The Seminary (Presidential Address)

Extract

The language of the liturgy will always be a little different from the language of common speech, however carefully the drafters of ritual aim to make it understood by the people. It has in it a strand of poetry, and the nature of reverence carries inside itself a healthy dislike of bathos. Therefore: if ministers of a liturgy are expected to preach to the people, they will need instruction in how best to teach or to speak, not to mention education so that they have something to say and are not windbags. But even if a minister of a liturgy is not expected to preach, but is only there as voice to go through the set text, it will be done better if he does it with understanding; and therefore the minister will need the education to understand what is read, which in the western centuries where all this started would be in Latin. The minister also needs instruction on how not to drop the baby at baptism, and how to behave with a coffin, and what to do to a dying person. It is therefore expected that this will be an educated person, even if for much of the Middle Ages the sort of education for many ministers would be that which we should think specially appropriate to a sacristan rather than to a professional preacher. And since some such qualification was essential to do the job, bishops hardly liked to ordain persons who could not pass some sort of an educational test.