Cranmer, the Prayer Book, and My Journey to the Catholic Faith

“The Catholic Church [is] necessary to the full flowering of the principles of the Reformation.” [Fr. Louis Bouyer, Cong. Oratio. The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism]

The quote above, written by the Lutheran-turned-Catholic priest Fr. Louis Bouyer, describes very poignantly my own journey towards the Catholic faith from the various branches of Protestantism I was exposed to for the first twenty years of my life. Following the commemoration of the 504^th anniversary of the Reformation this past October, I am compelled to write an essay detailing my own reflection on the competing narratives from both sides of Western Christendom’s greatest religious divide. Though many essayists, most far more erudite than I in theological knowledge, have written about the same topic – my essay will try to strike a personal, but well-balanced and charitable reflection on how certain products of the Reformation have formed my own faith and conscience as a Catholic.

Without getting into exhaustive historical detail, the cultural significance of Anglicanism is obvious for every serious church historian, especially those raised in or exposed to English-speaking Protestant culture. Though this by no means implies that every English-speaking Protestant today is really an Anglican by heart (as shown by Calvinist Puritans who wanted further reform within the English Church to move it away from residual ‘Catholic’ practices), the roots of Anglophone Protestantism all emerged from the wellspring of Anglicanism. Much of the beloved devotional texts of Anglophone Christian culture, such as the Our Father, Psalm 23, the King James Bible, as well as the classic English hymns sang in countless churches today, can all trace their origins to the Anglican tradition. Even classic authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and the deeply Christian C.S. Lewis are all greatly influenced by the Anglican imagination. Thus, in order to understand the roots of Anglophone Christian culture, one must first delve into the particularities of Anglicanism.

What then, does all this have to do with my own journey towards the Catholic faith? How could an ethnic Chinese Indonesian, with no obvious ties to Anglophone culture, speak with familiarity on the Anglican patrimony and its role within the Catholic Church? Herein shall I get to my reflection on how my conversion to the Catholic faith had owed much to Anglicanism – a faith tradition greatly influenced by Thomas Cranmer; one of the men most responsible for the English Reformation and the making of a Protestant Anglosphere. Any serious discussion about the Anglican patrimony cannot proceed without him, and this is where I will get to the main theme of my essay.

The Book of Common Prayer, the standard liturgical text of the Anglican tradition, is Cranmer’s magnum opus. Various editions of it are still prayed in Anglican (and a few Methodist) homes and churches worldwide. With the publication of Divine Worship: Occasional Services (2014); Divine Worship: The Missal (2015); Divine Worship: Pastoral Care of the Sick and Dying (2019) and Divine Worship: Daily Office (2020 – North American edition; 2021 – Commonwealth edition), the Anglican prayer book tradition has been, after nearly 500 years of separation, grafted back into the Catholic Church – and it has since provided spiritual nourishment for many Catholics, particularly those of Anglican and Methodist backgrounds. Even before the Divine Worship liturgical books’ publication, many Protestants including myself had found their way to the Catholic Church through the as yet ‘un-catholicised’ Prayer Book. Many, especially those brought up in non-liturgical churches, had been unfamiliar with the Catholic Church’s liturgical cycle of prayers. The BCP had helped them to acquaint themselves with the liturgical cycle, and in not a few cases, led many to the Catholic faith.

What then, is the secret to the Prayer Book’s charm? In an earlier essay, I have stated how the BCP, despite its Protestant origins, was ultimately the fruit of a Catholic imagination. Many Catholic converts from Anglicanism, such G.K. Chesterton and St. John Henry Newman, had made numerous remarks on the Catholicity of the Prayer Book. Chesterton had remarked in The Prayer Book Problem that “The old Protestant Prayer-Book [has] a power like that of great poetry upon the spirit and the heart…[because] it has style; it has tradition; it has religion; it was written by apostate Catholics.” Other, less famous converts, such as Fanny M. Pittar in her tract A Protestant converted to Catholicity by her Bible and Prayer Book alone, had also expressed much the same views. Much of what defines our Catholic faith – such as the ancient creeds, hymns, and prayers – are interwoven throughout the Anglican Prayer Book. The English Reformers, despite their faults of schism and heresy, have unknowingly anticipated the reforms of the 2nd Vatican Council centuries later, by providing the laity with an accessible means of praying in the vernacular tongue. When such reforms came to the Catholic Church in the form of vernacular Mass and a revised Liturgy of the Hours in the late 1960s, those within the Anglican Communion have been doing the same for more than four centuries.

The expression lex orandi, lex credendi is familiar to Catholics and Anglicans alike. What is authoritative pertaining to matters of worship pertains equally to the rule of faith. While Catholics have had countless devotionals, missals, and prayer books which serve to instruct the faithful in worship, Anglicans have by and large relied on the Book of Common Prayer in various iterations. To this day the BCP had left a great mark on Anglophone Christian culture. Phrases such as ‘the quick and the dead’, ‘till death do us part’, ‘upon the best and surest foundations’ have their origins in the litanies of the Anglican Prayer Book. In a world where the sense of beauty and the sacred are increasingly hard to find, and where a culture of superficiality and consumerism reigns, we the Christian faithful would do well to recover a sense of mindfulness of God’s presence through renewed appreciation and recovery of beauty and the sacred in our culture. The BCP, with its Theo-centric prayers and litanies, expressed in the most sublime English prose, shows us a way in which this can be done.

All this, then brings me back to the central point of this essay. As Christians, and Catholics especially, we not only have the responsibility to ‘make disciples of all nations’, but also to partake in Christ’s redeeming work, for He “hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation…for [He] reconciling the world to himself…hath placed in us the word of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18-19, Douay-Rheims). For us Catholics of the Personal Ordinariates, our ministry extends to the separated brethren in the various Protestant denominations, especially those from Anglican or Methodist traditions. As Christendom at large struggles with a world increasingly divorced from any sense of beauty and the sacred, we must – to paraphrase St. Paul – think on “whatsoever things are true, just, holy and lovely” (Philippians 4:8, Douay-Rheims). We must take heed of St. Paul’s exhortation to strive for the good, and become the ministers of reconciliation we are called to be. And in doing so, we may then fulfil our charism of reaching out to our separated brethren, so that we may, as Our Lord commands, ‘make disciples of all nations.’

To conclude this reflection, let us look back to Fr. Louis Bouyer’s dictum, that only within the Catholic Church can all the positive contributions of the Protestant Reformation can be brought to their full flowering. In order to achieve this, a truly ecumenical endeavour of renewing appreciation for all that is true and good in our Christian worship is needed. The Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican patrimony from which it sprang, now shared by Catholics and Protestants alike, is a step in the right direction. May our increasing awareness of promoting what is good, true, holy and lovely bring us closer together – so that though this shared endeavour, the wounds of the Reformation may be healed.