When I was a chorister, it was the time when Series III was introduced in the 1970’s. It was the first modern language Eucharist service in the Church of England. Series I was more or less the 1928 Prayer Book service, and then we had Series II, shortened but still in traditional language.
English choirboys and adolescents with freshly-broken voices singing alto, tenor and bass tend to have a wicked sense of humour. Series III went down like a lead balloon, and we would imagine the service beginning The Lord be with you, to which the response would be And also up yours. This was stuff claimed to be relevant and meaningful for young people – except us schoolboys who were anything from 13 to 18 years old!
One of our favourite anthems was O Thou the Central Orb by Charles Wood. Here is a fairly decent rendering, with a HT to Fr Ed Bakker.
We thought that if the litniks of the time, like our very own Dean of York Ronald Jasper, who was on Bugnini’s consilium in Rome to design the Novus Ordo, got their hands on it, the words would be changed to “Hey You, the Middle Ball“. The mind boggles to think of how they would have expressed the title of this blog!
I have been looking for texts of satirical rites from that era, but haven’t had any luck yet. Contributions would be welcome if you find anything in your old papers that you could scan!
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Update: next Sunday’s services…
9 am – Matings
10.30 am – Snug Eucharist
6.30 pm – Evensnog and Solemn Exposition of the Vicar
The Blue Flower 
Not sure if it is precisely what you seek, but somewhere I have lurking a copy of “Not the Church Times”, 1981.
A snippet is online at:
Click to access LITURGY1981-11.pdf
which ironically also reports on how the Church of England was to turn deaconesses into deacons: a path which led to the present impasse.
If of interest I could dig out Not CT and send you a copy.
Kind regards,
John U.K.
(my normal e-mail addresss has packed up – johnfhh [at] hotmail.co.uk should find me)
That sounds like something I might have seen at the time. Do please dig it out and scan it.
Something I heard a number of times back in the mists of time when the English “translation” of the Mass was first introduced in the RC parishes: the priest would be reading a collect: “O God, you who …” and teenagers gathered anonymously in the back of the church would liltingly respond “Yoo Hoo”
Most Bible translations are littered with “he who”s which have always sounded more like a sick donkey than plausible English grammar. The English personal pronouns just can’t do that.
Actually, in my experience, the 1960s and later versions of collects and the like tend to omit relative clauses altogether. So, instead of ‘Almighty God who . . .’, it’s ‘O God, you are this/do that . . .’, so that it goes from appealing to an attribute or past deed to reminding God of things that I’m sure He hasn’t forgotten.
From the contemporary translation of “Gloria in Excelsis”: “You alone are the MOST HIGH”.
Imagine what adolescent minds did with THAT back in the seventies!
May the Force (farce?) be with you.
Don’t get me going on that! 😉 Even with traditional psalms and hymns and readings from the KJ Bible, we had “double meanings” and sniggers in the choir stalls. About the worst place for that was Holy Trinity, Micklegate in York, where I sang in the choir from about 1973 until 1975 as well as our school choir (the differences in service times made that possible).
Well … it’s not a satirical rite – but it is certainly satirical commentary and positively pallid in comparison to many banal and grotesque (yes, it’s possible to be both!) renditions of the “Novus Ordo” that I’ve seen – and that’s Tom Lehrer’s classic, “Vatican Rag” (which you can find at e.g. http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/tom+lehrer/the+vatican+rag_20138401.html)
And then there’s Evelyn Waugh’s waspish suggestion for updating the Angelus (I no longer have the original text to hand – so my version may have been corrupted by defective memory): “Hiya Moll! Baby, you’re the tops – and that goes for Junior, too. Look, Moll, you put in a word for us slobs now and when we knock off! Over and out.”
I remember singing ‘Thy saints with holy lust around thee shine.’ Those were the days!
Sorry: ‘around thee move’.
How about “the ever-lusting Son of the Father” …
Um! I’m pretty thick-skinned, but I think we should be careful with the more highly-strung readers of this blog. They might think we’re blaspheming, and that just wouldn’t do… Now would it?