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My thanks to Michael LaRue, K.M. for pointing me to something of Percy Dearmer's hosted on the Project Canterbury website and posted on the very fine blog haligweorc. I post below the section of interest to me which speaks to the missionary imperative that should be at the heart of all that the Anglican diaspora within the Catholic Church seeks to do for the Lord and His Gospel:
THE IDEAL BEFORE USIs it not a great ideal of Christian life and worship? Shall we not all be better and stronger men when we take better advantage of our opportunities? Will not the Church of England be indeed a great and noble [31/32] Church when all who belong to her are regular communicants, when the parish church of every place is thronged with devout worshippers day after day, and when the children of England are all thoroughly taught the splendid Doctrine and Duties of the Catechism?
It is a sad and humiliating thought that, while a few centuries ago all Englishmen belonged to the fellowship of the one Church, and all partook of the life of our Lord in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, now England is full of petty divisions and miserable quarrelling, while the masses of the people are not even communicants. They belong to the Church, but they do not understand her, and so they are not faithful to her, and have little real love for Christ in their hearts. We have, therefore, enormous arrears to make up. We must pray more, worship more, teach others more, and thus lead the way, by our own loyalty, to a great revival of Christianity in our land.
Shall we not succeed? Through the neglect of past years the Church has become like a missionary in a strange land. But as we love God more and love our neighbour more, and in this spirit of love and devotion carry out the half-forgotten rules of the Prayer Book, we shall lead the people back from their Babylon, and build again the walls of Jerusalem.
Although I am a liturgical dinosaur -- well, I have been told I am a liturgical dinosaur with my love for the ancient uses of the British Isles, the Caroline divines, and the liturgies of the Non-jurors -- yet do I hope in due course the Ordinariates together with the Anglican Use parishes will produce a new particular Catechism with Services of Instruction like those with which we were once familiar. Of course, they would need to be adapted properly to our Catholic life. It would be an excellent way to bring quotes from the Anglican worthies to bear upon questions of the faith by way of footnote or direct quotation in the text.
+Salve, Regina!
