13 September will see the beginning of our twelfth year as a mission and now a parish of the United Anglican Church. When we started as a mission, we were part of the Anglo-Catholic Church in the Americas, which was an off-shoot of the Episcopal Missionary Church. We then merged with the Traditional Episcopal Church and became the United Anglican Church. The names have changed, but the mission is still the same: to proclaim the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ as part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church He established on Peter.

9 November 2009. There are three documents, included in the file download below: The Apostolic Constitution itself, The Complementary Norms to the Constitution, and an official Vatican Commentary to the Constitution. At Saint Alban's, we have eagerly awaited the publication of this important document, and are now further awaiting the disposition of the matter by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. The United Anglican Church is looking to perhaps become part of whatever Ordinariate is established in the United States. As we have said before, "Stay tuned!"

The Thursday evening Study Group finished working on The Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller. We will now take a break and resume on 9 September 2010, at which time we will begin the Essential Guide to Bible Versions, by Philip W. Comfort, PhD. Sessions are conducted as "read-throughs" and begin at 7:15 pm, after the Low Mass at 6:00 pm.

Although we use The English Missal for every Mass, the lectionary (readings) vary from year to year. This year, 2009-2010, we are using the traditional readings from the Missal (those of Pius V). Next year, we will use the readings from Year A from the Revised Common Lectionary, Episcopal Edition. We alternate between three years of the RCL followed by a year from Pius V. The readings at the Eucharist celebrated at The Brunswick on Sunday evenings always follows the RCL (which means that this year Bishop Yingling has to develop two separate sermons each Sunday!).

By the way, we generally use the Revised Standard Version (RSV), Catholic Edition for our readings. The weekday Masses stick to the Authorized Standard Version as published in The English Missal. For personal study, we recommend either the RSV, Catholic Edition, or the RSV with the Apocrypha. If you use a New Revised Standard Version, be sure it is the Catholic Edition, which does not take liberties with gender. The question as to which edition of Biblical texts is "best" is a complicated one, but a "rule of thumb" is to look at Psalm 1: if the first verse reads, "Blessed is the man..." then the text has not been altered to fit a "gender inclusive" agenda. But, there are so many other issues involved! A good work on the topic is the Essential Guide to Bible Versions, by Philip W. Comfort, PhD, published by Tyndale House Publishers (ISBN 0-8423-3484-X). Unfortunately this work is out-of-print, but used copies are available if you diligently search the Internet.

In the Nineteenth Century, Dom Gueranger, the Abbot of Solesmes in France produced an historic and monumental liturgical work, The Liturgical Year. This fifteen-volume commentary on each day of the liturgical year has been republished in the English translation of 1949. A lesser known work is Dom Gueranger's Explanation of the Prayers and Ceremonies of Mass. We found this on the Internet, and translated it into the Adobe .pdf format.

Like many Anglo-Catholic parishes, we have had to produce a loose-leaf edition of an altar missal. We substantially use The English Missal, but have modified it a bit (such as the use of the Proper Prefaces from the BCP 1979 and the three-year lectionary). We call our edition The York Missal. The entire English Missal, with propers, is used every fourth year (and on weekdays), so that we are able to take advantage of both the three-year lectionary and the traditional one. If you would like a copy of our altar edition (the Ordinary only), click here:

That is a question that we are often asked. Saint Alban Church is clearly Anglo-Catholic, but just what does that mean? We found the following essay from Father John Alexander on a website some time ago, and thought it was the best concise explanation we have discovered.

And, as if all of this is not enough, we have also had to develop some musical settings for the Mass for our own use. The Missa York setting uses a mix of plainchant and "Continental" chant from various sources which are quite singable for small congregations, and the Missal Marialis is, well, the Missal Marialis! We also have the Missa Simplicor of Merbecke, which should be most familiar to Anglicans.

In the pews at Saint Alban Church one will find copies of The Anglican Service Book. The book is also the basis for the Ashby Churchman's Ordo Kalendar, edited by our Rector, Bishop Barry E. Yingling, CSSS. This excellent liturgical and devotional work is the product of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, Pennsylvania. We understand that the pew edition is currently out-of-print, but the Altar Edition is available.

The Tridentine Latin Mass is celebrated at Saint Alban Church on the First Saturday of each month, and at other times as announced. The Private Prayers of the Celebrant are always recited in Latin, and on some Sundays the Canon is recited in Latin as well.

The celebration of a Latin Mass, whether the Tridentine (now referred to as the Extraordinary Rite) or the Novus Ordo, is unusual in the Anglican tradition. From the very beginning, however, Anglicanism never completely “outlawed” the celebration of Mass in Latin. The stipulation was that it needed to be intelligible to those who participated, so its use was primarily among the academic circles in Cambridge and Oxford. Although the Tridentine rite (from the Council of Trent) was not the Mass in use at the time of the English reformation, its use has become more universal.

So, why do we celebrate the Tridentine Latin Mass at Saint Alban's? One of our missions is to maintain the liturgical traditions of the church that, alas, have been largely ignored since the 1970's. We believe that the worship of Our Lord is a very serious thing indeed, and that the language used to address our Sovereign Lord and God should not be pedestrian. Our usual celebrations of the Eucharist and the Daily Office are in Elizabethan English, not the ordinary language used on the street or in so many churches today. The use of Latin, then, carries us to an even higher realm, addressing God as so many have done since the very earliest days of Christendom.