Deborah Gyapong has published an excellent article quoting some private correspondence she was allowed to reproduce if the author’s identity was kept confidential.

• On the Anglican tradition’s monastic approach to spirituality.

What is distinctive about monastic liturgy as opposed to what you get in the average Roman Catholic parish? I would say, simply, the absence of a self-conscious attempt to “bring the liturgy to the people” – what some call “pastoralism”. A monastery simply celebrates the liturgy without messing about with it or wondering whether the service will be understood by the people and “relevant and meaningful”.

That is something of a simplism, as many monasteries tinker with the liturgy more than little boys dismantling their mechanical toys to find out how they work! Here in Europe, there are some very traditional monasteries, especially of the Solesmes Congregation, and their example has much to teach and inspire us.

What is distinctive about monastic life is the primacy of the liturgy – ora et labora, pray and work. Monastic life is the last vestige of “integral” medieval Christian life as is still possible to find in Orthodox countries like Greece and Cyprus. In western parishes, the assumption is that ordinary lay people cannot relate to the liturgy and there are two ways to be Christian – being part of a “religion of the Book”, Protestantism, or in a parallel life of prayer through popular devotions. The ultimate expression of the second tendency was the Gebetsingmesse in Germany in the 1950’s, a “lay” service held simultaneously with a low Mass being celebrated silently at a distant altar. The nineteenth century parish church is not so much a liturgical space, but a “theme park” for lay devotions. Thus, as in the sixteenth century, the laity are indifferent to the religion of the clerics. After Vatican II, when the changes took place, only a very small minority complained that someone was changing their religion. That can be partly put down to scholasticism and the Papal system that puts authority over objective truth, perhaps even the more radical notion I entertain that most people were Catholics because they were under constraint. As in the sixteenth century, their religion was little more than Paganism with a few Christian terms.

I understand Deborah’s concern for the liturgy of the ordinariates. The ordinariates are of no concern to me, but Anglican patrimony is – at least for as long as I belong to a community calling itself an Anglican church, or a church of Anglican tradition. “Full-strength” monasticism is hardly to be found in any Anglican church, Canterburian or Continuing, but each of us tries to keep that ideal before our eyes. I know something of real monasticism, and those of us who are not monks can only live our Christian life with some aspects of monastic influence. For secular priests and laity, these would be “bringing the people to the liturgy”, something like the Liturgical Movement of the 1920’s, an aesthetic reaction away from nineteenth-century kitsch towards the ethos of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

To put it another way, those who regard the Anglican use liturgy as either a step on the way to restoring the Tridentine Mass or as an ethnic inculturation of the post-conciliar Mass are not recognizing the “common identity” that lies at the basis of the Pastoral Provision.

I won’t speak for what they do in the RC Church, but we Anglicans have been aping the Counter-Reformation for all too long. I understand those who react away from Anglo-Papalism to promote the view that prevails among American “classical” Anglicans. My own approach would be to correlate the early sixteenth century with the end of the nineteenth, and devise a “liturgical movement” approach to our Norman-Sarum tradition. It is just one step further than what Percy Dearmer attempted in strict obedience to the ecclesiastical system to which he belonged as a priest.