Saint Augustine of Canterbury and Ecumenically Incorrect Orations

These are a very English couple of days, yesterday and today, in the Church’s calendar, what with Saint Bede the Venerable yesterday and Saint Augustine of Canterbury today. That the former wrote about the latter in his famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People, establishes a certain literary solidarity between the two, a sign of their spiritual communion in Christ’s Mystical Body.

Speaking of which, at the time of Pope Leo XIII (a Holy Father possessed of intense interest in things English and Catholic), the orations of the liturgy for this feast were deliberately altered to pray for the return of the English People from their Anglican Schism to the Body of Christ, the Catholic Church. Those beautiful prayers were scrapped, in the name of ecumenical correctness, with the liturgical “reforms” of Bugnini et alia.

From The Contradiction of Core:

…the beautiful prayers for the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury are very much of the non-politically correct variety. With a curiosity to see what happened to these orations, I took my trusty Fr. Lasance Missal (published in 1945) and compared it with a 1974 Novus Ordo Sacramentary we have in our library. The prayers in the old Missal include these:

The Secret Prayer: “We offer sacrifice unto Thee, O Lord, on the solemnity of blessed Augustine, Thy Bishop and confessor, humbly beseeching that the sheep which have gone astray may return to the one fold and be nourished with this food of salvation .”

The Postcommunion: “Refreshed with the victim of salvation, we supplicate Thee, O Lord, that, through the intercessory patronage of blessed Augustine, it may always and everywhere be offered to Thy name .″

Now, the astute reader will pick up on the fact that the Church availed herself of the feast of England’s great Apostle in order to pray for her return to the fold. Because the Anglicans lost both the theology of sacrifice and the power to offer it, we who assist at the Traditional Rite pray for them to return to the source of the apostolic succession they lost. Further, there is reference to “sheep which have gone astray,” something which constitutes a “no-no” these days. These prayers were dropped entirely from the new text. Instead, the new Missal refers us to the Common of Pastors, where the celebrant may choose either the prayers for a missionary or for a bishop. What was offensive to the Anglicans, praying for their conversion, was dropped from the feast, apparently smacking of “intransigence and a spirit of conquest.”

In the new rite, the only prayer for the Mass of St. Augustine not found in the Common is the Opening Prayer, which is still proper to England’s apostle: “Father, by the preaching of St. Augustine of Canterbury, you led the people of England to the gospel. May the fruits of his work continue in your Church. Grant this through Our Lord Jesus Christ.″

Besides the banality of the language (which could in part be because of a bad translation), the prayer isn’t offensive. But let’s compare it to the Oration [Collect] it replaced: “O God, Who didst vouchsafe to illumine the English people with the light of the true faith by the preaching and miracles of blessed Augustine, Thy confessor and bishop, grant that, by his intercession, the hearts of those who err may return to the unity of the truth and that we may be of one mind in Thy will . Through our Lord….”

Besides nixing St. Augustine’s miracles (things of the past!), the liberals who fabricated the new rite omitted the part of the prayer beseeching the return of those who err.