Hugh Ross Williamson (1901-1978) was a prolific
British popular historian, and a dramatist. Starting from a career in the
literary world, and having a Nonconformist
background, he became an Anglican priest in 1943. In 1955 he became a convert
to Roman Catholicism and wrote many historical
works in a Catholic apologist tone. In 1956, he published his autobiography, The
Walled Garden. Williamson was critical of the reforms introduced by the Second Vatican Council. ~Wikipedia
*******
THE
MODERN
MASS:
A
Reversion to the Reforms of Cranmer
by
Hugh Ross Williamson
(1969)
The fort is betrayed even of them
that should have defended it.
— St. John Fisher to his apostate colleagues.
A weak clergy, lacking grace
constantly to stand to their learning.
— St. Thomas More to his daughter.
CRANMER’S OBJECTIVE
An English historian is apt, by the nature of
things, to be suspicious of liturgical change. He knows that in his country it
has happened before and that the consequences of it have molded his religious
background. What he does not always realize is that few but specialists are
interested in so circumscribed a subject and that the general condonation — so
it seems — of certain actions springs not from bad faith but from ignorance.
It
is my purpose here to set down quite simply the method by which the Faith was
destroyed in England by measures for which the main responsibility rests on
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was all-powerful in the religious
sphere from 1547 to 1553.
He
was honest enough about his intentions and made no effort to hide his opinion
that the power of “the great harlot, that is to say, the pestiferous see of
Rome” lay in “the popish doctrine of transubstantiation, of the real presence
of Christ’s flesh and blood in the sacrament of the altar (as they call it) and
of the sacrifice and oblation of Christ made by the priest for the salvation of
the quick and the dead.”[1]
It was this that must be destroyed. People must learn that Christ was not in
the Sacrament but only in the worthy receivers of the Sacrament. “The eating
and drinking of Christ’s flesh and blood is not to be taken in the common
signification, with mouth and teeth to eat a thing being present, but by a
lively faith, in heart and mind to digest a thing being absent.”[2]
The new rite, which Cranmer devised to embody this belief, “the administration
of the Holy Supper,” must have nothing in it which could be “twisted” to
resemble “the never-sufficiently-to-be-execrated Mass.” And that in the Mass
“there is offered to God the Father a sacrifice, namely the body and blood of
our Lord, truly and really, in order to obtain the forgiveness of sins and to
obtain the salvation as well of the dead as of the living”[3] was
defined as a heresy deserving the death-penalty.
So
much for Cranmer’s objective. The three
chief means by which he attained it were the use of the vernacular, the substitution
of a Holy Table for an altar and changes
made in the Canon of the Mass.
THE VERNACULAR
The translation of the
Bible into the vernacular had existed in England since Saxon days. Long before
Wyclif had made his “translation” in 1380, there had been, as St. Thomas More
pointed out, English translations “by virtuous and learned men” and “by good and
goodly people” before Wyclif “took it upon him of a malicious purpose to
translate it anew.” And More was insistent that there was no reason “why it was
not convenient to have the Bible translated into the English tongue” for “there
is no treatise of Scripture so hard but that a good virtuous man, or woman
either, shall somewhat find therein that shall delight and increase their
devotion.” What was to be resisted was the deliberate mistranslation of the
Bible “of malicious purpose” and it is this that provides the key for the
insistent anti-Catholic demands for the vernacular in the sixteenth century.[4]
The
translation made by William Tyndale, one of Cranmer’s associates, was burnt by
the Catholic authorities. When St. Thomas More was asked about it, he replied:
“It is to me a great marvel that any good Christian man, having any drop of wit
in his head, would anything marvel or complain of the burning of that book, if
he knew the matter. Which whoso calleth [it] the New Testament calleth it by a
wrong name except they call it Tyndale’s Testament or Luther’s Testament. For
so had Tyndale, after Luther’s counsel, corrupted and changed it from the good
and wholesome doctrine of Christ to the devilish heresies of their own, that it
was a clean contrary thing.” Asked for examples, he chose three words. “One is
the word Priests. The other the Church. The third Charity. For Priests he
always calls seniors; the Church he calleth alway the congregation, and Charity
he calleth love. Now do these names in our English tongue neither express the
things that be meant by them, and there also appeareth, circumstances well
considered, that he had a mischievous mind in the change.”[5]
Tyndale
also provided his translation with notes, such as that the Mass was a matter of
“nodding, becking, mewing, as it were, apes play.” Those who still believed the
traditional faith and practice were “beasts without the seal of the Spirit of
God, but sealed with the Mark of the Beast and cankered consciences.” But far
more damaging than the comments were, as More had pointed out, the deliberate
mistranslations which Tyndale (and Cranmer, following him, in a version issued
six years later) made in order to eradicate traditional Catholic doctrine. The
word meaning “idols” he rendered by “images” and thereby forged a useful tool
against the cultus of the Saints and
the Sacred Humanity of Christ. “Confess,” which might suggest the sacrament of
penance, became “acknowledge.”
The great key-words of
the Gospel, “grace” and “salvation,” became “favor” and “health.” The word,
which should have been “priest” he rendered as “elder” and “church” as
“congregation” and noted: “By a priest, then, in the New Testament understand
nothing but an elder to teach the younger.” He also explained that the two
sacraments which Christ ordained, Baptism and Holy Communion, were nothing but
the preaching of Christ’s promises.” So, to take one example, in the Epistle of
St. James, the apostolic advice: “Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in
the priests of the Church, and let them pray over him anointing him with oil in
the name of the Lord,” with its obvious reference to the sacrament of Unction,
could not be allowed to stand. Even Wyclif in his earlier translation had not
tampered with this and had correctly translated “priests of the church.” But in
Tyndale’s version and Cranmer’s version they became “elders of the
congregation.”
The Protestants could
thus appeal to the Bible in the vulgar tongue to bear witness that the New
Testament contained no references to justify contemporary Catholic teaching on
and practice of the doctrines in dispute; and when such tendentious
mistranslations of the Bible were, quite properly, seized and suppressed by
Catholic authorities, Catholics could be additionally accused of “trying to
prevent the people from reading the Bible.” It was as simple as that. And the
effectiveness of the double lie was so complete that its echoes still
reverberate.
At
the very core of a vernacular Mass lay the vernacular account of the
institution of the Eucharist. It was not only that the silent Canon, which had
been the rule from the eighth century,[6] must
be abandoned, but that the English “Do this in remembrance of Me” should be
“distinctly” heard.
The
Greek word, anamnesis, which is
translated as “in remembrance of,” is difficult to render accurately in
English. Words like “remembrance,” “memory,” and “memorial” imply the existence
of something itself absent, whereas anamnesis has the sense of re-calling or
re-presenting a past event so that it becomes actively present. This meaning is
not adequately caught even by the Latin memoria.
The English words “recall” and “represent,” even when written “re-call” and
“re-present,” are insufficient without further explanation; and “remembrance,”
“memory” and “memorial,” because of their conventional usage and common
meaning, are actually misleading.
“The understanding of
the Eucharist as ‘for the anamnesis
of Me’ — as the ‘re-calling’ before God of the one sacrifice of Christ in all
its accomplished and effectual fullness so that it is here and now operative by
its effects — is,” as one theologian has put it, “clearly brought out in all
traditions” of the early church. In the words of St. John Chrysostom: “We offer
even now that which was then offered, which cannot be exhausted. This is done
for an anamnesis of that which was
then done, for ‘Do this’ said He, ‘for the anamnesis
of me.’ We do not offer a different sacrifice like the high-priest of old, but
we ever offer the same. Or rather we offer the anamnesis of the Sacrifice.”[7]
Cranmer,
who wished to root out any idea of the Mass as a sacrifice and to substitute
the theory of a mere memorial meal in which Christ was not present except in
the hearts of the worshippers, could not have found a more potent weapon than
the abandonment of the silent Canon in favor of the Institution-narrative in
English, with its reiterated “Do this in remembrance of me.” In the great
silence, the ordinary worshipper, instructed in the meaning of the Moment,
knew, even if he could not formulate it, what was happening. But now he could
hear for himself that, as far as he could understand it, it was a memorial
meal. The Bible said so. He was called upon to remember something that had happened
long ago in the past. And this interpretation was emphasized by the words
spoken by the minister giving him his communion: “Take and eat this in
remembrance that Christ died for thee and feed on him in thy heart by faith,
with thanksgiving.”
The
imposition of the new vernacular Prayer Book on the country took place on
Whitsunday, 9th June 1549. On June 10th, a body of Devonshire peasants, having
sampled the new service, forced their parish priest to restore the Mass. Within
ten days a people’s army, possibly six thousand strong — the figures are
difficult to arrive at — had taken Crediton and were menacing Exeter. Their
demands were simple and pointed and concerned solely with the Faith. They asked
that the Mass should be restored “as before” and that the Blessed Sacrament
should be again reserved in a prominent position. “We will not,” they said,
“receive the new service because it is but like a Christmas game, but we will
have our old service of Mattins, Mass, Evensong and Procession (the Litany of Our
Lady) in Latin and we will have every preacher in his sermon and every priest
at his Mass pray by name for the souls in Purgatory as our forefathers did.”
Baptism should be available “as well
on week-days as on holy-days.” The Blessings of simple things should be
restored, palms and ashes should be distributed at the accustomed times with
“all the ancient old ceremonies used heretofore by our Mother, the Holy Church”
(which Cranmer had abolished as “superstitions”).[8]
Cranmer
was incensed not only by the demands themselves but, even more, by the fact
that ignorant peasants, “Hob, Will and Dick,” should presume to question his
theology. He wrote to them: “Oh, ignorant men of Devonshire and Cornwall, as
soon as ever I heard your articles I thought you were deceived by some crafty
papists to make you ask you wist not what. You declare what spirit leadeth them
that persuaded you that the Word of God is but like a Christmas game. It is
more like a game and a foolish play to hear the priest speak aloud to the
people in Latin. In the English service there is nothing but the eternal Word
of God. If it be to you but a Christmas game, I think you not so much to be
blamed as the papistical priests who have abused your sincerity. Had you rather
be like pies or parrots that be taught to speak and yet not understand one word
of what they say than be true Christians who pray to God in faith?”[9]
The rebels, in their
simple faith, paid no heed to the learned Archbishop. Cranmer had to rely on
the secular arm. Foreign mercenaries, mainly German Lutherans, were employed on
English soil for the first time for three hundred years and the last stand for
the Faith was defeated in battle. “The killing was indiscriminate,” in Hilaire
Belloc’s memorable words: “four thousand were shot down or ridden down or
hanged before the men of Devon would accept, without enthusiasm, the exquisite
prose of Cranmer.”[10]
Of the Italian and Spanish adventurers, who reinforced the Germans, it is
recorded that, when they realized what had been at stake, they went to the
Imperial Nuncio to be absolved for what they done.
When the news of the
vernacular victory reached London, Cranmer “made a collation in Paul’s choir
for the victory” and in a sermon before the Lord Mayor and Aldermen the
Archbishop admonished his auditors that “the plague of division among
ourselves, the like of which has not been heard of since the Passion of Christ,
is come upon us by the instigation of the Devil, in that we have not been
diligent hearers of God’s Word by His true preachers but have been led away by
Popish priests”.
It
was, of course, quite untrue that the people did not understand the Latin Mass.
The circulation of devotional and instructional books among the population of
three million may be gauged by the fact that, in the holocaust of Catholic
learning and piety which was part of the Protestant policy, a quarter of a million
of liturgical books alone were destroyed. The year after the enforcement of the
first Prayer Book — 1550 — Cranmer sent commissioners to the universities. In
Oxford, thousands of books were destroyed. Cambridge suffered a slower but even
more drastic denudation which ensured that there were, at the beginning of
Queen Elizabeth’s reign, no more than 177 “cut and mangled” volumes left.
The
result was inevitable. A Protestant preacher, in a sermon before the King in
1552, did not scruple to point out: “There is entering into England more blind
ignorance, superstition and infidelity than ever was under Romish bishops. Your
realm (which I am sorry to speak) shall become more barbarous than Scythia.”[11]
Another, deploring the multiplicity of sects which were the inevitable
concomitant of Cranmer’s policy, complained: “There are Arians, Marcionites,
Libertines, Davists and the like monstrosities in great numbers; we have need
of help against the sectaries and Epicureans and pseudo-evangelicals who are
beginning to shake our churches with greater violence than ever.”[12]
One
reason for the mangling of the books was the Act which Cranmer drew up because
“it has been noised and bruited abroad that they should have again their old
Latin service” and it was necessary to see that the people “put away all such
vain expectation of having the public service and the administration of the
Sacraments again in the Latin tongue.” The Act ordered the surrender of all
Latin service books for the authorities to “so deface and abolish them that
they never after may serve any such use as they were provided for.” There was
one exception. Copies in Latin or English of the Primer of Henry VIII were
allowed, provided that all mention of the saints was erased.
For
Cranmer hated the saints almost as much as he hated the Mass and one of the
advantages of the vernacular was that he could issue a new litany, from which
all the names of the saints were omitted — as well as that of Our Lady — and
the petition inserted “From the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his
detestable enormities, good Lord deliver us,” which could be easily
“understanded of the people” when it was said every Wednesday and Friday.
THE HOLY TABLE
Within a year of Cranmer’s
accession to full ecclesiastical power, one of the foreign Protestants in
England wrote exultantly to Bullinger, who had succeeded Zwingli in Zurich: “Arae facta sunt harae” — the altars have
been made into pigsties.[13]
It was not at that point quite true, for in various places altars were retained
by pious priests and congregations. But in the November of 1550, Cranmer,
through the Privy Council, issued an edict that all altars throughout the
kingdom should be destroyed. For the future, wherever the rite for the Holy
Eucharist was celebrated, a wooden table was to be used.
With
the order was sent Cranmer’s explanation, which, as Philip Hughes in his
definitive work on The Reformation in England (p. 121) has said “leaves no
doubt that one religion was being substituted for another.” The “certain
considerations”[14]
pointed out: “The form of a table shall move the simple from the superstitious
opinion of the Popish Mass unto the right use of the Lord’s Supper. For the use
of an altar is to make sacrifice upon it: the use of a table is to serve men to
eat upon. If we come to feed upon Him, spiritually to eat his body and
spiritually to drink his blood, which is the true use of the Lord’s Supper,
then no man can deny that the form of a table is more meet for the Lord’s board
than the form of an altar.”
Cranmer
went on to explain that, where he had retained the word “altar” in his new
Prayer Book, it meant “the table where Holy Communion is distributed” and that
it then could be called an altar because there was offered there “our sacrifice
of praise and thanksgiving.”
The edict was enforced
rigidly. When one of the bishops[15]
declined to remove the altars in his diocese, he was imprisoned and deprived of
his see. In London, the alterations were immediate and sweeping. The bishop,
who had been one of Cranmer’s chaplains, determined to make the new table as
far as possible inaccessible to non-communicants. A contemporary chronicle[16]
records that, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, “he removed the table into the middle of
the upper choir and set the ends east and west and after the Creed caused a
veil to be drawn that no person should see but those that received; and he
closed the iron gratings of the choir on the north and south side with brick
and plaster, that none might remain in at the choir.”
Since there was no Real
Presence and no Sacrifice, it was logical enough to attempt to get rid of
non-communicating attendance at the Eucharist and Cranmer laid down that “there
shall be no celebration of the Lord’s Supper, except there be a good number to
communicate with the priest at his discretion; and if there be not above twenty
persons in the parish of discretion, there shall be no Communion, except four,
or three at the least, communicate with the priest. And to take away the
superstition which any person hath, or might have, in the bread and wine, it
shall suffice that the bread be such as is usual to be eaten at table with
other meats, but the best and purest wheat bread that conveniently may be
gotten. And if any of the bread and wine remain, the curate shall have it to
his own use.”[17]
“The last stone to be
piled on the cairn below which lay the ancient belief in the Holy Eucharist” —
the phrase is Philip Hughes’s — was the attack on kneeling to receive
communion. What was this but idolatry? A rubric was rapidly inserted in the new
Prayer Book explaining that “it is not meant thereby that any adoration is done
or ought to be done either unto the sacramental bread or wine there bodily
received or to any real or essential presence there being of Christ’s natural
flesh and blood.”[18]
The table, as time went
on, became more of a table and was moved about for utilitarian purposes.
Explicit instructions were issued that “the holy table in every church is to be
set in the place where the altar stood, saving when the communion of the
sacrament is to be distributed; at which time the same shall be so placed in
good sort within the chancel, as whereby the minister may be more conveniently
heard of the communicants in his prayer and ministration and the communicants
also more conveniently and in more number communicate with the said minister.
And after the communion done the same holy table is to be placed where it stood
before.”
It
was left to the Puritans in the following century to carry Cranmer’s work to
its logical conclusion and not only to receive communion sitting but to use the
table as a convenient place on which to put their hats.
THE CANON OF THE MASS
The vernacular and the
Holy Table were the practical means by which Cranmer accustomed the ordinary
people of England to the new doctrines. They could now, by their corporate
action, understand that a simple meal was not a Sacrifice — the Sacrifice — and
that it involved eating nothing but ordinary bread and wine; and they could hear
that it was merely in memory of something done long ago. It was because such
usage was more potent for the theologically unlearned than any doctrinal
teaching that, in the short five-year reign of Mary the Catholic, when England
returned for the last time to the Faith, Cardinal Pole insisted on restoring
not only the altars and the Mass but simple ceremonies which Cranmer had
abolished — holy water, ashes and palms — “in the observation of which
beginneth the very education of the children of God” and the abolition of which
the heretics “make a first point” in their attempt to destroy the Church.[19]
But
the core of Cranmer’s work, of course, was the theological statement of the new
beliefs in liturgical form. His final version of what had once been the Mass
was, as Gregory Dix has insisted, “not a disordered attempt at a Catholic rite,
but the only effective attempt ever made to give liturgical expression to the
doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’”[20]
And, thus considered, it is a masterpiece.
The
logical consequences of the basic Protestant doctrine of “faith alone” were —
and are — the abolition of the sacraments. External actions obviously cannot be
accepted as causes in the realm of grace. Luther, of course, had seen this from
the beginning and had abolished the five “lesser” sacraments at the same time
as he had attacked communion in one kind, transubstantiation, and the doctrine
of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, as the first stages of devaluing what — since
both baptism and holy communion are indubitably commanded in the New Testament
— he could not deny. As it was impossible to rid Christianity of these external
acts of baptism and the Eucharist, it was essential to empty them of any
intelligible meaning. On this, all the Protestant sects were at one, the
Zwinglians and the Calvinists no less than the Lutherans.
Cramner agreed, as he
was bound to, with Zwingli’s logic that “the doctrine, Sola fides justificat, is a foundation and principle to deny the
presence of Christ’s body really in the Sacrament”[21]
and, as we have seen, he therefore attacked the Mass as vehemently as had
Luther in his famous: “I declare that all the brothels (though God has reproved
them severely), all manslaughters, murders, thefts and adulteries have wrought
less evil than the abomination of the popish mass.”[22]
Cranmer’s
alternative to the Mass is included in the two Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552.
Like later engineers of change, he thought it best to bring it about gradually
so as not immediately to arouse opposition,[23] but
there is no doubt that the 1552 version was in his mind from the beginning; and
as “1552 still supplies the whole structure of the present [Anglican] liturgy
and some ninety-five per cent of its wording”[24] it
is the 1552 rite alone that will be considered here.
The
Canon was divided into three parts and became
the “Prayer
for the Church Militant,”
the “Prayer
of Consecration” and
the so-called “Prayer of Oblation.”
Roughly speaking, the first of these
corresponds to the
Te Igitur,
Memento Domine,
and Communicantes:
the second to Hanc Igitur, Quam Oblationem and
Qui Pridie;
and the third to Unde et memores, Supra quae
and Supplices te rogamus.
(There is no parallel to the Memento Etiam, the Nobis quoque peccatoribus or the Per Quem).
To
see exactly what Cranmer did, these three sections must be considered in
detail.
(a)
THE PRAYER FOR THE CHURCH MILITANT
The “Prayer for the Church Militant” runs: “Almighty and everliving God, which by the
holy apostle has taught us to make prayers and supplications, and to give
thanks for all men; we humbly beseech thee most mercifully to accept our alms
and to receive these our prayers which we offer unto thy divine Majesty,
beseeching thee to inspire continually the universal church with the spirit of
truth, unity and concord. And grant that all they that do confess thy holy name
may agree in the truth of thy holy Word and live in unity and godly love. We
beseech thee also to save and defend all Christian Kings, Princes and Governors,
and specially thy servant Edward our King, that under him we may be godly and
quietly governed; and grant unto his whole council and to all that be put in
authority under him that they may truly and indifferently administer justice,
to the punishment of wickedness and vice and to the maintenance of God’s true
religion and virtue. Grant grace (O heavenly father) to all Bishops, Pastors
and Curates that they may both by their life and doctrine set forth thy true
and lively Word and rightly and duly administer thy holy sacraments: and to all
thy people give thy heavenly grace, and especially to this congregation here
present, that with meek heart and due reverence they may hear and receive thy
Holy Word, truly serving thee in holiness and righteousness all the days of
their life. And we most humbly beseech thee of thy goodness (O Lord) to comfort
and succor all them which in this transitory life be in trouble, sorrow, need,
sickness or any other adversity. Grant this, O father, for Jesus Christ’s sake,
our only mediator and advocate. Amen.”
The change is sufficiently dramatic. Apart
from the omissions of the Pope and the saints, which were only to be expected,
what has disappeared is any mention of the oblations haec dona, haec munera, haec sancta sacrificia illibata which
are so essential a part of the Te Igitur.
In the ancient liturgy of the Church, great
honor had always been paid to the offerings of the bread and the wine. They are
the immaculatam hostiam, the calicem salutaris of the offertory
prayers, as well as the assertion of excellence in the Te Igitur, to be presented to God, with the request to make them in omnibus benedictam, adscriptam, ratam,
rationabilem, acceptabilemque, for the coming miracle of
transubstantiation. And “always,” as Jungmann has shown, “it is the thought of
their imminent transubstantiation that has conditioned the insistence on their
sanctity.”[25] This
alone was anathema to Cranmer. “Like Luther he believed that any form of
offertory ‘stank of oblation.’”[26] He
therefore abolished all the offertory prayers, even what many might consider
the most beautiful of them, Deus, qui
humanae, and all mention of the “oblation” of bread and wine.
Cranmer’s difficulty was that the placing of
the bread and wine upon the altar looked, as far as the people were concerned,
as the offertory always had. If the congregation was to be taught an entirely
new idea, something more was required. This Cranmer found in arranging for the
church-wardens at this point to make a collection of money and by referring
only to “alms” in the prayer. As the alms had not been offered or even handled
by the minister, there could be no danger of their being thought of as an
“oblation” in the old sense. As an ingenious piece of liturgical workmanship,
it does indeed, as Gregory Dix has said, deserve admiration.
And, of course, the reference to “alms” only
was heard and understood by the congregation. For it was of the essence of the
“reform” that the silent Canon, which had been in use since the eighth century,[27] was
abolished so that the new vernacular should have its due effect on the people.
To the changes effected by omission, Cranmer
added one important one by the inclusion of the name of the sovereign in place
of the Pope.
Sixteen years previously King Henry VIII had ordered Bidding
Prayers in the vernacular by which, in the form of carefully-phrased petitions,
people’s thoughts should be directed in correct political and theological
channels. Pre-eminently men were to be made to realize that the King was the
supreme head of the Church in England. The Pope, if mentioned at all, was to be
mentioned with contumely. The Bidding Prayers were a useful device for
commenting on various aspects of contemporary life, but the reason for their
introduction and the essence of their utility was in their emphasis on the
sovereign.
Cranmer, though abolishing the actual prayers,
kept and emphasized that point, by putting the prayer for the King and the
State (of which the church is merely a part) in place of the Te Igitur prayer for the Pope and the Church.[28]
So the “Prayer for the Church Militant,” with
its omission of any reference to the oblations, of Our Lady and the Saints, of
the Pope and the world-wide Catholic Church and its inclusion of the Erastian
head of State and Church, prepared the way for the consecration of the
elements.
(b)
THE
PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
In the 1549 Book, Cranmer had prefaced the
Words of Institution with: “Hear us, O
merciful Father, we beseech thee; and with thy Holy Spirit and Word, vouchsafe
to bless and sanctify these thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine that they
may be unto us the body and blood of thy most dearly beloved son, Jesus Christ.”
This formula was attacked
on the grounds that it was capable of being construed as effecting
transubstantiation. To this Cranmer replied indignantly: “We do not pray absolutely that the bread and wine may be made the body
and blood of Christ, but that unto us in that holy mystery they may be made so;
that is to say, that we may so worthily receive the same that we may be
partakers of Christ’s body and blood, and that therefore in spirit and in truth
we may be spiritually nourished.”[29]
Yet though this formula
expressed with exactitude the Zwinglian meaning of the rite — that is, the
continual mental “remembering” of Christ’s passion and death, which constitutes
“eating the flesh and drinking the blood,” and the offering of our souls and
bodies to Christ, which constitutes the only “sacrifice” — Cranmer decided in
the Second Book to remove any possibility of misunderstanding.
But before proceeding to
this, it is necessary to make a digression into the present.
It is, of course, quite true that the word “nobis” exists in the Quam Oblationem of the Roman Canon — “be pleased to make this same offering wholly
blessed, to consecrate it and approve it, making it reasonable and acceptable,
so that it may become for us the Body and Blood.” But here the sense is
unequivocal, for the transubstantiation has been prepared for by the
magnificent Te Igitur, Memento Domine and Hanc Igitur where the “holy, unblemished sacrificial gifts” are
described in terms proper to the coming change into the Body and Blood, of which
we are the unworthy beneficiaries. It is Cranmer’s omission of these references
to and elaborations on the oblations, which justifies his defense of himself
that his formula could not be confused with transubstantiation. It was merely
“for us” in our minds, not objectively.
The alternative Canon,
Anaphora II, now imposed on the Church, follows Cranmer with exactitude. For
the consecration, there is no preparation whatever. After the Benedictus, the celebrant merely says: “You are truly holy, Lord, the fount of all
holiness” and then immediately prays that “these gifts may be made for us the Body and Blood.” In the Roman Canon,
it is impossible to understand “nobis”
in the Cranmerian sense; in Anaphora II, it is almost impossible to understand
it any other way. What makes it worse is that the instruction of the Consilium was that this Canon, Anaphora
II, should be the one in ordinary use and, further, be utilized for
catechetical instruction of the young in the nature of the Eucharistic Prayer.[30]
But to return to Cranmer
and his removal of any possible misinterpretation or ambiguity in the prayer.
In the 1552 version, it ran: “Hear us, O merciful Father, we beseech Thee; and
grant that we, receiving these thy creatures of bread and wine, according to
Thy Son, our Savior Jesus Christ’s holy institution, in remembrance of his
death and passion, may be partakers of his most blessed body and blood.”
By the omission of “with Thy Holy Spirit and
Word to bless and sanctify these Thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine that
they may be unto us the body and blood of Thy most dearly beloved Son Jesus Christ,”
Cranmer destroys any implication that the gift of the Body and Blood is
connected with the bread and wine and that “sanctify” betokens, in some sense,
holiness.
The 1552 Prayer of
Consecration begins “Almighty God, our heavenly father, which of thy tender
mercy didst give thine only son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for
our redemption, who made there (by his one oblation of himself once offered) a
full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins
of the whole world, and did institute and in his holy gospel command us to
continue a perpetual memory of that his precious death until his coming again.”
Here Gregory Dix has
drawn attention to “the unmistakable emphasis on ‘His one oblation of himself
once offered, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and
satisfaction for the sins of the whole world,’ long ago — on Calvary — and its
relegation of the Eucharist to a ‘perpetual memory’ — a cleverly chosen word —
‘of that His precious death until his coming again,’ where ‘again’ — not in St.
Paul — emphasizes that as the Passion is in the past, so the ‘coming’ is in the
future, not in the Eucharist.”[31]
(c)
THE
PRAYER OF OBLATION
The Prayer of Oblation which is said
immediately after the Communion of the people runs: “O Lord and heavenly Father, we thy humble servants entirely desire thy
fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this our Sacrifice of praise and
thanksgiving: most humbly beseeching thee to grant that by the merits and death
of thy son, Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood, we and all thy whole
church may obtain remission of our sins and all other benefits of his passion.
And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and
bodies to be a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto thee; humbly
beseeching thee that all we which be partakers of this holy Communion, may be
fulfilled with thy grace and heavenly benediction. And although we be unworthy
through our manifold sins to offer unto Thee any Sacrifice; yet we beseech thee
to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits but
pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord; by whom and with whom in
the unity of the holy ghost, all honor and glory be unto thee, O father
almighty, world without end. Amen.”
Here, it will be noticed, Cranmer puts beyond
doubt his new interpretation of the rite and by the three-fold use of the word
“Sacrifice” confuses the issue for the simple who listen to the vernacular and
are therefore ready to assume that the new Mass has some kind of continuity
with the old.
The Catholic concept was that Christ offers
His perfect oblation of Himself to the Father and that the earthly church as
his Body enters into the eternal priestly act by the Eucharist. Cranmer deliberately
substitutes for this the idea that we offer to God “ourselves, our souls and
bodies.”
Again the “by
whom and with whom in the unity of the holy ghost, all honor and glory be unto
thee, O father almighty, world without end. Amen” is intended to give the
impression of, but to be totally different from, the doxology — the greatest in
liturgy — of the Per Ipsum: “Per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso, est tibi,
Deo Patri omnipotenti, in unitate Spiritus Sancti, omnia honor et gloria, per
omnia saecula saeculorum.” Here, the five-fold sign of the Cross followed
by the elevation of the Host and Chalice together in a gesture of offering (a
remnant of the ancient ceremony in which the celebrant lifted up the
consecrated Bread and the deacon the great two-handed Chalice and touched one
with the other) was the outward and visible sign of the offering of the
Acceptable Sacrifice to God. The actual elevation, coinciding with the words omnis honor et gloria saw the symbolism
of language and action fused into one and become a liturgical lesson in the
meaning of the Mass.
Cranmer forbade the Crosses and the Elevation
but kept an approximation to the words, which now meant something quite
different, to give the illusion of continuity.
Thus the new rite was shaped to embody the
belief in Justification by faith alone — a belief in which the sacraments, in
the sense they had always been understood, could have no place.
THE QUESTION OF JUSTIFICATION AND THE
TRIDENTINE MASS
It was the question of
Justification which lay behind all the other matters with which the Council of
Trent was called to deal — and it is too often forgotten that the Council was
summoned to reconcile the differences between Catholic and Protestant but, after
the most intensive debate lasting in all for eighteen years, recognized that
those differences were unbridgeable. Between the Scriptural Catholic doctrine,
based on James ii. 24, 26: “Do you see
that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only? Faith without works is
dead” and Luther’s doctrine of the sole necessity of faith there could be
no compromise.
At
Trent the definition was promulgated in 1547: “If any man shall say that the wicked man is justified by faith alone,
meaning that no other thing is required to co-operate for obtaining the grace
of justification, and that it is not necessary for him to be prepared and
disposed by the movement of his will, let him be anathema.”
At the end of Trent,
during which the Protestants everywhere made, like Cranmer, new rites embodying
the heresy, “the great Catholic need had become that of unity and the closing
of the ranks against the new negations. For this the old liturgy, in the same
language everywhere, was too valuable an instrument to lose. The result was the
reformed Roman Missal of Pius V, imposed on the whole Roman obedience by an
unprecedented legislative act of the central authority.”[32]
This Tridentine Mass
was enacted by St. Pius by his Quo Primum
on July 19, 1570. He ruled that “by this our
decree, to be valid in perpetuity, we determine and order that never shall
anything be added to, omitted from or changed in this Missal.” To bind
posterity, he affirmed that “at no time
in the future can a priest, whether secular or religious ever be forced to use
any other way of saying Mass. And so as to preclude once for all any scruple of
conscience and fear of ecclesiastical penalties and censures, we herewith
declare that it is in virtue of our Apostolic Authority that we decree and
determine that this our present order and decree is to last in perpetuity and
can never be legally revoked or amended at a future date.”
As this was delivered
three centuries before the definition of Infallibility, it is perhaps pointless
to argue how far it is binding, though the “in
virtue of our Apostolic Authority” suggests a reasonable rigidity. And
certainly St. Pius’s own estimation of its importance can be gauged from his “and if anyone would nevertheless dare to
attempt any action contrary to this Order of ours, given for all times, let him
know that he has incurred the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles
Peter and Paul.”
It is these
prohibitions and censures of St. Pius which the present Pope has set aside in
his Apostolic Constitution Missale
Romanum of April 3, 1969, decreeing the new forms of Mass: “We wish these our decrees and prescriptions
may be firm and effective now and in the future notwithstanding, to the extent
necessary, the apostolic constitutions and ordinances issued by our
predecessors.”
The Tridentine Mass,
forged as an everlasting weapon against heresy, is to be abandoned to a new form,
which is only too compatible with the heresies of Cranmer and his associates.
Some of us wonder why.
London.
The Feast of S.S. Peter
and Paul 1969.
SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
For the general history
of the time R. W. Dixon’s six-volume History
of the Church of England from 1529 to 1570, especially vol. iv, is
invaluable. More recently, Philip Hughes’s three-volume The Reformation in England, especially vol. ii, should be read.
For Cranmer himself
there is a wealth of material. The Parker Society has issued — I: Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer
. . . relative to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and II: Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas
Cranmer. There is also Strype’s Memorials
of Cranmer and Jenkyns’s Remains of
Thomas Cranmer. These, with Gairdner’s edition of Bishop Cranmer’s Recantacyons provide a most complete index to
Cranmer’s theological mind. A modern exposition of Cranmer’s intentions by an
Anglican theologian is Gregory Dix’s The
Shape of the Liturgy.
A useful edition of
Cranmer’s two Prayer Books is the Everyman edition of The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI with an introduction
by Bishop Gibson.
In the footnotes I have
shortened to Defence, Cranmer’s The Defence of the True Catholic Doctrine of
the Sacrament (1550) and to Reformatio
his new ecclesiastical code of 1553 Reformatio
Legum Ecclesiasticarum.
[2] ibid., III 1
[3] Reformatio.
[4] The English Hexapla, published in 1805, contains six vernacular
versions (of 1380, 1534, 1539, 1557, 1582, and 1611), printed in parallel
columns. They include Wyclif’s, Tyndale’s and Cranmer’s, and are invaluable for
comparison.
[5] More’s controversy
with Tyndale includes the Dialogue
concerning Heresies (1529) — from which this passage is taken — and the Confutation of Tyndale’s answer (1532
and 1533).
[6] See infra p. 23.
[7] Gregory Dix
[Anglican], The Shape of the Liturgy,
p. 243 (1944) quoting St. John Chrysostom in Heb. hom. Xvii. 3.
[8] The Fifteen Articles
of the rebels are printed in Strype’s Cranmer,
Appendix XI; there are other versions, though the demands here quoted are
common to all, and the whole matter is chronicled in F. Rose-Troup, The Wesern Rebellion of 1549.
[9] The very long and
bitter letter from which this extract is taken is printed in full in Jenkyns, Remains of Thomas Cranmer, Vol. II and
there is a short, six-page abstract in Mason’s Cranmer.
[10] A History of England, vol. iv.
[11] Sermon by Bernard
Gilpin, quoted in F. O. W. Hawel’s Sketches
of the Reformation taken from the Contemporary Pulpit.
[12] Original Letters relative to the English Reformation, vol. ii,
Micronius to Bullinger (May, 1550).
[13] John ab Ulmis to
Bullinger, in Original Letters II.
[14] Reasons
why the Lord’s Board should rather be after the form of a Table than of an
Altar: printed in full in
Parker Society, Cranmer II.
[15] George Day of
Chichester.
[17] Rubrics at end of 1552
Prayer Book Communion Service.
[18] The so-called “Black
Rubric” in the 1552 Prayer Book.
[19] Pole’s great sermon on
St. Andrew’s Day, 1557, is admirably summarized in Philip Hughes: The Reformation in England, vol.
2, pp. 246-253.
[20] Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p. 672.
[21] Stephen Gardiner, the
Catholic Bishop of Winchester, who was imprisoned by Cramner for his defense of
the Eucharist, quotes Zwingli’s admission in the course of his controversy with
Cranmer. See The Letters of Stephen
Gardiner, p. 277.
[23] cf. Cardinal Heenan’s Pastoral Letter of October 12th, 1969.
“‘Why does the Mass keep changing?’ Here is the answer. It would have been
foolhardy to introduce all the changes at once. It was obviously wiser to
change gradually and gently. If all the changes had been introduced together,
you would have been shocked.”
[25] Jungmann: Missa Sollemnia
iii, p. 62, n. 19.
[27] It was ordered that
“pontifex tacite intrat in canonem,” though à voix basse was not necessarily interpreted everywhere as “d’une voix absolument imperceptible”: Jungmann,
op. cit p. 9.
[28] It is interesting to
notice that the recent inclusion of Bidding Prayers in the Mass can — at least
in England — have the same effect. Thus, the first petition may be a prayer for
the Queen and the Royal Family which, by the place in the Mass, therefore take,
in time, precedence of the Pope.
[30] In the July of 1968,
knowing that many who knew Cranmer’s work were seriously disturbed at the
possibility of Anaphora II being phrased and used for the purpose of a spurious
unity with Protestants — for it can clearly be used to deny transubstantiation
— I wrote in the Catholic Herald an
appeal to the English Hierarchy (who know the whole story of Cranmer as well as
I do) to ask the Consilium, as
evidence of good faith, to delete the nobis. Nothing happened and one was forced to remember
that the English Reformation was brought about by the apostasy of all the English
bishops except one — St. John Fisher.
[31] Dix, op. cit p. 664.
[32] Dix, op. cit 619. I have quoted this from
an Anglican source, because it emphasizes the point, which is a commonplace to
theologians and historians, that Trent has a unique status and is not, as too
many casual readers assume, just another Ecumenical Council. The italics are
mine.
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