Searching for the BCP
From Monsignor Robert Mercer CR
In his review of Fr Aidan Nichols’ recent booklet, Fr Ian McCormack is incredulous: can former FiF clergy normally accustomed to using the RC Breviary, revert to BCP offices? If he were occasionally to worship with the ordinariate he might be both surprised and delighted. I think, for example of Prayer Book Evensong in the Little Oratory of the Brompton Oratory, with the Coverdale psalms sung to Anglican chant by an Oratory choir, and with the canticles of Orlando Gibbons. All this followed by Benediction with Tantum Ergo to the tune of ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence’. I think of two similar offices in St James, Spanish Place. I think of a mass in the Guildhall of Chichester and a congregation made up of members of the Church of England, Diocesan Catholics and Ordinariate Catholics. We all sang Merbecke to the Book of Common Prayer words, and the rousing evangelical hymn ‘I can not tell how He who made the heavens’. For the communion motet the choir sang Byrd’s ‘Ave Verum’. Within the ordinariate there is a joyful sharing of traditions, though I myself claim I joined as a way of getting more Book of Common Prayer than I’d get in the Church of England.
Robert Mercer
3 The Limes, St Botolph’s Road, Worthing BN11 4HY
Live in charity
From Cherry Foster
As a member of the Ordinariate increasingly troubled by the seemingly common tendency within that organisation to refuse to respect and acknowledge that many Anglo-Catholics have good spiritual and theological reasons for remaining within the Anglican Church, I was saddened to read Father Ian’s protest in the September issue of ND against comments evincing a lack of charity towards Anglicans from people within the Ordinariate. I would like to say that there are those of us who passionately disown such attitudes.
Cherry Foster, Salisbury
The author did supply an e-mail address but at her request we are not printing it