The Catholics Who Embrace T S Eliot

The Daily Telegraph (UK) ^ | 1/7/13 | Christopher Howse

[marshmallow]

Sacred Mysteries: a great modern Anglican poet features in Roman Catholic liturgy

It is surprising to find the Protestant reformer Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Psalms used in a Catholic church. His version of the Bible was burnt in Henry VIII’s reign, and even on his return from exile, when Elizabeth became queen, he did not resume his office as Bishop of Exeter.

Partly by accident, Coverdale’s Psalms are used in the Book of Common Prayer, not the version from the Authorised Version of the Bible of 1611. Now they are incorporated into the service book of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

The Ordinariate admitted nearly 1,000 ex-Anglicans, including three bishops, in 2011. This week it was granted use of the church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Warwick Street, in Soho, which is associated with the penal centuries of English Roman Catholicism before 1829.

The Ordinariate’s aim is “to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church”. It does not have its own liturgical rites, as it belongs to the Latin rite of the Church, but its usages reflect its patrimony.

Now the Ordinariate has published a Customary (Canterbury Press, £45), which is a daily prayer book, though it does not include the Mass. The editors are Fr Aidan Nichols, a Dominican theologian of a compendious mind, and Mgr Andrew Burnham, who is Assistant to the Ordinary. (The Ordinary, Mgr Keith Newton, who runs the Ordinariate, has the jurisdiction of a bishop, but he and Mgr Burnham – bishops when Anglicans – are both married, so cannot be consecrated bishops in the Catholic Church. They are both in priestly orders.)

Mgr Burnham is the author of Heaven and Earth in Little Space, a study of the liturgy that I....

[Bigg Red]

mark

[MDLION]

I love the T.S. Eliot quote, “Mankind cannot stand too much reality.” It’s a perfect quote to describe the media’s blackout of the results of abortion whether it be the dead baby or the woman suffering Post-Abortion Syndrome.

[Bigg Red]

Good stuff. Thanks for posting.