Rites surrounding Death: The Palermo Statement of the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation 2007 Edited by Trevor Lloyd

You might be able to guess from the title that this is a recent edition of  Joint Liturgical Studies! And as I have said before (and no doubt will say again) the value of these is that they place before you material that you would not otherwise encounter. 

The International Anglican Liturgical Consultation is one of a number of fora for the production of “normative statements”, either ecumenically or, as in this case, for a particular denomination.   Their relationship to the general thinking of the members of a denomination or the pronouncements of a denomination’s Synods (or equivalent bodies) is often loose or strained.  A clear example of this difficulty was the ARCIC report on the place of Virgin Mary which a large part of the Anglican Church denounced.

Here we have “The Palermo Statement; Rites surrounding Death” along side a commentary by Trevor Lloyd.  The commentary is mostly made up of examples from different Anglican Liturgies of the themes encountered in the Statement.

While of interest neither the Statement nor the commentary had anything particularly earth shattering to say. 

However as someone with no love for Common Worship I need raise an audible cheer when reading the Statement saying,

“We affirm that the liturgy is owned by the Christian community as well as by the minister or clergy leading the rites.  Where church members own a service book in their homes, and also a hymn book, they are more likely to feel they own the liturgy with the clergy.”

This is one of my key critiques of Common Worship – it has fundamentally removed the liturgy from the hands of the people.  The Prayer Book, and even the ASB, gave a sense of a liturgical whole while Common Worship allows only for the encounter of isolated liturgical events.  Also the people saw and knew the rubrics in both the Prayer Book and ASB - allowing at least some small insight into why things were happening – in Common Worship these are hidden from sight encouraging the people to be passive recipients of worship done by the clergy and other leaders.

On similar ground the Statement later says:

“No set of texts or rubrics, however comprehensive or permissive, can do all this without the mediation of pastorally sensitive, theologically astute and liturgically fluent clergy.”

From this I would read that the search for the perfect text (which the endless variation of Common Worship encourages) is flawed.  A decent text placed within an appropriate context of pastoral and liturgical action is powerful enough.  And the search for “pastorally sensitive, theologically astute and liturgically fluent clergy” is somewhat less fruitful than the search for hen’s teeth!