Friday, February 13, 2009

Presentation on Anglican Use Liturgy Available

The Junior and Senior students at Conception College Seminary were very encouraging at the first presentation of my program, “The Anglican Use of the Roman Rite: Is there anything here to interest Catholics?”  Based on their positive responses, I am willing to visit parishes and groups in the Kansas City area.  The program gives a taste of the Sarum Use – the pre-Reformation Catholic liturgy used in most of England - and the Protestant Anglican Book of Common Prayer liturgy that replaced it.  I show how the Anglican liturgy very quickly embraced a very Protestant theology, and then gradually restored some Catholic structures and practices.  The embrace of Catholic styles surged beginning with the 19th century Oxford Movement as Anglicans re-adopted aspects of historical English and Catholic liturgy.  I argue that Anglicanism’s fairly recent embrace of Catholic liturgy means that Anglican converts to Catholicism have a different experience of Catholic liturgy worthy of consideration by Catholics who rushed to embrace modern cultural forms from the 1970s.    

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