A characteristic of the modern Catholic Church is its liturgical uniformity. Centuries ago, if you were travelling through Christendom, you would have experienced an array of liturgical rites and ‘uses,’ all of which would nonetheless have seemed to belong to the same religion. Presently, in the strange ecclesiastical institution that was allegedly born of a ‘New Pentecost’ half a century ago, only one liturgical order is deemed acceptable, the Novus Ordo of the Roman Rite—a ritual concocted by Archbishop Bugnini, a shady character with curious Masonic connections.
There’s an obvious rigidity among the Church’s hierarchs—those senior clergy who routinely conflate uniformity with unity—in regard to what liturgy may be celebrated. But going from one church to another often requires a wholesale change of one’s religion. This is the case, because the Novus Ordo allows for such an injection of the priest’s personality into the liturgy, that the liturgy itself is frequently a mere platform by which the priest can celebrate his parochial celebrity and his personal opinions on the religion he claims to profess.
For this reason, among others, a growing number of the faithful have sought out the ancient ritual forms of the Church—still offered by certain clergy as part of a sort of underground network—to encounter the liturgical expression of their religion and escape the self-referential theatrics of the local parish priest. As ever more laity, especially young people, seek out the ancient liturgy of the Church, the Eye of Sauron in Rome has turned towards these congregations—and is now constructing various means to eliminate them.
Unfortunately, such ‘traditionalist’ Catholics may presume that the ancient form of the Roman Rite is the only Latin Rite liturgy that ever existed before the 1960s’ ‘New Pentecost,’ which successfully emptied the pews in the greatest single apostasy the Church has ever seen. In reality, as I noted above, in old Christendom there were local rites and ‘uses’ everywhere. In fact, the diversity rather crossed over into liturgical chaos, and in the 16th century, Pope Pius V declared that any rite that couldn’t be proven to have at least a 200-year pedigree must go. This requirement was extremely conservative, however, and thus widespread liturgical diversity continued.
In Britain alone, we had the rites of York, Hereford, Bangor, Aberdeen, and Sarum, the last of which was by far the most widely offered in these isles. There were also the rites of the religious orders, like those of the Carmelites, Dominicans, Cistercians, and others. Then there were many types of chant, and different styles of vestment, and that’s all before we come to low cultural, popular devotional diversity, as almost every village had its own rituals and patron saints. The liturgical life of Britain in particular and Christendom in general was like a great medieval tapestry, full of variety and colour, though forming a single picture of beauty and grace.
Under the lunacy of King Henry VIII, all the rites of these isles were suppressed except the Sarum Rite, which was translated and modified into the glorious but heretical prose of Archbishop Cranmer for use by Henry’s new church. Later, during Queen Mary Tudor’s attempt to restore England to her old faith, the Sarum Rite was re-instituted as the liturgy of this land, and indeed she married Philip of Spain in this rite at Winchester Cathedral. So, the Rite of Sarum became something of a symbol in the English mind of the old faith’s triumph over Henry’s invented religion, which he had inflicted upon his subjects with astonishing violence alongside voracious land-grabbing.
It wasn’t to last, though. Soon, after Queen Mary’s death, this country was forced back into its religious experiments, and the Sarum Rite vanished from the world. Unusually, the liturgical books of the Sarum Rite were preserved, as were books of commentary for the rite. And I’m informed by a respected liturgical scholar in Rome that these books, as well as many copies of them, still exist. Thus, the Sarum Rite in completion waits on shelves to glorify the Living God once more.
There was a reasonable expectation during the rise of Victorian medievalism that the Sarum Rite would be restored to England, and Augustus Pugin—the Catholic convert and architect who was the genius largely behind the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster—designed all the sanctuaries of his churches to accommodate the Sarum Rite rather than the Roman Rite. Anglicans of the Oxford Movement were especially interested in the Rite of Sarum and sought to bring the use of Cranmer’s Prayer Book much closer to this rite.
Evidently, when the English Catholic hierarchy was restored in 1850, there was considerable appetite among both Roman Catholics and High Anglicans—with many of the latter flirting with converting to Catholicism—for a re-institution of the Sarum Rite in England. Pope Pius IX, aware of such appetite, openly gave the newly established English bishops the option of restoring the Sarum Rite. Never, though, underestimate the Catholic hierarchy’s aptitude for shooting itself in the foot. In what was a significant own-goal, the bishops rejected Pius’s offer. There seem to have been a number of reasons for the bishops’ rejection of the Pope’s proposal.
First, in the times of constant persecution from the 1560s to Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s, the liturgy had been provided by a secret network mostly comprising Jesuits and secular clergy trained in France and the Papal States. Whilst there was considerable scholarly interest in the Sarum Rite at the English seminary in Douai, France, on arrival in Britain there was certainly no possibility for priests to conduct elaborate liturgies; the aim was to get the Eucharist to the faithful in the simplest way possible. Consequently, the Roman Rite Low Mass—with no music and an absolute minimum of ceremony—was, for numerous English Catholics (especially the old recusant families), the liturgy that had seen them through times of oppression and suffering, and hence understandably they were attached to it and didn’t want anything else.
Second, among Victorian Catholics there was a culture of deep ultramontanism, and for many Catholics the faith’s distinguishing feature was little more than an intense piety toward the pope. John Henry Newman was a Victorian example of scepticism towards such borderline papolatry, but even his great mind was insufficient to extinguish the inordinate obsession with Rome and its bishop. Opting for the pope’s rite was seemingly an opportunity for English Catholic bishops to demonstrate their unswerving loyalty to the pontiff, even to the point of discarding their own liturgical inheritance (and that of their flock).
Third, there was a significant desire among the Catholic bishops at the time to look as un-Anglican as possible. For this reason, when the decision was made to build Westminster Cathedral—the Catholic mother church in England and Wales—the hierarchy opted for a Byzantine design over the gothic designs that are associated with Western Christianity, so that no one would mistake it for an Anglican cathedral. Given that the Sarum Rite seemed too much like the rite of ‘little England,’ and insufficiently like a rite of the Church Universal, it was apparently held that it was better to reject it. After all, it was felt, ‘little Englander’ mentality had been rather too wrapped up with the origins of the English Reformation. Moreover, as so much of the interest in the Sarum Rite was generated through Tractarian scholarship, many Catholic clergy felt that it had already been tainted with the whiff of Anglicanism.
The decision to reject the Sarum Rite was, however, profoundly short-sighted. In Victorian England, there was a widely believed bit of Protestant propaganda that Catholicism was essentially a foreign religion of Irish and Italian peasants. The true English religion was that of the Church of England, people said, the religion protected by the constitution since that gin-dripping 1688 revolution kicked out the tyrannical, Romanising Stuarts. Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of British history knows how false this narrative really is—notwithstanding the fact that it’s still commonly believed due to the historical illiteracy of modern people. Re-instituting the Rite of Sarum would have sent out a message: Catholic Christianity is the English religion, evidenced by the fact that Catholics worship according to the liturgy that these isles offered to God for at least five centuries until a strange aberration occurred under the rage of—as Edmund Burke put it—“that tyrant, Harry the Eighth.”
Given that there was such interest in the Sarum Rite among the Tractarians—who by then formed the Church of England’s intellectual elite—the Catholic bishops’ re-institution of the Rite would have made ‘crossing the Tiber’ for this movement’s leaders and their followers very attractive indeed. In short, the rejection of Pope Pius IX’s offer marked a terrible missed opportunity for the conversion of England.
The good news is, as I noted above, the Sarum Rite and ample commentaries on how to offer it remain in existence. It’s all there, waiting to be brought back to the Sceptred Isle once more. And whilst there is almost no cultural interest in this rite among the English today—that proselytising opportunity really was well and truly missed—it remains part of the religious inheritance of English Catholics and the English nation as a whole, and therefore there is a moral imperative to restore it. In fact, prior to the liturgical rigidity that has arisen under the infelicitous pontificate of Francis, permission was granted by Rome at various times—certainly in 1985, 1996, and 2000—to offer the Sarum Rite for one-off special occasions in England and Scotland. It’s been done, and it could be done again.
Recently, I discussed the history of the Sarum Rite with a friend—the director of the wonderful wine supplier Monastic Order—who suggested some practical steps. First, as the Sarum Rite was of particular interest to the Oxford Movement, whose heirs are very much the Anglican Ordinariates, the three Ordinariate branches could reasonably claim that the Rite of Sarum is part of their patrimony and petition to offer it to congregations where there’s an expressed desire for it. My friend’s second recommendation was that a priestly society be created for the Sarum Rite’s preservation, for which he suggested the name of the ‘Priestly Fraternity of St. Joseph of Arimathea’—named in honour of the Biblical character who is said to have been the proto-apostle to Britain and the founder of Glastonbury, the Romano-British spiritual heart of these isles. Obviously, under the current ecclesiastical regime, there is little hope of such initiatives being received with any enthusiasm in Rome, but perhaps when the tide changes a little, such steps may be taken.
