Catholic worship adopts Matins and Evensong
Ihave next to me a thick little book of 2,000 pages bound in leatherette with a cross on the front, satin ribbons sticking out at the bottom, and the page edges in two-tone gold and red, like the tonic trousers that Mods favoured when I was a boy. It weighs 13 ounces.
It is plainly a prayer book; in fact it is Divine Worship: Daily Office (Commonwealth Edition). It contains the order for daily services outside the Mass, intended for members of what is generally known as the Ordinariate. This was set up in 2011 “to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church”. It is not part of the Anglican Church but is part of the Catholic Church under the Pope.
I had been puzzled by what those Anglican liturgical traditions might be, for some of Anglicans who leant towards the practices of Rome (incense, chasubles, reservation of the Blessed Sacrament) had been using bits of Roman Catholic liturgy, even the Roman Missal translated into English.
Anyway, this Daily Office turns upon the two main daily elements of the Book of Common Prayer, 1662: Morning Prayer (Matins) and Evening Prayer (Evensong). The variable parts of these are the psalms, and here the Daily Office uses the translation by Miles Coverdale much loved by those who know it as the version preserved in the Book of Common Prayer. His translation was based, I think, on that of Luther and on the Latin Vulgate version.
The chosen version of the psalms is one reason that this Daily Office is intended for the Personal Ordinariate in Britain and Australia. A sister Ordinariate in North America incorporates the version of the psalms and prayers from the Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church there, taking in the 1928 revisions stopped by Parliament in England.
The Daily Office envisages lay people using Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. These are the elements that priests of the Ordinariate are bound to recite daily, just as priests of the Roman rite are bound to recite the Breviary.
But the Daily Office also contains the lesser hours of Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Compline. Compline has been quite popular devotionally for lay people with access to it, for it is short and rounds off the day.
The Daily Office faces the fact that Roman Catholics and members of the Church of England have believed different doctrines. The new book preserves the phrases “miserable sinners” and “there is no health in us”, but understood in the Catholic sense. The problem here was that by these terms Calvinists implied “total depravity” by which all human acts are displeasing to God.
The Daily Office also includes prayers for the dead, going against the Thirty-nine Articles and the contents of the Book of Common Prayer. At the same time it preserves happily fossilised chunks of the Prayer Book services seldom used in Roman Catholic liturgy, such as the Athanasian Creed.
This quite technical creed, teasing out points of doctrine on God the Holy Trinity, though directed for use by the Book of Common Prayer, had been the object of hostility in the Church of England in the 1870s for its “damnatory clauses” asserting that anyone who doesn’t hold the Catholic faith, “without doubt he will perish eternally”. The campaign against it failed, but its use dwindled.
A reliable overview of the Daily Office, free from the expressions of opinion that I have indulged in, is given by Father James Bradley in the learned journal Ecclesia Orans. To my mind, peculiar liturgies that have developed organically are very welcome.