To be a classical prayer book Anglican when your parish's schedule of services says otherwise? Anyone who reads the rubrics and other directions in any of the classical prayer books knows that those who put them together intended that every parish would have daily services of Morning and Evening Prayer. In addition the English prayer books direct that the Litany should be used on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday while they also provide propers for the celebration of Holy Communion on every Sunday of the year as well as a series of saints and fast days. This means that what you should find in a parish or mission loyal to the prayer book on a Sunday is the reading of Morning Prayer followed by the Litany and Holy Communion. In late afternoon Evening Prayer would be read or sung. When you don't find this in a parish or mission then it doesn't matter what they say about being loyal to doctrine, discipline and worship of the Church because their actions or lack of same speak far more loudly and powerfully than their words.
I have recently been surfing the web for parishes which claim to be orthodox Anglican. I have also not a very large number of churches which claim to be traditionally 'Anglo-Catholic' and they as well as the others show by their published schedules that they don't accept or practise what the Book of Common Prayer teaches. And the amazing thing is that this schedule is simply that of the Catholic Church in England as evidenced by Walter Langland's Vision of Piers the Plowman.
Some Catholics; some prayer book loyalists!
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What happens at your parish during Holy Week?
We do the prayer book services in the order that the prayer book provides. Pslms and flowering branches are blessed before the Palm Sunday Eucharist. And communion will be given from the reserved sacrament on Good Friday.
The Pascal will be blessed on Easter Even. If you have ever done just what the prayer book provides and those few extras you will find them to be enough and very satisfying spiritually. And you have to realize that we are doing essentially what all the Church did before the Church of Jerusalem began the more theatrical liturgy which made them a place of pilgrimage.
The problem for all those who do the pseudo-Roman theatre is that they don't do or cultivate the basically Benedictine spirituality that the daily and weekly use of the BCP as it is inculcates. And without that the rest is like an overdose of sugar.
Does the US 1928 BCP provide for a Mass of the Presanctified on Good Friday and the lighting of the Paschal Candle at the Vigil?
Lukacs,
You have to remember this is Anglicanism and not pseudo-papalism. And while it is possible to distribute communion after reading the Ante-Communion service on Good Friday and to sing the Exultet in the early hours of Easter, these things however lovely and even old, are not part of apostolic tradition. They are not necessary to our Salvation. But a real Anglican priest should have done all of which the prayer book demands before he adds extras which are not part the necessary tradition of the Church.
I am a great fan of the the minor propers as found in the Palmer's graduals done for the Community of St Mary the Virgin, Wantage, and the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society's Services in Holy Week, but they are frosting and not part of what the apostles left the earliest church.
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