The Book of Common Prayer Explained

1. What the Book of Common Prayer Is

The Book of Common Prayer is the single volume of English liturgy compiled under Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and imposed on the Church of England by the Act of Uniformity of 1549. Into one portable book it gathers the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, the Litany, the collects with their appointed epistles and gospels, the order for Holy Communion, the rites of baptism, confirmation, matrimony, visitation of the sick and burial, a short catechism and the whole Psalter. Every service an English parish needed, and every text a layperson could follow, sat between two covers in the vernacular.

The word "common" in the title carries two meanings at once. The book was common to the realm, replacing the several Latin uses that had differed from diocese to diocese, chiefly the Use of Salisbury (the Sarum Use) in the south, along with the uses of York, Hereford, Bangor and Lincoln. It was also common in the older sense of shared: prayer said together, aloud, by clergy and people in one tongue, rather than recited by the priest in Latin at the altar while the congregation followed private devotions.

Understanding the Prayer Book means holding two facts together. It is one of the great achievements of English prose, and it is a Reformation document with a doctrinal programme. Cranmer's cadences have shaped how English speakers across many traditions talk to God for close to five centuries. The same book, in its 1552 and 1662 recensions, was designed to make certain Catholic convictions about the Mass unsayable in English worship. Both statements are true, and this guide takes each of them seriously.

2. Cranmer and the Book of 1549

Thomas Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533 and spent the reign of Henry VIII working within narrow limits. Henry broke with Rome over jurisdiction and kept the Latin Mass and most Catholic doctrine in place, so Cranmer's reforming work advanced by inches: an English Litany in 1544, still sung today in a lightly altered form, and the Order of the Communion of 1548, a short English insertion into the Latin Mass supplying devotions for the people at their communion. The accession of the young Edward VI in 1547 removed the brake.

The sources Cranmer worked from

The first Prayer Book was compiled from a wide range of material, and Cranmer was a careful reader of both ancient and contemporary liturgies. His principal sources were these:

• The Sarum Use. The structure of the communion service, the calendar and the great majority of the collects come from the Latin books of Salisbury, themselves descendants of the Roman rite.
• The reformed breviary of Cardinal Francisco de Quinones, published in 1535 with papal permission, which simplified the office, cut the antiphons and responsories and restored continuous reading of Scripture. Cranmer borrowed both its principles and, in places, the argument of its preface.
• The Consultation of Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne, a reforming church order drafted with help from Martin Bucer and Philip Melanchthon. The Comfortable Words that follow the absolution at communion, four sentences of Scripture from Matthew 11:28, John 3:16, 1 Timothy 1:15 and 1 John 2:1, reach the Prayer Book through it.
• Cranmer's own composition. The Prayer of Humble Access, which had appeared in the 1548 Order of the Communion, and the General Confession of the office are his, and several of the finest collects have no Latin original.

The office reduced to two hours

Cranmer's most drastic structural decision concerned the daily office. The medieval breviary distributed the psalms and readings across eight hours, from Matins in the night to Compline at its close, a discipline built for monastic communities and clergy in choir. The Prayer Book compressed the eight into two, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, each with confession, psalms, two lessons, canticles, creed and collects. The Psalter was appointed to be read through every month, the Old Testament once a year and the New Testament three times, and both offices were designed for a parish church with a congregation present. Whatever else it did, the Prayer Book put a great deal of Scripture into English ears at a fixed daily rhythm.

The reception of the first book

The 1549 book came into use on Whitsunday, 9 June 1549. It satisfied almost nobody. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and the leading conservative, argued from prison that its communion service could be read in a fully Catholic sense, a claim Cranmer felt obliged to rebut at length in his Answer to Gardiner. Martin Bucer, then Regius Professor at Cambridge, produced a detailed critique known as the Censura at Cranmer's own request, listing the ceremonies he thought still smelled of the old religion. In the west of England the book provoked armed revolt. The rebels of Devon and Cornwall, in the rising of the summer of 1549, demanded the restoration of the Latin Mass and dismissed the new service as "but like a Christmas game", a phrase from their articles that has outlived them.

3. What Is Inside the Book

The contents of the Book of Common Prayer follow the shape of a Christian life from font to grave, and the order of the volume is itself a piece of teaching. A reader who has never opened one can expect to find the following, in roughly this sequence.

Two features of that list deserve notice. First, the offices for the dead disappear as a category. The medieval books carried a whole apparatus of requiem masses, dirges and month's minds, and the Prayer Book reduces the Church's dealings with the departed to a single burial office. Second, the private confession of sins survives only in the visitation of the sick, where the rubric invites the sick person to make "a special confession" if the conscience is troubled, followed by an absolution. What Catholics know as the ordinary sacrament of penance, treated on our page about confession and the sacrament of reconciliation, becomes in Prayer Book practice a rare pastoral resort.

4. The 1552 Revision

The second Book of Common Prayer, authorised by the Act of Uniformity of 1552, is the decisive one. Where 1549 had translated and pruned the old rite, 1552 rebuilt the communion service around a different theology of what happens when the faithful receive. Almost every subsequent English Prayer Book, including 1662, is a revision of 1552 rather than of 1549.

What changed at the altar

• The altar became a table. Stone altars had already been pulled down and replaced with wooden tables by Privy Council order in 1550, and the 1552 rubrics assume a table set in the chancel or the body of the church, with the priest standing at the north side, so that the action read as a meal.
• The vesture was reduced. The 1552 rubric directs that the minister shall use neither alb, vestment nor cope, wearing a surplice only, with a rochet for a bishop. Our page on liturgical vestments and what they mean sets out the Catholic understanding of the garments that were dropped.
• The prayer for the dead was removed. The intercession became a prayer for "the whole state of Christ's Church militant here in earth", the last four words added precisely to exclude the departed from its scope. On what the Catholic Church teaches about the state those prayers were for, see purgatory and prayer for the dead.
• The invocation over the elements was removed. The 1549 prayer had asked God to "with thy Holy Spirit and word vouchsafe to bless and sanctify these thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine". In 1552 that petition is gone, and the prayer asks instead that the communicants receiving the bread and wine "may be partakers of his most blessed body and blood".
• The words of administration changed. The 1549 formula, "The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life", was replaced by "Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving."

The breaking of the canon

The structural change is the one that matters most, and it is easy to miss on a first reading. In every ancient eucharistic prayer, East and West, the institution narrative is followed by an anamnesis and an oblation: the Church remembers the passion, resurrection and ascension, and offers the holy gifts to the Father. Communion comes after that offering. In 1552 Cranmer cut the prayer in half. The consecration prayer now ends at "Do this in remembrance of me", the people receive immediately, and the material that had followed the institution narrative, the self-oblation and the thanksgiving, is moved to a position after communion where it can no longer read as an offering of the consecrated gifts.

The liturgical scholar Gregory Dix, a Benedictine of Nashdom Abbey, described the 1552 communion service as the only effective attempt ever made to give liturgical expression to the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Source: Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (Dacre Press, 1945), in his chapter on the Reformation rites. Dix was himself an Anglican, and his verdict is quoted by scholars on all sides of the argument.

The Black Rubric

Late in 1552, after printing had begun, the Privy Council ordered the insertion of a declaration explaining why communicants still knelt. The pressure came from John Knox and other preachers who thought kneeling implied adoration of the elements. The added rubric, printed in black where other rubrics were red and so nicknamed the Black Rubric, states that kneeling signifies humble and grateful acknowledgement, and denies "any real and essential presence there being of Christ's natural flesh and blood" in the sacrament. Elizabeth I's book of 1559 dropped it. The 1662 book restored it in altered wording, denying instead any "corporal presence of Christ's natural flesh and blood", a change that leaves room for a spiritual presence while still excluding the Catholic doctrine.

Cranmer's own eucharistic thought had moved a long way by this point. His Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of 1550 argues that Christ is received spiritually by faith, that the body of Christ is in heaven and cannot be locally present in the bread, and that the benefit of the sacrament belongs to the worthy receiver. Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli, both teaching in England at the time, stood close to that position. The 1552 rite is the liturgical form of it.

The book had less than a year to run. Edward VI died in July 1553, Mary I restored the Latin rite and the papal obedience, and Cranmer was tried, degraded and burned at Oxford on 21 March 1556, having signed and then publicly repudiated a series of recantations.

5. The Language of Sacrifice, and What Was Removed

The single greatest difference between the Prayer Book communion service and the Catholic Mass concerns sacrifice. Catholic teaching holds that the Eucharist is the sacramental re-presentation of the one sacrifice of Christ on the cross, offered to the Father by the Church through the ministry of a priest. The Prayer Book rite of 1552 and 1662 contains a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and a self-offering of the worshippers, and it contains no offering of the eucharistic victim.

What the Prayer Book retains

The post-communion prayer of the 1552 and 1662 books is worth quoting, because it shows exactly where the language of sacrifice survives and in what form.

The wording draws on Romans 12:1, where St Paul urges the faithful to present their bodies as "a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God". Catholic theology affirms every word of that. The self-offering of the baptised is real, and the Church has always taught it. The question is what else is offered, and when.

What the Prayer Book removes

Three things present in the Latin Mass and in the 1549 book are absent from 1552 onward:

• The offering of the consecrated gifts. The Roman Canon, after the institution narrative, offers to God "a pure victim, a holy victim, a spotless victim". No equivalent stands anywhere in the Prayer Book rite, and the placing of the oblation after communion removes the possibility of one.
• The application of the sacrifice to the living and the dead. The Latin Mass prays for those "who have gone before us with the sign of faith". The 1552 intercession is confined to the Church militant here in earth.
• The doctrinal warrant for both. The Thirty-nine Articles, bound with the book, close the door explicitly. Article XXVIII states that transubstantiation "is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions". Article XXXI states that the sacrifices of Masses, in which the priest was said to offer Christ for the quick and the dead, were "blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits".

Why the Reformers thought this necessary

The Reformers' argument deserves to be stated in its own terms, because it is a serious one and it is drawn from Scripture. The Letter to the Hebrews insists that Christ "entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption" (Hebrews 9:12), and that "we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Hebrews 10:10). Cranmer and those with him read the medieval multiplication of private masses, mass stipends and chantry endowments as a system that treated the cross as insufficient and turned the sacrifice into a commodity. Whatever one concludes about the doctrine, the abuses were real, and Catholic reformers at Trent said so too.

The Catholic answer

The Council of Trent, in its twenty-second session in 1562, taught that the Mass offers the same victim who offered himself on the cross, now offering himself through the ministry of priests, the manner of offering alone being different, and that the sacrifice of the Mass is therefore propitiatory. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts the point in a sentence: the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice (CCC 1367). Nothing is added to Calvary and nothing is repeated. What happens at the altar is the making present, under sacramental signs, of the offering that was made once.

The Catholic reading of Hebrews turns on the same "once for all" the Reformers cite. Christ's offering is unrepeatable precisely because it is eternally present before the Father, where he "always lives to make intercession" for those who draw near through him (Hebrews 7:25). The Eucharist joins the Church on earth to that permanent offering. Our guide to the Eucharist and the Real Presence works through the scriptural and patristic case at length, and our comparison of Catholic and Protestant belief sets the eucharistic question alongside the others that divide them.

6. From Elizabeth to the Book of 1662

The Prayer Book's path from 1552 to its final English form runs through a century of enforcement, rebellion, abolition and restoration. Six moments carry the story.

The Elizabethan book of 1559

Elizabeth I restored the 1552 book with a small number of significant changes. The words of administration were combined, so that the priest says both the 1549 formula about preserving body and soul and the 1552 formula about receiving in remembrance, a fusion that let people of quite different eucharistic beliefs commune together. The Black Rubric was dropped. A new Ornaments Rubric directed that the ornaments of the church and of its ministers should be those in use in the second year of Edward VI, wording ambiguous enough to be fought over for the next three hundred years. Attendance was made compulsory by the Act of Uniformity of 1559, with a fine of twelve pence for every Sunday absent, and a statute of 1581 raised the penalty on obstinate recusants to twenty pounds a month.

Sources for the penalties: the Act of Uniformity 1559 (1 Eliz. I c. 2) and the Act to retain the Queen's Majesty's Subjects in their due Obedience 1581 (23 Eliz. I c. 1). Both are printed in the standard collections of English statutes.

Those fines are the origin of English Catholic recusancy, the refusal of Catholics to attend the parish church. For a century and a half, Catholic worship in England meant a Latin Mass said in a private house at some risk. The Prayer Book is therefore, for English Catholic memory, both a book of prayers and an instrument of legal pressure, and honesty requires saying so.

Hampton Court, 1604

James I called a conference at Hampton Court to hear Puritan complaints. The revisions to the Prayer Book that followed were minor, chiefly additions to the catechism on the sacraments and some new thanksgivings. The conference is remembered instead for authorising the translation that became the King James Bible in 1611.

The Scottish book of 1637

Archbishop William Laud pressed a Prayer Book on the Church of Scotland, drafted by Scottish bishops with his oversight. Its communion office was in some respects more traditional than the English one, restoring an invocation of the Holy Spirit and moving the oblation back before communion. Presbyterian Scotland received it as an attempt to impose English and half-Roman worship by prerogative. Its first use at St Giles' in Edinburgh on 23 July 1637 ended in riot, tradition ascribing the first thrown stool to a woman named Jenny Geddes, and the National Covenant followed in 1638. That book had a long afterlife: the Scottish Episcopal liturgy descended from it shaped the American communion office of 1789.

Abolition, 1645

During the Civil War, Parliament abolished the Book of Common Prayer and replaced it with the Directory for Public Worship produced by the Westminster Assembly, a manual of directions for extempore prayer rather than a set text. The same assembly produced the confession described on our page about the Westminster Confession of Faith. Prayer Book services continued quietly in private houses through the Interregnum, and clergy were ejected for using them.

The Savoy Conference and the book of 1662

The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought the Prayer Book back and forced a decision about how far to accommodate Presbyterian scruples. The Savoy Conference of 1661 set twelve bishops against twelve Presbyterian divines, with Richard Baxter offering a complete alternative liturgy of his own composition. The conference produced almost no agreement. The book annexed to the Act of Uniformity of 1662 made a modest number of changes: the manual acts were restored to the prayer of consecration, directing the priest to take the bread and break it at the appointed words; a service for the baptism of those of riper years was added, along with prayers for use at sea; the epistles and gospels were taken from the King James Version while Coverdale's Psalter was kept; and the Ordinal's preface was tightened to require episcopal ordination of all who would serve as bishops, priests and deacons in the Church of England.

The Act required every minister to declare his unfeigned assent and consent to everything the book contained, by St Bartholomew's Day, 24 August 1662. Roughly two thousand ministers refused and left their livings, an event that English Nonconformists remember as the Great Ejection and that gave permanent institutional shape to Congregationalism, the Baptists and English Presbyterianism outside the establishment.

The figure of about two thousand ejected ministers derives from Edmund Calamy's Account of the Ministers... Ejected (1702) and its later revisions, the standard Nonconformist register of the event. Modern historians treat the total as approximate.

The 1662 book then governed English worship, with remarkably little alteration, into the twentieth century. Our page on the Church of England and its beliefs covers the institution the settlement produced, and Anglicanism as a global communion takes up the tradition that grew out of it.

7. The Ordinal and the Question of Anglican Orders

The Ordinal is the part of the Prayer Book with the sharpest consequences for relations between Rome and Canterbury. Issued in 1550, revised in 1552 and again in 1662, it supplies the forms for making deacons, ordaining priests and consecrating bishops, and it deliberately drops elements of the medieval Roman pontifical.

What the Edwardine Ordinal changed

The medieval rite for ordaining a priest included the handing over of a chalice with wine and a paten with bread, accompanied by words giving the ordinand power to offer sacrifice for the living and the dead. The Edwardine Ordinal removed that ceremony and those words. In their place the bishop lays on hands with the words "Receive the Holy Ghost", and from 1662 the form was expanded to specify "for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands." The anointing of hands was also dropped. The changes were consistent with the theology of the 1552 communion service: a ministry ordained to preach the word and administer the sacraments, with no reference to a power to offer sacrifice.

Apostolicae Curae, 1896

Leo XIII addressed the question in the apostolic letter Apostolicae Curae, dated 13 September 1896. He judged that ordinations carried out with the Edwardine rite were, in the Latin, "irritas prorsus fuisse et esse, omninoque nullas", absolutely null and utterly void. The reasoning rested on two grounds. There was a defect of form, because the words used did not signify the grace and power of the priesthood as the Church understands it, chiefly the power to consecrate and offer the body and blood of Christ. There was also a defect of intention, because the compilers of the rite had removed the sacrificial language deliberately, and the rite as a whole expressed an intention different from the Church's. Leo added that the two defects reinforce one another, and that a break in the line of valid consecrations, once made, cannot be repaired by later restoration of Catholic wording.

The Anglican reply and the state of the question

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Frederick Temple and William Maclagan, replied in 1897 with the letter Saepius Officio. They argued that the Ordinal's essential form is adequate by the standards Rome itself applies to ancient Eastern rites, several of which lack any explicit mention of the power to sacrifice; that the Church of England had never intended to ordain anything other than priests in the apostolic succession; and that the offering language Rome required is present in the Anglican rite in the sense the English Church holds it, in the offering of praise and thanksgiving. They pressed the point that if Anglican forms are defective, some ancient and undisputed forms would be defective too.

The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, established after the Second Vatican Council, produced agreed statements on eucharistic doctrine in 1971 and on ministry and ordination in 1973, with elucidations later in that decade. Those statements record a substantial measure of agreement on the language of memorial and sacrifice. The Catholic Church has not reversed Apostolicae Curae, and a clergyman ordained in the Church of England who enters into full communion with Rome is ordained absolutely, not conditionally. Our page on Catholic ecumenism and how it works describes the dialogue in which these questions sit, and the Catholic priesthood explains what the Church holds ordination confers.

8. Prayer Book English and Its Afterlife

Cranmer's prose is one reason people who reject every doctrine in the book still read it. His sentences are built for the ear, on a principle of paired and tripled phrases with the stresses falling where a speaking voice would put them, and they were composed to be said aloud by a congregation with no book in hand.

The collect as a form

The collect is a compact prayer in a fixed shape: an address to God, a relative clause naming something God has done, a petition, a purpose clause, and a closing through Christ. Cranmer translated most of the ancient Latin collects and composed some of his own, and the discipline of the form is what gives them their density. The collect for the second Sunday of Advent is his own composition and is among the best known:

The Collect for Purity, which opens the communion service, is a translation from the Sarum missal, where it was a private preparatory prayer for the priest: "Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name." Cranmer's decision to give a priest's private prayer to the whole congregation is characteristic of the book.

Phrases that left the book

A great deal of ordinary English comes from the Prayer Book, often from speakers who have never seen one. "Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God" opens the marriage service. "Till death us do part" and "with this ring I thee wed" come from the vows. "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" is the committal. "The peace of God, which passeth all understanding" is the blessing, taken from Philippians 4:7. The General Confession supplies "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us", a sentence that has taught generations of English speakers to name sin in two directions at once.

Why the cadence matters theologically

Liturgical language forms belief over time, which is the sense of the old maxim that the law of praying establishes the law of believing. A congregation that says the same words weekly for a lifetime absorbs the theology those words carry, and the Prayer Book was written by a man who understood that better than most of his opponents. That is exactly why the eucharistic changes of 1552 mattered so much, and it is also why Catholic authorities, four centuries later, thought the cadence worth preserving when they could set it within a Catholic rite. Our guide to Catholic prayer and its forms takes up the same relationship between the words and the belief.

9. Later Revisions Across the Anglican Communion

No single Book of Common Prayer governs worldwide Anglicanism today. Each province authorises its own books, and the 1662 text stands behind them as an ancestor and, in England, as a doctrinal standard.

England

The Church of England attempted a thorough revision in the 1920s, partly to regularise practices the Anglo-Catholic movement had introduced, including reservation of the sacrament and a fuller eucharistic prayer. The revised book passed the Church Assembly and was rejected by the House of Commons in December 1927, and again, after amendment, in June 1928. The bishops permitted its use in practice, and the episode remains a striking illustration of an established church's dependence on Parliament. Later authorised alternatives followed in the twentieth century, and Common Worship, adopted in 2000, is now the ordinary provision. The 1662 book remains legally authorised, is used weekly at cathedral evensong and in college chapels, and continues to define what the Church of England officially teaches.

The United States

The Episcopal Church adopted its first Book of Common Prayer in 1789, after independence made an English book with prayers for the Crown impossible. Its communion office followed the Scottish line rather than the English one, restoring the invocation of the Spirit and placing the oblation before communion, a difference with real theological weight. American revisions followed in 1892, 1928 and 1979. The 1979 book, with its contemporary-language rites alongside traditional ones, remains the official book of the Episcopal Church, and disagreement over it and over later liturgical change is part of the background to the divisions described on our page about the Episcopal Church in the United States.

The wider Communion

Provinces across Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas have produced their own books, in their own languages, over the last century. Some hold closely to 1662, and several African and Asian provinces treat the traditional text as a mark of orthodoxy in current disputes. Others have revised extensively. Our page on Christianity in Africa covers the churches where much of the Communion's present strength lies.

Beyond Anglicanism

The Prayer Book's reach extends past the churches that use it. John Wesley abridged the 1662 book for American Methodists in 1784 as the Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, and Methodist liturgy still shows its bones, as our page on Methodism and Wesleyan belief notes. Nineteenth and twentieth century Lutheran and Reformed service books in English borrowed its collects freely. Even the vernacular Catholic rites produced after the Second Vatican Council drew on Prayer Book phrasing in some early English translations, since the translators were working in a language whose religious register Cranmer had largely built.

10. The Catholic Response, Stated Plainly

A Catholic assessment of the Book of Common Prayer needs to separate three questions that are usually run together: the language, the doctrine and the ministry. The answers differ.

On the language: no objection at all

The Catholic Church has no quarrel with liturgy in English. It celebrates the Roman rite in the vernacular languages of the world and has approved Cranmer's own English for use in a Catholic missal, which settles the point beyond argument. The 1549 preface's complaint about an office so cluttered with responsories and antiphons that the Scripture was never read through would have been recognised at the Second Vatican Council, which ordered a reform of the Liturgy of the Hours on comparable grounds.

On the doctrine: a real and settled disagreement

Catholic teaching holds that at the consecration the whole substance of the bread becomes the body of Christ and the whole substance of the wine becomes his blood, the appearances alone remaining, and that Christ is present in the sacrament whole and entire, before, during and after its reception. The Prayer Book rite, taken with the Articles printed beside it, denies the change of substance, restricts the benefit of the sacrament to the faithful receiver, and provides no place for adoration or reservation of the consecrated elements. Article XXVIII directs that the sacrament was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up or worshipped. That is an intelligible position, argued from Scripture, and it is not the Catholic one.

On sacrifice, the Catechism states the Catholic doctrine compactly: the Eucharist is a sacrifice because it re-presents, makes present, the sacrifice of the cross, and because it applies its fruit (CCC 1366), and the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice (CCC 1367). Article XXXI's charge of blasphemous fables is aimed at the doctrine that the priest offers Christ for the living and the dead. The two statements cannot both be true.

On the ministry: the judgment stands

The verdict of Apostolicae Curae has not been withdrawn, and Catholic practice follows it. An Anglican priest received into the Catholic Church is ordained as though he had never been ordained, and this applies to married former Anglican clergy who receive a dispensation from the discipline of celibacy. That practice is the clearest available evidence of where the question actually stands, whatever progress the theological dialogue has made on the doctrine of the Eucharist itself.

What Catholics can receive from it

Recognising a real disagreement leaves room for real debts. The Prayer Book preserved and translated a treasury of ancient Latin collects that would otherwise have been unknown to English speakers for centuries. It established a daily discipline of psalms and Scripture for laypeople who were never going to say a breviary. It taught generations of English speakers to pray in a register that is grave, plain and unsentimental. Those are Catholic goods, and the Church said as much when it took them into its own worship.

11. Divine Worship and the Ordinariates

The Prayer Book's language now has an approved place inside Catholic worship. The route by which it got there runs through two papal decisions, one in 1980 and one in 2009.

The Pastoral Provision

In 1980, at the request of the bishops of the United States, John Paul II approved a pastoral provision for groups of Episcopalians seeking full communion with the Catholic Church. It allowed the ordination of married former Episcopal clergy as Catholic priests by dispensation, and the establishment of parishes retaining elements of Anglican liturgical usage, which came to be known as the Anglican Use. Liturgical books were prepared for those parishes drawing on the American Prayer Book tradition.

Anglicanorum coetibus, 2009

Benedict XVI issued the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus on 4 November 2009, providing a permanent structure: personal ordinariates, which function somewhat like dioceses without territorial boundaries, for groups of Anglicans entering into full communion together while keeping their liturgical and spiritual patrimony. Three were erected:

• The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, for England and Wales, erected in January 2011.
• The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, for the United States and Canada, erected in 2012.
• The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, for Australia, erected in 2012.

Divine Worship: The Missal

The liturgical books that followed carry the title Divine Worship. Divine Worship: The Missal was approved by the Holy See and came into use on the First Sunday of Advent in 2015, and books for the daily office followed. The missal is a Catholic book, a use of the Roman rite, and it takes the shape and doctrine of the Catholic Mass. What it takes from the Prayer Book is the English and a set of much loved texts:

• The Collect for Purity opens the liturgy.
• The Summary of the Law and the Decalogue may be used in the penitential rite.
• The Comfortable Words, those four sentences of Scripture, follow the absolution.
• The Prayer of Humble Access is said before communion: "We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies."
• The Last Gospel, the prologue of St John, may close the Mass, a feature of the older Roman rite described on our page about the Traditional Latin Mass.
• The whole rite is in Cranmerian English, with "thee" and "thou" addressed to God throughout.

The decisive difference is the eucharistic prayer. Divine Worship uses the Roman Canon, with its offering of the pure and holy victim, its memento of the dead, and the full Catholic language of sacrifice that 1552 removed. The Prayer of Oblation is restored to its ancient place. What resulted is the cadence of Cranmer's English carrying the doctrine Cranmer's revision was written to exclude, which is either an irony or a reconciliation depending on where one stands.

12. How a Catholic Should Read the Prayer Book

A Catholic who picks up a 1662 Book of Common Prayer is holding a book of extraordinary beauty that was written in part to refute what he believes. Reading it well means doing three things at once.

Read it honestly about the history

The Prayer Book was enforced by statute. Failure to attend it cost money, and eventually, for priests who said Mass instead, it cost lives on both sides of the confessional divide during a savage century. English Catholics who kept the faith through the penal years did so at real expense. Pretending the book was only ever a literary achievement dishonours them, and pretending it was only ever an instrument of persecution dishonours the many faithful English Christians who have met God in its words. Our pages on the Protestant Reformation and on the Inquisition both try to hold the historical record without flattering anyone.

Read it precisely about the doctrine

The differences are specific and they can be named without heat. Transubstantiation is denied in Article XXVIII. The offering of the eucharistic sacrifice is absent from the rite and repudiated in Article XXXI. Prayer for the dead is excluded from the intercession. Ordination is conferred by a form that omits any reference to sacrificial priesthood. A Catholic who can point to those four facts understands the disagreement better than one who complains vaguely about Protestant worship. Naming a difference accurately is the beginning of any honest conversation about it.

Receive what is genuinely good

The collects are largely ancient and largely Catholic in origin, and many are now said in Catholic churches under the ordinariate use. The discipline of daily psalms and continuous Scripture reading is the Church's own discipline in English clothes, and any Catholic can take it up. The plainness of the language is a rebuke to a great deal of contemporary religious writing in every tradition. St Paul's instruction to test everything and hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21) applies here as readily as anywhere.

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