17 March 2009

Courtesy

I appreciate the unfailing good manners with which the Pastor in Valle Adurni cites my blog, although I am only an Anglican, when it sets him thinking. And thinking he is, very provokingly, about questions involved in the authority of Councils. I commend his thoughts to your edification.

I'm probably paranoid, but there's a query put to Fr Zed on his blog - about what I have called utraquism, but which Fr Zed calls biformality: the problems of clergy who use both forms of the Roman Rite - which looks to me suspiciously like a rewording of things I've been writing. It would be nice ... Ah, well, I will just add another ingredient to the utraquism pot to see if it come to the surface in Fr Zed's culinary wonderland. This: it's not just a question of adding a genuflexion here or an altar kiss there. There are structural differences which make it dangerous to forget which Form one is celebrating. Fraction/Pax/Agnus Dei, for example. You really have got to do one or the other, or risk irreverent confusion.

2 comments:

Chris said...

You remind me of an anecdote I heard once concerning a priest who, confused as to whether he was celebrating according to the BCP or the then-new alternative, got as far as "Who, in the same night in which he was betrayed ... Oh." before realising he'd missed out the offertory both sides of the Prayer for the Church.

The Welsh Jacobite said...

Or the parish which habitually sang Gloria in exclesis twice - at the start and the end of Mass. (Gives a certain symmetry I suppose.)