‘No-one is free from parliament’: the worship and doctrine measure in parliament, 1974

Extract

In retrospect, we may agree that the prayer book crisis of 1927 and 1928 was not as critical as it seemed at the time, but it did leave unfinished business for a future generation. The draft prayer book of the Church of England had been rejected by parliament, and if any saner revision of that church’s worship proved acceptable to the church it would still have to be approved by parliament.

Gregory Dix, who worried about these things more than was good for him, expressed a common opinion in 1945. He felt that any return to parliament would be fatal, since ‘the debate would inevitably circle around’ the real presence in the eucharist, and instead he suggested that the church should ‘not directly challenge parliament at all’ but quietly institute a new book backed by about seven bishops at ‘a moment when parliament was pre-occupied’. This was not done. By the time the Church of England had some idea of how it wanted to pray, the debate about real presence was almost irrelevant. Furthermore, bishops were no longer the natural people to put forward a new book, though some of them did not know it. What was actually done was to slip in alternative series of eucharistic rites by liturgical scholars whose work was in fact revised at a more popular level. Their series 1, giving what so many were supposed to have wanted in 1927, was almost totally ignored. It proved something of a surprise to everyone that an overwhelming majority of parishes preferred series 2 and then series 3, despite or because of their uninspired prose. If the 1662 book of common prayer was almost totally abandoned in many areas, this was neither intended nor expected.