Mgr. Keith Newton, the former Anglican bishop who heads the Ordinariate, presided at a Mass with the community’s new Missal in the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory, in London’s Soho area. The text has been approved by the Congregation for Divine Worship which incorporates elements of the Anglican tradition.
In the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, Benedict XVI specified that Anglicans would be able to enter into communion with the Catholic Church while maintaining aspects of the Anglican spiritual and liturgical tradition that are “a treasure to be shared”.
This principle was enforced by the Vatican when it approved the Ordinariate’s very own rite for the celebration of marriages and funerals.
But now that a new Missal is about to come into official use, the process of integration is complete.
The new liturgical rite includes both material from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer - the 1662 text which became the main point of reference for prayer in the Anglican Church - and the Roman Rite followed by the Catholic Church.
What is particularly interesting is that the Ordinariate’s liturgy also contains prayers written by the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, who had a part to play in the separation of the English Church from union with the Holy See during the reign of Henry VIII and is considered the father of Anglican spirituality.
Cranmer was burnt at the stake in Oxford on 1556 during Queen Mary of England’s brief attempt to restore Roman Catholicism. The approved rite also includes a number of traditional English hymns by composers such as Howells, Elgar and Bairstow.
The Roman Rite is prevalent in those areas of the Missal where ambiguities could have arisen in relation to Catholic theological doctrine on the Eucharistic presence.
After communion with Rome was official, some suggested that the Ordinatriate of Our Lady of Walshingham should adopt the Sarum Rite, used at Britain’s Salisbury cathedral before the Reformation.
Instead, it opted for a rite that recognised the spiritual fruits of the Anglican tradition, as Mgr. Newton had explained at the international “Sacra Liturgia” conference in Rome last June.
The Ordinariate’s priests will not be obliged to use the new Missal. They will also be able to celebrate Mass according to the Roman Rite in both its ordinary and extraordinary forms reintroduced by Benedict XVI in the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum.