In a recent address, "What is this personal ordinariate?" (http://www.anglocatholic.net/) about the Anglican option now being offered by Rome, Bishop Peter J. Elliott, Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne, Australia, offered this criticism of the Prayer Book in his discussion of the liturgy for use by Anglican Roman Catholics.
The various editions of the Book of Common Prayer will obviously influence the preparation of this use for the Ordinariates. Yet a note of caution is necessary. Cranmer's prose is majestic, but all his doctrine is not sound. Some editing will be needed to deal with expressions which are not in harmony with Catholic Faith, particularly those that come down from his severely Protestant 1552 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. In Anglo Catholic circles you have tried to manage these matters, as may be seen in the English Missal and the Anglican Missal. I give one example that concerns me as a sacramental theologian. "Do this in remembrance of me" should never appear in a Catholic rite. "Do this in memory of me" is a more accurate rendering of the original languages and takes us away from "memorialism". The meaning of the Eucharist as the great sacrificial Memorial is set out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1362-1367.
Reading the Bishop's comments about the alleged deficiencies of Cranmer's eucharistic doctrine, one cannot help wondering what of Cranmer he has read. For many Catholics, their reading of Cranmer consists in the one-sided and polemical accounts that began with Froude and reached their apogee with Dix. The resulting distortions bear little resemblance to the Cranmer one encounters in his own extensive writings on the eucharist, or that countless Anglicans have encountered in the liturgy he devised. Sadly, these polemical readings are endlessly repeated by Anglicans - and Roman Catholic auxiliary bishops - as established facts.
The charge is that Cranmer taught a memorialist doctrine like that of Zwingli's, that is, one in which the presence of Christ in the eucharist is not associated with the elements and that it is a purely subjective presence, the pious remembrance of an absent Christ. Zwingli died in 1532, and his doctrine was modified by Bullinger, his successor in Zurich. By the time of the publication of the first Prayer Book in 1549 there was few or none who could be called a pure Zwinglian. Nonetheless, there did remain significant differences over eucharistic doctrine between the Zurich school (represented in England by Hooper, Vermigli, and Laski) and other reformers like Bucer. Cranmer engages as irenically as he can with the Zurich theologians, but on the matter of the objective but non-materialistic presence of Christ associated with the elements, he (like Calvin) takes the side of Bucer (as well as Melanchthon) rather than theirs.
Like every other Protestant critic of Romish transubstantiation, Cranmer is concerned to deny a physical or localized association of Christ's body and blood with the bread and wine: but this does not mean that he denies an objective presence, which he describes as not merely "figurative" but "spiritual and effectual". He will say that Christ is "spiritually exhibited", which meant not merely "shown" in the present use of the word, but "held forth", "offered". For Cranmer, subjective remembrance of the cross of Christ is not the substance of the eucharistic presence, but the condition of apprehending and receiving and feeding on Christ truly present. That is why Cranmer can frame the Institution narrative, as no other reformed liturgy did, with the prayer addressed to the Father (not an exhortation addressed to the worshippers) that "we, receiving these thy gifts of bread and wine, according to thy Son's holy institution, in remembrance of his death and passion, may be partakers of his body and blood". In rightly receiving (that is, in grateful remembrance and faith) the bread and wine there is a real participation in Christ's body and blood.
Thus Cranmer rebutting his conservative enemy Gardiner, "you misrepresent my doctrine that I should say we receive not Christ at all but in a figure and no body at all wherein you untruly and slanderously report me; there is a true presence and a true feeding in deed and not in figure only….I do speak as plainly as I can that Christ's body and blood be given to us in deed yet not corporally and carnally, but spiritually and effectually" (Parker Society Volume 1, p. 64). In his answer to Smith's preface, he says "I have written in more than an hundred places, that we receive the self-same body of Christ that was born of the virgin Mary, that was crucified and buried, that rose again, ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty: and the contention is only in the manner and form how we receive it" (Parker Society I, p. 370).
One should also consider Cranmer's highly distinctive emphasis on eucharistic sacrifice, which is just one of many features that set apart his liturgy and writings from a Zwinglian or Zuricher position. It indicates how, independent of any contemporary theologian, he was guided by the testimony of the Church Fathers which he had so carefully and exhaustively studied.
For an extensive and careful discussion of the evidence, see Basil Hall, "Cranmer, the Eucharist and the Foreign Divines in the Reign of Edward VI", in Thomas Cranmer, Churchman and Scholar, ed. Paul Ayris and David Selwyn (1993).
