The Reformation liturgy of England will flicker briefly in a few hundred of the country's 11,000 Anglican churches on Sunday, the 500th birthday of Thomas Cranmer, architect of England's historic prayers.
At St. Giles-in-the-Fields, off Charing Cross Road in London, a special peal of bells is planned and the rector, the Rev. Gordon Taylor, will use Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer as he does at all services.Taylor is one of the few clergymen of the state Church of England who cling to the old prayer book that appeared in 1549, when Cranmer was archbishop of Canterbury.
The traditionalists scorn The Alternative Service Book, written in contemporary English and published in 1980, which was ordered by the General Synod of bishops, clergy and laity ruling the church. The new book has almost entirely supplanted Cranmer's.
"Rapid social and intellectual changes . . . have made it desirable that new understandings of worship should find expression in new forms and styles," the editors wrote in the new book's preface.
"I wouldn't think of using anything else but The Book of Common Prayer, and I haven't done so in the 51 years I've been a parson," Taylor said in an interview.
"I don't understand why the old prayers were abandoned. If some people want something else, God bless 'em, but not me," he said.
Anthony Kilmister, chairman of the Prayer Book Society, which has campaigned to keep the old prayers for most of 20 years, said he doubted whether more than a few hundred churches would remember Cranmer on Sunday.
"Cranmer was a liturgical genius who encapsulated . . . the Church of England's doctrinal standard, in a heightened English which has become timeless," Kilmister said.
"It is sad indeed that we have not found another Cranmer to write a modern prayer book. Perhaps it will take another 500 years," he said.
Cranmer, as archbishop of Canterbury, dissolved King Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon in 1533 and crowned Anne Boleyn queen. The divorce was forbidden by Pope Clement VII, and Cranmer became England's first Protestant archbishop when the king broke with Rome and set up the Church of England the next year.
Cranmer encouraged the translation of the Bible from Latin into English, ordering a copy to be placed in every church, and directed the translation and ordering of the litany from Latin.
He lived in turbulent times and died a martyr.
Cranmer stood by during the king's purges and killings. He was hated by the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I for trying to block her accession. Under pressure, he recanted his Protestant beliefs but finally defied the queen and went to his death at the stake in Oxford in 1556.
Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie has publicly gone on record as regretting the ouster of the old prayer book, which he said was too hurried.
Runcie told The Associated Press on Friday: "Cranmer's prayers have consecrated the souls of English-speaking people through the centuries and enriched our language. His sense of the majesty of God and the mercy of Christ never failed him. It was that which, with all his faults, made him a great archbishop, a true patriot and a sensitive Christian."
Runcie will open an exhibition about Cranmer at the British Library on Oct. 26 and preach at a commemorative service in Westminster Abbey on Nov. 7.