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Thanks to Jayson Grieser for sending along notes and quotations from Ramie Targoff's 2001 Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. Targoff points out that, contrary to what we might think, Protestants were more interested than Catholics in communal worship. "For sixteenth-century Catholics," she writes, "the challenge of public devotion was not to promote a shared and collective liturgical language, but instead to encourage the worshippers to perform their own private devotions during the priest's service."
Protestants, on the other hand, saw common prayer as a public and communal means for forging practices of devotion: "What emerges from the texts and instructions of the BCP is not the triumphant celebration of religious interiority that we so often associate with the Reformation—as I have already briefly observed, this commitment to individualize worship would more accurately characterize the Catholic Church, not the Protestant. Instead, behind the introduction of a liturgy emphasizing the worshipper's active participation and consent lies the establishment's overarching desire to shape personal faith through public and standardized forms."
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, April 06, 2007 at 05:38 PM
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