WFB On The BCP

Regular reader (and offline friend) PnutQueen sends in this vintage piece of Buckleyism that she discovered whilst rooting about in an old recipe box:

LEAD THEM NOT INTO TRANSLATION

by William F. Buckley Jr.

As a Catholic, I have abandoned hope for the liturgy, which, in the typical
American church, is as ugly and as maladroit as if it had been composed by Robert Ingersoll and H. L. Mencken for the purpose of driving people away. Incidentally, the modern liturgists are doing a remarkably good job, attendance at Catholic mass on Sunday having dropped sharply in the ten years since a few well-meaning cretins got hold of the power to vernacularize the mass, and the money to scour the earth in search of the most unmusical men and women to preside over the translation.

The next liturgical ceremony conducted primarily for my benefit, since I
have no plans to be beatified or remarried, will be my funeral, and it is a source of great consolation to me that, at my funeral, I shall be quite dead, and will not need to listen to the accepted replacement for the noble old Latin liturgy. Meanwhile, I am practicing Yoga so that, at church on Sundays I can develop the power to tune out everything I hear, while attempting, athwart the general calisthenics, to commune with my Maker, and ask Him first to forgive me my own sins, and implore him, second, not to forgive the people who ruined the mass.

Now the poor Anglicans are coming in for it. I am not familiar with their
service, but I am with their Book of Common Prayer. To be unfamiliar with it is
as though one were unfamiliar with Hamlet, or the Iliad, or the Divine Comedy. It has, of course, theological significance for Episcopalians and their fellow travelers. But it has a cultural significance for the entire English-speaking world. It was brought together, for the most part, about 400 years ago, when for reasons no one has been able to explain, the little island of England produced the greatest literature in history. G. K. Chesterton wrote about it, "It is the one positive possession, and attraction ... the masterpiece of Protestantism; the one magnet and talisman for people even outside the Anglican church, as are the great Gothic cathedrals for people outside the Catholic Church."

What are they doing to it? Well, there is one of those commissions. It is
sort of re-translating it. As it now stands, for instance, there are the lines,"We
have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed to much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done."

That kind of thing noble, cadenced, pure as the psalmist's water becomes,
"We have not loved you [get that: you, not thee. Next time around, one supposes it will be "We haven't loved you, man"] with our whole heart, we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves." "Lead us not into temptation" becomes "Do not bring us to the test."

Well, if the good Lord intends not to bring his Anglican flock into the test,
he will not test it on this kind of stuff. As it is, Anglicanism is a little shaky,
having experienced about a hundred years earlier than Roman Catholicism some of the same kind of difficulties. I revere my Anglican friends, and highly respect their religion, but it is true that it lends itself to such a pasquinade as Auberon Waugh's, who wrote recently, "In England we have a curious institution called the Church of England. Its strength as always lain in the fact that on any moral or political issue it can produce such a wide divergence of opinion that nobody from the Pope to Mao Tse-tung can say with any confidence that he is not an Anglican. Its weaknesses are that nobody pays much attention to it and very few people attend its functions."

And it is true that in a pathetic attempt to attract attention, the Anglicans,
and indeed many other Protestants, and many Catholics, absorb themselves in
secular matters. "The first Anglicans," Chesterton once wrote, "asked for peace and happiness, truth and justice; but nothing can stop the latest Anglicans, and many others, from the horrid habit of asking for improvement in international relations." International relations having taken a noticeable turn for the worse in the generation since Chesterton made this observation, once can only hope the Anglicans will reject any further attempt to vitiate their line of communication with our Maker.

I would guess that this column was written some time in the mid-70's, given that the current version of the BCP dates from 1979. It strikes me more as a general broadside against liturgical modernism than as an attack on any particular denomination. In subsequent years, the Vatican seems to have begun to get the message. Will anybody else?