Elizabeth Scalia invited me to write a personal account for a series Aleteia is doing on differing liturgical expressions in the Catholic Church. Above is a picture of me taken by Jake Wright on the day our parish was received into the Catholic Church.

You can find it here.
What a joy to be invited to write on our beautiful Divine Worship: the Missal!
Of course, what I submitted was too long and had to be substantially trimmed. However, since I have a more specialized audience here that might be interested in more details, I will post my original here.
Why I feel called to the Anglican Ordinariate
By Deborah Gyapong
I am called to the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, one of three Ordinariates set up for former Anglicans who believe the Catholic faith, and out of a passionate desire for Christian unity wished to be in communion with the Pope. At the same time, I am grateful Pope Benedict XVI made provisions for us to retain distinctive elements of our Anglican patrimony—including our liturgical traditions. We are fully Roman Catholics with an Anglican accent and ethos.

Our liturgy is called Divine Worship. It’s a Catholic Mass in the language of Shakespeare. We pray using sacral language such as the formal “thee” and “thou” when addressing God. Though fully approved by the relevant Vatican congregations, our Mass is touched by the Reformation through the use of some of Archbishop Cranmer’s gorgeous English translations of Latin collects, the inclusion of the Comfortable Words of Scripture following our Penitential Rite and the beautiful Prayer of Humble Access before Holy Communion. Our liturgy also incorporates elements of pre-Reformation English Catholicism in its use of Sarum collects and chants.
The rubrics are similar to those of the Traditional Latin Mass—it is a ballet of genuflection usually prayed ad orientem — facing God, not the people—but it has many of the hallmarks of the reform of the liturgy called for in the Second Vatican Council: it’s in the vernacular; our people actively participate in the Mass; and in addition to traditional chanted introits and graduals we sing hymns, and it is Anglican patrimony to sing robustly often in four-part harmony! Of course someday we hope to have the grand choirs to bring the treasures of our musical heritage to life in the Catholic Church—and some of our larger parishes already do– in the meantime, our congregations are the choir.
Many people might ask ‘Why not become a normal Roman Catholic? Why cling to these old-fashioned forms of worship that even most Anglicans of the Canterbury Common don’t celebrate anymore?’ It’s a long story.
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