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The Real
Absence: Cranmer & Bucer's Eucharist
from the November-December 1997 issue
Of the various forms of Classical
Protestantism which have survived to our day, the one
deemed most "Catholic" has been the Church or
England, both in its architecture and its rites. In
reality, this is a false perception brought about by the
catholicizing influence of the Oxford Movement from the
middle 19th Century.
The original schism between Henry
VIII and the Catholic Church initially brought about
no changes in the liturgy, but merely the seizure of
property from the Church to fill the coffers of Henry's
treasury and enrich his friends. The true origin of the
Anglican Church began after Henry's death under the boy
king Edward VI. Finally freed from his rapacious
master, the arch-apostate bishop Thomas Cranmer
began a campaign to de-catholicize the Anglican Church by
"reforming" the liturgy. In doing so, he
severed the schismatics in England not only from
communion with the Holy See but with the Church of all
time. The first step in the official "reform"
of the liturgy was the publication of the Book of
Common Prayer in 1549. With its publication, Cranmer
managed to extinguish Apostolic Succession and to deny
— at first implicitly but, in later editions, most
explicitly—transubstantiation and the Real Presence
in the Eucharist.
Cranmer's program was not his original
idea. Rather, he was influenced by one of the most
ubiquitous, insidious, and little mentioned figures of
the 16th century: Martin Bucer. Originally a
Dominican priest, Bucer became an early advocate of the
"reform" in Germany. He lived in Strasbourg and
actively agitated for the protestantization of the Church
in that area.
Bucer eventually had to leave Germany
and went to France and Switzerland where he became a
major influence on the young "reformer" John
Calvin at a critical point in Calvin's career. Bucer
expounded a merely symbolic meaning to the sacraments
–especially the Eucharist.
The Reformed Liturgy
It was Bucer whom Cranmer called upon to help him
"reform" the Anglican liturgy. Eventually,
Bucer came to England and he held sway at Cambridge
University assisting in the composition of the 1549 Book
of Common Prayer (BCP) and its planned revision until
his death in 1551. After the death of Edward VI, when Queen
Mary restored England to the Catholic Church, albeit
briefly, the remains of Bucer were disinterred and burned
publicly at Cambridge for his part in the destruction of
England's faith and liturgy.
The original 1549 BCP was a
"simplified" translation of the Latin text of
the Sarum usage into vernacular English with the overt
references to sacrifice "suppressed." The basic
rite of communion remained unchanged. Altars were still
used with both the priest and the people facing to the
east. The faithful came up and knelt at the altar rail to
receive the host. To the ordinary layman, not much seemed
to have changed.
However, the 1549 BCP also contained a
revised rite of ordination (ordinal) for deacons,
priests, and bishops, which completely suppressed any
notion of the minister as offering sacrifice and in fact
implied that all three offices differed only nominally
from each other. The three rites were virtually
identical. The four minor orders were suppressed. This
Edwardine Ordinal has always been held by the Holy See to
be insufficient to confect Holy Orders. This point was
forcefully asserted by Pope Leo XIII in the Bull "Apostolicae
Curae" in 1896 in which he drew the final
conclusion after careful study that the defect of
intention in the 1549 Ordinal rendered any attempt at
ordination by subsequent Anglican rites to be
"absolutely null and utterly void."
The 1552 BCP revision —thanks to
Bucer's direct input— was far more radical. Cranmer
and Bucer intended by the new rite to deny any difference
between the minister and the people. They also wanted to
deny the sacrificial nature of the Eucharistic rite, and
the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic Species.
To those ends, several things were done. Altars were
replaced with free standing tables. The minister faced
the congregation over the table during the entire
ceremony. He was not a priest mediating between the
people and God but the leader of the congregation leading
them in a rite that proceeded from the authority of the
community as a whole. Kneeling was held to a minimum
because this was a sign of difference between minister
and people and because it implied worship of the
Eucharistic elements. The congregation stood during the
"consecration" of the eucharistic elements just
as the minister did. Reception of Communion was done
standing, into the hand, and under both species for
everyone, both minister and laity. The Eucharist was not
reserve. What was not consumed was often used later
deliberately for regular eating and drinking in order to
scoff at the scruples of the Catholics.
The original draft of the 1552 BCP was
sent to Parliament for ratification. Not everyone in
Parliament understood what was being done and why. They
were just told that the three year-old BCP was obsolete
and needed further revision to "keep up with the
times." Some objections were raised and some changes
were made in the text before the new BCP revision was
passed. One thing in particular was that the people were
allowed to kneel for communion as an option.
The Black Rubric
After Parliament's final vote, Cranmer illegally added
what became known as the "Black Rubric" to the
text. This rubric was inserted as a footnote where
permission was given for kneeling during Communion. The
rubric stated that while one might kneel for communion,
this did not imply any worship of the sacred Species as
if they were truly the Body and Blood of Christ.
In 1553, Cranmer promulgated "The
Forty Two Articles" of the Anglican Church imitating
the Lutheran "Augsburg Confession." Later,
these would be reconfigured by pseudo-bishop Matthew
Parker as "The Thirty Nine Articles" under
Queen Elizabeth in 1563. In both sets of articles, the
Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was specifically
condemned. The Thirty Nine Articles teaches a variation
on Luther's view of consubstantiation and condemns the
views of Zwingli, Calvin, and Bucer. Revisions to the BCP
in 1558, 1604, and 1662 were seen as more
"catholic" and these were proximate causes of
the Puritan rebellions which culminated in the
"Glorious Revolution" when William of Orange
seized the throne and deposed the rightful Stuart heirs.
Thereafter it would be written in the English
Constitution that only a Protestant could be King (or
Queen) of England.
The similarity of our contemporary
reforms
The implications of the above history are sobering for
Catholics in the period after the reform of the Roman
Missal in 1969. Although not specifically called for in
the new Missal or by the document on the liturgy, "Sacrosanctum
Concilium," from the Second Vatican Council,
many of the changes wrought by Cranmer and Bucer to deny
the priesthood, the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist,
and transubstantiation have become commonplace in
Catholic liturgical practice. These changes did not alter
the validity of the Mass, nor do they necessarily imply
the denials that Cranmer and Bucer intended.
Nevertheless, one would think that an astute liturgist
with a sense of history would understand what they had
signified in the past and would have been very reluctant
to add them to a Catholic rite.
There is a trend now among
fully-believing Catholics to return to the practice of
kneeling for Communion, receiving on the tongue and under
one kind. As the Catholic people return to a reverence
for the Eucharist, which is commensurate with the reality
of transubstantiation, perhaps we will remember what
Cranmer and Bucer tried to do and modify our practice to
refute them. —Arthur C. Sippo MD, MPH
[ St. Catherine Review ]
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