Brilliant! If only... if only... *sigh*.
From the Rome Report.
That reminds me: Whist in San Antonio, MM and I went to Our Lady of the Atonement Anglican Use Parish for Saturday mass. Very impressive. Especially the triptych behind the altar, a picture of which I cannot seem to find online. See MM's blog for fuller, more trenchant commentary.
I thought the Anglican Use, at least as accomplished at Our Lady of the Atonement, was an improvement on both the BCP as well as on the Roman Rite -- especially the Novus Ordo ubiquitously implemented. It catholicizes the standard BCP liturgy (a good thing) with a more robust emphasis on Eucharistic sacrifice as well as the Communion of Saints (woefully lacking in the BCP). And it beautifies the Roman Rite with Cranmerian idiom -- and I imagine with general High Church Anglican liturgical niceness, although we were only there for a Low Mass and so couldn't really tell.
Think of the potential! These churches, of which there are currently only a handful, should be spread across the land. The robustness of Roman doctrine and devotion, coupled with the beauty of Anglican liturgy. A new day could dawn over the rather saturnine American ecclesiastical landscape, with its current backward emphases on Anglican (non)doctrine and (non)devotion, and Roman liturgical (non)beauty.
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Think of the potential! These churches, of which there are currently only a handful, should be spread across the land. The robustness of Roman doctrine and devotion
Such as the doctrine of clerical celibacy, a great evil and a sad distortion of the Hebraic roots of the Christian faith?
Hasn't Rome already done enough damage surrounding this issue lately?
I'm sorry, but I know a lot of Anglicans who lust in the hearts for some sort of Uniate status with Rome. They're forever shadow-boxing with the "Mother Church" instead of doing their own theology, loving their own Anglican heritage in the Protestant context it was birthed in, fully Catholic but also fully Reformed.
I suppose if I ever adopted the peculiar Anglo-Catholic doctrines you've promulgated here, why shouldn't I just become a Roman Catholic? Is maintaining married clergy and a mild form of anglophilia sufficient for you to stay in Anglicanland? Why not swim the Tiber and be done with it?
This is what is singularly lacking in the discussion today: a specifically Anglican theology that takes the best of the Reformation emphasis on Holy Scripture and the Carolinian respect for high devotion.
BTW, I liked that Masters' Singers mp3. Just so you know I'm not a total crank.
God help us if this were to come to pass. The one really good thing Rome has going for it is the way the Mass is conducted liturgically these days. It's a place where stodgy Anglicans could stand to learn a thing or two.
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