The Liturgy of the Liberal Catholic Church

The word “liturgy” originally meant any public work, but by the early days of the church it came to mean “sacred work” or “public worship.”  In the Liberal Catholic Church it refers to the whole book of services of the Church, not just the Holy Eucharist (or Mass).  Further, it is noteworthy that the LC Liturgy was one of the first – if not the first – catholic liturgy to be written in the vernacular, the first edition being published in 1919.  Bishop Leadbeater in his Preface to the 1924 edition says: “”We find a vernacular liturgy to be provocative of an infinitely greater response from our congregations that the use of Latin … believing that the truest reverence is best shown by helping the people for whose worship the Liturgy is written.”  And this was many, many years before Vatican II!!

Our founding bishops also believed that the language used in worship should be “stately and beautiful” thereby, as in the use of sacred music and elegant ritual, raising the hearts and minds of worshippers to a level of consciousness higher than the normal and mundane.  This point is often overlooked in worship today.

Particularly in the Longer Form of the Holy Eucharist, for which Bishop Wedgwood was largely responsible, we find passages of great mystical beauty and deep meaning.  For example, the Incarnation is seen in cosmic terms, rather than the merely historical: “…in the mystery of thy boundless love and thine eternal sacrifice [thou didst] breathe forth thine own divine life into thy universe and thus didst offer thyself as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, dying in very truth that we might live.”

The movement from which the Liberal Catholic Church originated used the Roman liturgy of the day, but the reorganization of the Church by our founding bishops involved a correspondingly drastic revision of its forms of worship.  However, like many liturgies of the time (and still even today), that Roman liturgy was very negative in many respects.

In particular, says Bishop Leadbeater in his preface to the 1924 edition, it was “full of expressions that indicated fear of God, of His wrath and of the prospect of everlasting hell.  These in their turn evoked other expressions of servile cringing and self-abasement, abject appeals for mercy, even naïve attempts to bargain with the Almighty.”  Bishop Leadbeater gives examples and he adds: “It ought to be impossible for thinking men [sic] of our day to have to repeat this crude anthropomorphism.”  How much more so should it be in the 21st century!

While conceding that, because all our conceptions of God arise in the human mind, they must be anthropomorphic in some sense, the Bishop considers it “fair canon to demand that he [God] shall be interpreted in terms of that which is best in our human nature and not in terms of that which is worst and of which we ourselves are ashamed.”  In the Liberal Catholic Liturgy, “these disfiguring elements have been eliminated as derogatory alike to the idea of a loving Father and the men (sic) he has created in his own image.”

Bishop Leadbeater then makes an important point, one which continually comes to mind even today.  “If Christians had been content to take what Christ taught of the [loving] Father in heaven, they would never have saddled themselves with the jealous, angry, bloodthirsty Jehovah of Ezra, Nehemiah and the others, a God who needs propitiating and to whose mercy constant appeals must be made.”

On the same principles, our Liturgy rejects imprecations of the “heathen” and passages of cursing, which were again common at the time and still sometimes occur in the Psalms used, for example.  Their use, says Bishop Leadbeater, is totally foreign to the spirit of Christ.  “Hence, with a view to preserving for our worship language and sentiments that are sublime … we have been emboldened to construct psalms, epistles and gospels by a system of cento selection.”  While he was well aware that there would be objections to this, and that many of the offending passages can be given gentler interpretation, he maintains that such passages “convey a false impression” of the loving and forgiving God of Jesus Christ.

Another recurring element in older liturgies (and still even today in many churches) is that of petition for personal and temporal advantages.  CWL says “We have sought to interpret the spirit of our age by substituting joyous aspirational utterance … and encouraging our worshippers to forget themselves – indeed, to find their true selves – in thoughtfulness for others.”  Liberal Catholics thus see that one of the principal motives for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist is not the benefiting of ourselves, the participants, but the spiritual uplifting of the whole neighbourhood around the church, an insight that came to CWL while on a walking tour of Sicily.

So Bishop Leadbeater concludes that “worship has a threefold aspect and purpose.  It is firstly the offering of ‘worship’ – that is praise and honour – to almighty God.  Secondly, it is intended to help the worshippers.  And thirdly – most important of all – it is intended to help the world at large … by pouring out upon it a great flood of spiritual power.”

Thus, while at first contact, the Liturgy of the Liberal Catholic Church may seem somewhat dated today, on closer study it will be found to be an amazingly uplifting practice, an extended and beautiful meditation that inspires and lifts the soul, and provides the spiritual refreshment that is badly needed in our secular-materialist world.