Clever Tumblr Spoof Page

It’s called The Low Churchman’s Guide to the Solemn High Mass: Keeping Loyal Anglicans Safe from Superstition Since 2013. And it is a riot. A sample from the post “Masters of Ceremonies.”

If a loyal churchman were to attend a Solemn High Mass (we are speaking here, of course, in purely hypothetical terms), he would see a throng of strangely-dressed people behaving oddly. By the time the service reaches its full swing, a wide variety of functionaries will be fulfilling various tasks: the organist is playing something, the choristers are screeching, the verger is guarding the chancel entrance, the thurifer is thurifing, and the sacred ministers are shuffling awkwardly in their ill-fitting shoes. Yet a closer look would reveal a person who doesn’t seem to be doing anything; he is wearing a cassock and surplice, and occasionally directs peremptory gestures toward the other people in the chancel. Who is he and what is he doing?

This person is an MC (Master of Ceremonies), and what he is doing is destroying Anglicanism.

On a day when some are recklessly ch-ch-charging the Ordinariates with over-ritualizing, um, rituals, it seems only right to hear from a dissenting voice.

4 Replies to “Clever Tumblr Spoof Page”

  1. A favourite site of mine. The Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham is to use its new Order for the Mass for the first time on 10th October – is this what you are referring to?

  2. The Tridentine prayers at the foot of the altar are entirely different from the Sarum use and yet occur in the new Ordinariate Mass. The Tridentine Offertory Rite is also markedly different, yet this is what is used as an option in the new AU Mass. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Anglican patrimony, except for the fact that some Anglo-Catholics used an English translation of the Tridentine Mass in the fifty years before Vatican II. What is going on here? It seems that mixing rites is now OK. Perhaps it has something to do with Benedict XVI's declaration in SP that the EF and OF are the same Roman Rite.

  3. Joshua Vas has just commented on this over at Pray Tell Blog, to the effect that the Tridentine Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, Offertory prayers, and other elements distinctly Roman rather than Sarum, were inserted into officially approved Anglican rites in parts of Africa & Asia. They could, therefore, be argued to be elements of the patrimony of worldwide Anglicanism, even though they were not – I would agree – familiar to many Anglo-Catholic congregations in the UK.

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