Page 28 - The Priest, Summer 2015

Radical Ecumenism: a new Catholic missal
by Rev Ramsay Williams
On the First Sunday of Advent this The decree offi- year (29 November), a new Missal
of the Catholic Church was used for the rst time in parishes of the Ordi- nariates in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States and Canada. It was an historic occasion with radical ecumenical implications.
The new Missal, called Divine Worship – The Missal, is remarkable in that its texts are largely drawn from the Book of Com- mon Prayer and the Anglican tradition or ‘patrimony’. It contains the Order for the Mass, and the variable prayers and other scriptural texts, instructions and rubrics and music, and the liturgical calendar for Ordinariate congregations.
Pope Benedict XVI established the Or- dinariates by Papal Constitution in 2009. Anglicanorum Coetibus was a response to re- quests from Anglicans worldwide wishing to return to the rock from which Angli- canism was originally hewn, without los- ing their identity or liturgical heritage. It was a pastoral and ecumenical initiative, building on, although separate from the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission on unity, established in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.
Fr Ramsay Williams OLSC is Parish Priest of the Ordinariate Parish of St Edmund Campion in Melbourne’s Bayside Peninsula region, and Associate Priest of St Patrick’s, Mentone and Parkdale.
This article derives from an address Fr Williams delivered to the Prayer Book Society at All Saints, East St Kilda on 10th October 2015.
28 – Summer 2015
the
cially authorising
the new Missal was
promulgated by
the Congregation of
ship and the Discipline of the Sacraments on May 27th this year, the Memorial of St Augustine of Canterbury.
It stands alongside the 2002 Roman Missal and the 1962 Missale Romanum as an officially authorised liturgical use of the Latin or Roman rite. The new Missal is thus firmly in the western tradition. It is a variant of the Roman Rite, and is not a distinctive or separate rite.
Anyone in communion with the Holy See may receive Holy Communion at cele- brations of the Ordinariate Mass, and ful- fil their Sunday obligation. Any member of the Ordinariate may receive Commun- ion at any other authorised Eucharistic rite of the Catholic Church. Normally, a priest of the Ordinariate will be the cel- ebrant of the Ordinariate Mass, but any Catholic priest may celebrate the Divine Worship Rite for an Ordinariate congre- gation if an Ordinariate priest is not avail- able for some reason. Any Catholic priest may concelebrate at an Ordinariate Mass.
Divine Wor-