Thoughts on the Anglican Use Conference

Monday and Tuesday, the 5th and 6th of June, two traditional Catholic laymen from the metropolitan D.C. area attended the second “Anglican Use Conference”. A former Episcopalian minister by the name of Eric Bergman, whose request to the Pope for ordination to the Catholic priesthood is pending, hosted the event. Mr. Bergman is the Executive Director of the St. Thomas More Society, which is made up of former Episcopalians who are now Roman Catholic. Once ordained, Eric Bergman hopes to acquire a Catholic church in the Diocese of Scranton to begin an full-fledged Anglican Use Catholic parish. Currently, his St. Thomas More group worships at St. Clare Catholic Church, where an Anglican Use Mass is offered every Sunday and Holy Day.

To read more about the group which sponsors this meeting, you can get the information from the website of the St. Thomas More Society.

For those of an intellectual bent, the Anglican Use Catholics publish a very interesting publication called "Anglican Embers", which is issued quarterly. Volume 1, number 9, for Lent 2006 contains a very interesting article: Whither the Anglican Use. This article makes the case for the Anglican Use to be set up as a separate sui juris Church, with its own bishop, law, liturgy, and devotions, under the jurisdiction of the Pope. There are strong parallels between this and the Traditional Catholic effort to have the Pope set up an apostolic administration.

The keynote speaker of the conference was Avery Cardinal Dulles, who gave a detailed explanation of his youth, college, and eventual conversion to Catholicism; in the process, he described the inadequacies of the Episcopal Church. What this conveyed to the audience was that they should not be confortable remaining an “Anglo-Catholic”, but instead should seel the truth and the full communion of the Roman Catholic Church.

We asked him two pertinent questions, whether he stood by the statment in his book ,the Five Models of the Church, in which he states that the Institutional Model (the pre-Vatican II model), ‘is the only one that must not be paramount’. He answered that all five should be equally valued, backtracking from what he had written. Then he was asked what he thought of the Traditional Movement, in light of the Chartres Pilgrimage in France, a yearly event, in which thousands of youth march in pilgrimage and attend the Tridentine Mass. Cardinal Dulles said that if by tradition we meant the 19th century political stance of Archbishop Lefebvre, who was interested in restoration of the French monarchy, with his very limited conception of tradition, then no, he was more in favor of early Church tradition. Needless to say, we were referring to the Traditional Movement in the liturgical and spiritual sense. It was obvious that he wanted to publically distance himself from it, even though in his talk, he had nostalgically talked about how pre-conciliar Catholics, even the uneducated, were able to sing such beautiful Catholic Latin hymns from St. Thomas Aquinas, e.g. Tantum Ergo.

Privately, he was asked about the Pope’s effort to free up the Traditional Latin Mass worldwide. Cardinal Dulles said that he did not know if the Pope had done so or not. He also said that the Pope was disposed to approving it. But that he did not want to disturb the bishops. He then quickly switched to the new ICEL translation of the Novus Ordo in English, as if to indicate that we should focus on the reform of the reform rather than the Tridentine Mass.

The talks during the conference were inspiring. Not only was the architecture of one of the major churches of the Anglican Use, Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston Texas highlighted in a wonderful presentation but a Notre dame student of architecture detailed his view of how an Anglican Use Church theoretically would look, built hypothetically in a downtown area of Chicago.

The conference finished with an actual Anglican Use Mass, which was celebrated by the auxiliary bishop of Scranton, Bishop Dougherty. In comparison with the typical Mass celebrated in Roman Rite dioceses, the Anglican Use Liturgy is a breath of fresh air. Particularly noteworthy is the use of the Roman Canon in a very devout English translation. It must be stated that the translation of the Words of Institution copy those of the New Rite of Mass (Novus Ordo) rather than the Tridentine formula.

The remainder of the talks were the personal conversion stories of Anglicans who became Catholic. A note of hope was sounded by one of the participants, who told us privately that the Holy Father signed a Motu Proprio document on March 31st, 2006 freeing up the Tridentine Mass worldwide.

While those attached to the Traditional Latin Mass might find the Anglican Use Mass to be too different for full time participation, there is no doubt that for the average Catholic, seeing a sung Mass in English facing the altar, said in a devout form of English, should prove the value of the Anglican Use Liturgy as a precursor to the Reform of the Reform desired by Pope Benedict XVI (The New Latin Rite of 1969).

Ed Snyder