THE
P RTAL
June 2018
Page 20
Anglican Patrimony:
A Perspective
from the Holy See
We publish the text of a talk given by Archbishop J Augustine Di Noia, OP of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith at the conference titled, “The Gospel and the Catholic Church: Anglican
Patrimony Today” held at Saint Stephen’s House, Oxford in April this year.
I had my
first experience of the Anglican communion, when, roaming New York City’s theatre district
as a high school student one day, I came upon the Church of St Mary the Virgin on West 46th Street.
Eventually, I would learn that this was not a Roman Catholic Church, as I had assumed, but an Episcopal
church founded by Father Thomas McKee Brown in 1868.
He wanted to build a church in New York City
dedicated to expressing the fullness of Catholic ritual
and teaching within the Episcopal Church. With the
support of the Episcopal Bishop of New York, Horatio
Potter, and the donation of three lots by John Jacob
Astor (who stipulated “that the Church should be
free, and positively orthodox in management and
working”), Brown saw the church erected, and then
dedicated on the feast of the Immaculate Conception,
December 8, 1870.
The congregation had outgrown the church by 1890,
and the present church was built on West 46th Street
and dedicated in 1894. That day many years ago when
I came upon what is known affectionately as “Smoky
Mary’s” because of the abundance of incense used
during its solemn liturgies, that is the day that I fell in
love with Anglicanism.
Perhaps more importantly, that experience-and
many others subsequently - inspired and sustained a
lifelong quest to understand what, since Pope Paul VI,
we have come to call the Anglican patrimony.
Today, I have been asked to approach the matter
from the perspective of the Holy See as it has evolved
over the past ten years. It was during that period that
the question about what constitutes the Anglican
patrimony took on an exceedingly concrete aspect for
the universal Church.
Allow me to explain the nature of the new situation
in which this question is now posed concretely for
the universal Church by considering the development
of the liturgical provisions for use by the Personal
Ordinariates erected following the publication of the
Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus (2009).
I In 2011 the Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith and the Congregation for Divine Worship
established the Anglicanae traditiones Interdicasterial
Commission to undertake the task of developing
liturgical provisions for use in the personal ordinarates.
As a result of this work, the commission was able to
authorise a Lectionary for the ordinariates based on
the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (Second