IN KEEPING WITH A PROMISE, #4

For many of us, in the abstract we think of the overall divisions of “Catholic” and “Protestant” and pretty well conclude that the latter is one large and homogeneous grouping. A little bit of experience first-hand in “Protestant” worship, however, tells us how wrong that idea is. It largely depends on what you meant by “Protestant.”

Roughly speaking, there is a further “sub-set” that needs to be considered: between “liturgical” and “non-liturgical” Protestant denominations. In the latter would be those denominations where the central (perhaps the sole) focus is on hymn-singing and sermons; there is, to be sure, a “pattern” for the worship, but it has little or nothing to do with things like “set responses” to prayers made by the congregation in unison. There would be no expectation, for example, of what we might call standard “dialogue”—The Lord be with you/And also with you. But free-flowing “Amen!” and “Thank you, Jesus!” would be present on a continual basis. Protestants in this group would include some Baptists, Assemblies of God, Pentecostals…

In the former group, however, set liturgies might be repeated virtually every Sunday, as we repeat the overall form of the Eucharist every time we celebrate. Especially when these denominations celebrate Holy Communion, the structure of their worship would look very like a Catholic Mass (with some differences, of course, but overall almost identical). This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise since their liturgy was derived from the Catholic. In this group there would be included Episcopalians, many in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), some in the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), some United Methodists… The point to be noted here is that even when there is a structured prayer book that has a service outlined, not all in the denomination choose to use the book (the ELCA is an example of this). For Catholics and Episcopalians, of course, this kind of choice is not an option.

For those who attended our ecumenical symposium last December on the Catholic acceptance of groups of Anglicans who wished to become Catholic yet retain their heritage with their Book of Common Prayer, you may remember the comment made by Fr Bry Shields, who openly admitted he missed the cadences of the Prayer Book when he left it in the 1980s to become a Catholic. The lilt of the language is clearly there in the collects (formal prayers) in the Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran books of worship, as well—in large part because they were developed when our language itself was more florid and flowing—the BCP (and its derivatives for the Presbyterians and Methodists) was put together at the time when the “King James Version” of the Bible was being translated and when Shakespeare was writing his plays—the “Golden Age of the English Language.” To this day (thanks in part to its being set to music by Handel in Messiah, and my time in Oxford) there are large chunks of the Bible that I can only “hear” in that version. Nobility of language (with restraint and dignity) is where these Protestant liturgies find their center.

Where does the Catholic side of this liturgical question find itself? More to come…