The Broken Middle

It turns out to be necessary to differentiate this blog -- and its title -- from any association from lady -- or lady-man -- priestesses and the so-called messy church . The title is inspired by the notion championed by the under-appreciated British philosopher Gillian Rose. It is a complex concept, only incompletely spelled out in what follows: If we want to occupy the 'broken middle', we can't do this by brushing over differences and disagreements, by pretending that they're not there or that they don't matter. Philosophy, for Rose, is all about recognising and identifying conflicts which are ignored or overlooked. But what we then need to do is to refuse to identify the different positions as 'guilty' or 'innocent'. To live in the middle is to experience the impossibility of reconciling different positions, to refuse to take sides and so to look guilty to everyone, to satisfy no one, to be torn apart. This, says Rose, is where the sacred is. ...

From Mr. Hitchens: I love the Church of England. By that I do not mean its bishops, its arid modern prayers and poetry-free, unmemorable modern bibles, nor its stripped and carpeted modernised churches, its compulsory handshakes, perky modern hymns or happy-clappy conventicles where everyone is saved. If I'm saved it was such a narrow squeak that I think it wiser not to go on about it, as the man said. What I love is the wondrous Elizabethan settlement which refused to make windows into men's souls and allowed Catholics and Protestants to forget their differences in a rather beautiful ambiguity. That settlement is expressed in several ways. It lingers in buildings, in books, in music, a sort of ghostly presence just within reach at certain times of day and in a few unravaged, unwrecked parts of this country. It also continues to survive as a body of thought, song and literature, quite immune from the peculiar bureaucratic organisation which currently uses the Church's n...

A re-post from Father Jonathan: The phrase “Prayer Book Catholic” has come to characterize those Anglo-Catholics who not only use the Book of Common Prayer but believe it to be the liturgy par excellence for Catholic worship and teaching the Catholic faith. This is opposed to those Anglo-Catholics who only ever use the prayer book out of necessity but see it as at best incomplete and feel the need to gussy it up with affectations from the liturgies of Rome, the East, or wherever. Prayer Book Catholics believe that Anglicanism is Catholic by its very nature. In that respect, they are the inheritors of the old High Churchman tradition which stressed fidelity to the prayer book as a matter of faith, not simply discipline. Prayer Book Catholics strenuously defend the catholicity of the prayer book liturgies, but what about the 39 Articles of Religion that are appended to the back of the book? Is it possible for Catholics to defend the Articles or are they simply a relic of the Church of...

From The Ecclesiastical Review, Volume 65, July-December, 1921: THE importance and the value of a good prayer book can scarcely be overestimated. The average Catholic has no opportunity and no inclination for much mental prayer. Nor is he able to concentrate his mind for any considerable length of time on any given subject of meditation. He must find his beliefs and his aspirations expressed in the printed word, in terms that appeal to his intellect and to his heart. Besides, at divine service, the language of the Church is incomprehensible to him. Hence he cannot take part in the ceremonies as fully as was the case in former centuries. A good prayer book is required as an interpreter and a guide. And it affords the easiest means of familiarizing the faithful with the essentials of the devotional life: Holy Mass, Holy Communion, Confession, the other Sacraments, and the various practices in general use in the Church ... The Third Council of Baltimore saw the need and tried to supply...

Much like The Secker Society , this blog "is dedicated to the preservation and continued use of the historic standards of the Church of England", i.e.: The Articles of Religion of 1571, the Authorized Version of 1611, the Prayer Book of 1662, the Psalter of 1539, the Ordinal of 1661, and the Books of Homilies of 1547 and 1571. These standards were never the norm in America: the very first American prayer book is already vitiated by, inter alia , the omission of the Athanasian Creed. In our day, there are YouTube videos for everything. Here is the Mass, done reverently and solemnly, omitting nothing, and coming in, with full communion by the congregation, at under thirty minutes.

From Martin Thornton: The greatest Benedictine achievement (from this point of view) is the final consolidation of the threefold Rule of prayer which is absolutely fundamental to all Catholic spirituality: the common Office ( opus Dei ) supporting private prayer ( orationes peculiares ) both of which are allied to, and consummated by, the Mass. To call this the greatest Benedictine achievement is not to exaggerate … Here is the basic Rule of the Church which, varying in detail, is common to East and West, monastic and secular, to all the individual schools without exception, and which forms the over-all structure of the Book of Common Prayer. Amongst all the tests of Catholicity or orthodoxy, it is curious that this infallible and living test, is so seldom applied. We write and argue endlessly about the apostolic tradition, about episcopacy, sacramentalism, creeds, doctrine, the Bible—all very important things—yet we fail to see that no group of Christians is true to orthodoxy if it ...