The Ordinariate Patrimony

THE PATRIMONY is given focus in Divine Worship: the Missal. As Fr. James Bradley reminds, "it is the liturgical books of Divine Worship that must now be considered the principal, and even essential means of transmitting the Anglican liturgical patrimony in the Catholic Church."

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At the website of the Ordinariate (OLSC) Catholic Parish of Saints Ninian and Chad, the question, 'What is the English Patrimony?', is answered as follows:

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The English, or Anglican, Patrimony is the sum total of the spiritual, liturgical, pastoral, cultural and social traditions that have come down to us primarily via the experience of Christian life primarily in England, but also to an extent from the whole of the British Isles. It begins with the first unknown missionaries to England, from the protomartyr Saint Alban, and continues through the Celtic Church, the Roman-Gregorian Mission of Saint Augustine of Canterbury. It includes the lives and writings of great figures like Saint Bede the Venerable, Edward the Confessor, Saint Anselm, Saint Richard of Chichester, Saint Hilda of Whitby, Margery Kemp, Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, the Lady Julian of Norwich, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, St Aelred of Riveaux, and continues down through the era of the time of the separation between the sees of Canterbury and Rome; the era of the Book of Common Prayer, and the King James Bible; with figures like Thomas Ken, George Herbert, William Laud, Jeremy Taylor, John Donne, Lancelot Andrewes, Charles Wesley, and into the Oxford Movement of the Nineteenth Century, with Saint John Henry Newman, Dr Pusey, Fr Faber, Christina Rosetti, A.W.N. Pugin, and later via the "Ritualists" into the "Anglo-Catholic" movement of the Twentieth Century, with figures like Eric Mascall, C.S. Lewis, Michael Ramsay, Percy Dearmer, and many, many others. In this great host of people, theologies, spiritualities, writings, understandings, customs and traditions, we find a worthy patrimony in and through which we can express our prayer to God in particular kinds of ways.