The Catholic World, Vol. 20, October 1874‐March 1875Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 20, October 1874‐March 1875
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
Moreover, finding their own mutilated communion service insufficient, and
yet claiming and professing to “say Mass,” which they were never intended
to say, and which in their present position they are utterly incapable of
celebrating, the ritualistic ministers are in the habit of supplementing
the deficiencies of their own liturgy by private interpolations from the
Roman Missal, which, in case they are questioned on the subject, they
designate as “prayers from ancient sources,” a statement less honest than
true. One thing after another do they imitate or claim as their own, now a
doctrine, now a practice, which for three hundred years their communion
has emphatically disowned: vestments, lights, prayers for the dead,
confession, transubstantiation, in some “extreme” quarters intercession of
the saints; here a gesture and there a decoration, which only has its
fitness and meaning in the ancient church and her venerable ritual, but
which with them can claim no title but that of doctrinal, disciplinary,
and decorative disobedience—however great may be the pains they take to
force the false to simulate the true, and however pertinaciously they may
dare, as they do, to appropriate to themselves and to their chaotic schism
the very name of the Catholic Church, out of whose fold they are content
to remain in hereditary apostasy.
Among the four principal sections of “High,” “Low,” “Broad,” and “No”
church, into which the Anglican communion is divided, the “Low” or (so‐
called) “Evangelical” school is the sternest opponent of the new “Extreme”
or “Ritualistic” party, which it very mistakenly honors with the name of
_Romanizers_. We say mistakenly, because, however they may imitate
according to their various shades of opinion the outward ceremonial of the
church, or adopt, at choice, more or less of her doctrines, yet all this
in their case is but a double development of Protestantism (to say nothing
of the effect it produces of making them rest satisfied with the shadow
instead of seeking the substance);(12) for none are so bitter as they
against the church they are so desirous to resemble, and also none are so
practically disobedient to their own ecclesiastical superiors, in spite of
reiterated professions to the contrary. It is this persistent disobedience
which has brought about the present crisis.
In the Evangelical party there exists a society calling itself the “Church
Association,” of which one principal object is to watch over the
principles of the reformation,(13) and to keep a jealous eye upon the
movements of tractarianism in all its varied developments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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