The Portal - Australia edition January 2014 | Page 16

THE P RTAL

January 2014

Page 12

A recension
of the recension
Geoffrey Kirk

Let me

come clean at the outset. I have never been an enthusiast for Dr
Cranmer’s interesting anthology.

Coverdale’s psalms, of
There must, I would have thought, be enough of
course are magical, with us with an ear for the music of authentic liturgical
a memorability which thirty years of the Grail Psalter English – not Cranmerian pastiche, but a dialect both
has been unable to erase.
historically rooted and robustly
modern – to assist in what
But the Prayer Book itself
must surely come: a revision
always struck me as overly
of the revision, a recension of
wordy. Its English was already
the recension. That might well
a period piece when it first
be a contribution which the
appeared, and its strongest suit
Ordinariates could make to
since then has been familiarity.
liturgy world-wide.
So you can imagine that I
the mother tongue
was less than delighted by the
publication of the Ordinariate
For if you want to understand
Use.
the importance of the Missal in
English go, as I do as often as
clunky
I can, to the Cathedral of the
I only hope that my parish
Good Shepherd, Singapore, or
priest will not make it his usage!
the church of St Francis Xavier,
But that is not to say that I am
Melaka.
happy, either, with the latest
recension of the Roman Missal.
There
multicultural
The word is ‘clunky’.
congregations use English
as a lingua franca; there the
tragically wrong
mother tongue of Milton and
In a laudable attempt to add dignity to the language Shakespeare has become people’s habitual mode of
and to render the Latin with something approaching address for God. The Universal Church has a special
accuracy, something has gone tragically wrong. Elegant responsibility in its English translations. Spanish,
phrases which have stood the test of time in liturgical French and Portuguese are of course important. But
English since before Cranmer (‘speak the word only English is the language of the world.
and my soul shall be healed’) have been superseded
by the banal (‘only say the word…’ , with its estuarial slough of despond
How tragic if the world is offered a variety of liturgical
overtones). And I defy anyone, at first reading, to
navigate the syntax of the post-communion prayers pidgin as its daily offering at the altar. Meanwhile we
must soldier on with what we have got. Dignified
without mishap.
ceremonial and carefully chosen music (revive the
gawky angularity
eucharistic hymns of John and Charles Wesley, I say!)
The bones of the Latin protrude through their thin can do much to enliven the dull post-Vatican II slough
English skin. Many of the prefaces have a gawky of despond into which many parishes have sunk.
angularity which is only accentuated by setting them
Ordinariate Use
to music.
Even the Ordinariate Use may have its uses after
not Cranmerian pastiche
all. ‘Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your
So what is to be done? Here I think is a role in the sins…and intend to lead a new life’ should now get on
wider Church for ‘Anglican Patrimony’.
with it.