Whose rite is it anyway?
Liturgical vandals have trivialised worship in Anglican and Catholic churches. Now, says William Oddie, Rome is trying to do something about it
Sometime during the Seventies, in Anglican and Roman Catholic churches throughout the English-speaking world, a strange (and for many, unwelcome) kind of language began to issue forth from the mouths of clergy and faithful. In most places of worship, a new kind of liturgical English — bare, sparse, apparently wilfully lacking in elegance or sonority — gradually replaced both Cranmer’s English and the Latin of what became known as the old Mass. The old books, familiar for three centuries or more — for Anglicans, the Book of Common Prayer, for Catholics, the old Latin Missals — disappeared from the Churches.
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