The Prayer of Humble Access in “Full Communion”

The Prayer of Humble Access in “Full Communion”

DOM BENEDICT ANDERSEN OSB

It may surprise (or even shock) many to know that this Benedictine priest-monk, in the context of the celebration of the traditional pre-conciliar Missale Romanum, says as a private devotion, a text from the pen of a Protestant Reformer, and a radical one at that.  Having prayed the preparatory prayers before communion in the customary sotto voce, I switch in the same voice to my mother tongue, saying from memory a prayer which I have cherished all my adult life^[1], beginning with those powerful words: “We do not presume.”

There is no other text in the English language dearer to me — save the Lord's Prayer, the Angelic Salutation, and the Coverdale Psalter — than this prayer, commonly called in the Anglican tradition, “The Prayer of Humble Access”^[2].  It has, for me, an unction, a particular grace, which few other prayers have.  I quote it in full, not only for Catholics who may not know it, but also to allow those of the Anglican tradition (Catholic and non-Catholic) to read it anew:

<We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his Blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.  Amen.[^3]

The language here does not seem to be of a fundamentally different spiritual world than that of the traditional Roman Rite, or the other historic Liturgies of both East and West.  It breathes the same scriptural and patristic air as these ancient traditions, and instills in the communicant in the same spiritual sentiments: deep humility, bitter sorrow for sin, and a sense of unworthiness, but, at the same time, a boldness to present ourselves, and even our sinfulness, before “the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16^[3]).

The Prayer of Humble Access is, to my mind (and my heart), not only one of the great

Christian prayers, but one of the great Catholic prayers.  This is an audacious statement, to be sure, and one which might seem incomprehensible to many fellow Roman Catholics, especially those attached, as I am, to the Usus Antiquior of the Roman Rite.  I fully acknowledge the difficulty.  How can a Protestant prayer, arising from a milieu of revolt against the Church, be regarded as a Catholic prayer?  Is this not a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the subtle theological “game” being played by the unfortunate Archbishop Cranmer, that of concealing novel doctrines under the outward form of Catholic phraseology?

At this point, the great G.K. Chesterton — that “prince of paradox” and “apostle of common sense” — steps in to help us understand the spirit in which the Catholic Church has come to make Humble Access, and other elements of the Prayer Book, an expression of her own faith and of the piety with which she would have us approach Holy Communion.  The Book of Common Prayer, wrote Chesterton,

is the one positive possession and attraction, the one magnet and talisman for people even outside the Anglican Church, as are the great Gothic cathedrals for people outside the Catholic Church. I can speak, I think, for many other converts, when I say that the only thing that can produce any sort of nostalgia or romantic regret, any shadow of homesickness in one who has in truth come home, is the rhythm of Cranmer’s prose. All the other supposed superiorities of any sort of Protestantism are quite fictitious. […] But why has the old Protestant Prayer-Book a power like that of great poetry upon the spirit and the heart? The reason is much deeper than the mere avoidance of journalese. It might be put in a sentence; it has style; it has tradition; it has religion; it was written by apostate Catholics. It is strong, not in so far as it is the first Protestant book, but in so far as it was the last Catholic book.[^5]

But, again, how can this be?  How can a prayer specifically framed to deny Catholic dogma — that is, the Real and Substantial Presence of the Lord under the accidental forms of bread and wine — be, or become, a Catholic prayer?  The answer, I think, lies in the fact that Cranmer's subtle “game”  — feeding the reluctant Catholics of England with the bitter pill of Protestant revolt hidden under the guise of language drawn from medieval liturgy and piety — might have been a bit too subtle.  As Bouyer explains:

If we pay close attention to the interpretations given by Cranmer himself to the formulas he uses, all of these prayers [...] seem to be deprived of their original content.  But, since they retain practically all of the ancient expressions, with the minimum of retouching that was necessary in order to bend them to the devitalised sense in which he understood them, a person who is without the key to his perpetually metaphorical language can be easily taken in.^[4]

Cranmer was, as it were, “hoisted with his own petard” because the “Cranmer Code” (as one might call it) was not easily decipherable, nor would many in the Church of England recognise that there was a code.  Or perhaps if they did, they had no interest in it, settling instead for a more straightforward reading (and one more in concert with the belief of the Undivided Church).  Perhaps, after all, when in the Liturgy we beg the Father to “grant us to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his Blood”,  we are asking for exactly that, without any circumlocutions or the theological gymnastics as to how when we ask for the Body and the Blood we're not actually getting the Body and the Blood!

That this is the case is demonstrated by the fact Cranmer's “Godly Order” of 1549 was almost immediately interpreted against its framer's own heretical intent by Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester who upheld the King's takeover of the Church but upheld all other aspects of Catholic faith and order.  Gardiner's “Henrician Catholic” enthusiasm about the Liturgy of 1549 prompted the far more radical “slash-and-burn” revision of 1552, in which all of the parts lauded by Gardiner were excised or rearranged to make Catholic interpretation well nigh impossible.  In particular, Cranmer transferred Humble Access from its original post-consecration position to an extremely awkward position immediately after the Sanctus and before the Eucharistic prayer proper.          Now, it seemed, no one could possibly interpret the vivid language of eating the Body and drinking the Blood as in any way connected to a post-consecratory objective Real Presence connected with the elements themselves.  And so the prayer remains, officially, to this day in the 1662 English Prayer Book.  Cranmer had the last word officially speaking but it didn't take long for later Anglican bishops and theologians, inspired by patristic learning and investigation of ancient (particularly Oriental) liturgies, to begin little by little to undo the damage, first in ways unofficial, and then, outside of England, in official Prayer Book revision.

The words I wrote years ago in my master's thesis concerning the Orthodox adaptation of the Anglo-Catholic Missal tradition can be applied also to the Ordinariate Liturgy:

[It is] the product of over four centuries of liturgical development within Anglicanism. The first Anglican Liturgies were born out of the upheavals of the English Reformation, and thus bear the marks of doctrinal negation and compromise. But generations of High Churchmen – Elizabethan, Caroline, Non-Juring, Scottish, American, Tractarian, and Anglo-Catholic – reshaped this Reformation Liturgy, as much as possible, into a form closely approximating the ancient and medieval Liturgies of the Church (both Eastern and Latin). They were able to do so because these High Church parties held a high regard for the precedents of Christian antiquity, for the patristic tradition (especially the Greek Fathers), and for the ancient liturgical usages of the Church.^[5]

And now, at the end of “the long path away from Cranmer”^[6], trod by generations of Catholicminded Anglicans, the Holy See has officially recognised in many of the most cherished liturgical forms “proper to the Anglican tradition” — including the Prayer of Humble Access — “a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared” with the whole Church Catholic.^[7]

“Whatever anyone has said well,” said Justin Martyr, “belongs to us Christians.”^[8]  He was speaking about those mysterious “seeds of the Word” (spermatakoi Logoi), sown by the pre-incarnate

Son deep within the soil of pagan thought.  If Justin can affirm this, how much more can the

Church of our day find in eloquent prayers like this one, Christian but composed outside of Catholic unity, not merely tiny “seeds” of truth but, tout court, an expression — situated within proper dogmatic context — of that faith and piety which, as a good Mother, she always desires to instil within her children.

Echoing Justin, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in the dogmatic constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium (1:8) affirms that “many elements of sanctification and of truth exist are found outside of [the Church's] visible structure”, elements which, “as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.”^[9]  The Prayer of Humble Access, among many other elements of Anglican liturgical and devotional patrimony, are gifts which belong to the Catholic Church and thus has been “brought home”, as it were, into “full communion”.

Allow me to indulge in a creative re-appropriation of the words of the Patriarch Joseph: “Ye thought evil against [the Church]; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” (Gen. 50:20).  The Prayer of Humble Access can now be regarded by Catholics as true and faithful expression of the Church's own belief and piety concerning the august Mystery of the Lord's Body and Blood.  Duly restored to its original function as a communal precommunion prayer, re-contextualised within orthodox liturgical tradition, and all erroneous connotation being purged by contact with the “live coal” of the one true faith, the Prayer of Humble Access has been revealed to be a gifts which has always belonged to the Church, waiting to be reclaimed by her — not merely as an expediency, a concession or a sop to Anglicans on their way into full communion, but as a genuine expression of the Church's lex orandi and thus also, of necessity, her lex credendi.

Dom Benedict Maria Andersen is sub-prior of Silverstream Priory, home of the Benedictine Monks of Perpetual Adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, County Meath, Ireland.  A native of Denver, Colorado, he holds degrees in philosophy from the Pontifical Lateran University, Rome, and Eastern Orthodox theology from St Vladimir's Seminary, Crestwood, New York.

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[^3] The official text from Divine Worship: The Missal.

[4|4] [^5]: The Well and the Shallows (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935), p. 47 (emphasis mine).