This is not the first time I write on Percy Dearmer (1867-1936), and when I did in the past, I discovered that this man was highly controversial. Some of the comments in Dearmer and Modernism really shot me down. It was truly a case of falsus in uno falsus in omnibus! The man was probably a little too interested in “esoteric Christianity” and sympathised with the feminism of the Suffragette movement.

Typing the right words into Google bring up some very “interesting” ideas. For example, some of the more cranky characters in the blogosphere would attribute to Dearmer the idea of ordaining women as priests or being a secret bishop in the Order of Corporate Reunion. A Ship of Fools thread gives us a profile that would portray Dearmer as a total modernist. The crankiness and hatred of those whose pet hates are Sarumism and Vagantes seem to have no limit, and seems to me self-discrediting. The OCR story also discredits itself through claiming that Henry Arthur Stanton (1839-1913), the saintly and humble Curate of St Alban’s Holborn, was another one of them. I wonder what the authors of such allegations were smoking in their pipe! I would be very surprised if anyone in those days had the remotest idea of ordaining women, but I am open to documentary evidence.

One interesting posting is by a TAC priest by the name of Fr Bartus – Sarum what?. His major argument against Sarum seems to be that it is Dearmerite and leads to Affirming Catholicism. Incidentally, I was the one of them running amok on the Anglo-Catholic blog, who ironically enough is an expat English priest running a small Anglican mission in France!  He and three other parishes in the world use the Sarum liturgy. Quite flattering. I wish Fr Bartus and his parish well in the Ordinariate. Of course the point I would make is that if Sarum died, nobody would be talking about it or saying they wished it would come back!

Quite frankly, I don’t care about the tittle-tattle, and the man has been dead for a very long time. To me, what is important is what he wrote about the liturgy and the appointment of churches.

Alternatively, go to the English Catholic or the Anglo-Catholic and type the word “Dearmer” into the search box to find articles I or others have written.

No one ever said that Dearmer was the Church’s greatest saint or even perfect. He only went so far with the Sarum revival, dressing up the 1662 Communion Service. As a priest of the Church of England in the late nineteenth century, that was all he could do, and he felt the need to combat the rapidly-growing Papalist tendency in southern England. This seems understandable.

His life can be found in the Wikipedia article. Mention is made of his left-wing politics, as was the case of many other ritualist clergy in those days serving poor parishes in the cities. Our young blogger friend living in Kent, Patrick Sheridan, wrote Percy Dearmer…, which I find a very interesting and well-written article. Some of Dearmer’s work can be found reproduced here, all downloadable for free!

Perhaps, Percy Dearmer’s greatest contribution to Anglican worship was good taste, an exceedingly rare virtue these days. When he took up his living as Vicar of St Mary’s Primrose Hill, he was known to have invented this dictum: “You must give people what is good and they will come to like it“. He looked out the “ornaments rubric” to justify introducing beauty in worship. He introduced sanctuary lamps, riddle curtains and full and ample vestments. He quickly attracted large numbers of faithful to his services.

Is good taste something too much to ask for in 2012? It is a question of communicating holiness through care, concern and diligence. Dearmer once wrote,

…whether the ceremonial used is little or much, the services of our Church should at least be conducted on the legitimate lines, if only that they may be freed from what is anomalous, tawdry or grotesque.

Many things were tawdry and grotesque in those days, going by some of the monstrous creations of the nineteenth century, but they fade into insignificance at some of the brutish horrors inflicted on our churches since the 1960’s, and even earlier.

Surely, good taste and care for beauty are not everything, but they are a beginning to a revival of western Catholicism in the widest meaning of this word.