Cranmer's Godly Order
Liturgical Revolution: Vol. I
by Michael Davies
Cranmer's Godly Order is a classic...revised and expanded by Mr. Davies during his final years. Drawing upon the best of Catholic and Protestant scholarship and on primary sources, Davies traces the steps by which the ancient Catholic Mass became the Lord's Supper in the Church of England. And these steps were changes - as Popes and Reformers alike were at pains to stress. Michael Davies shows that Henry VIII and Thomas Cranmer understood that if you change the way people pray, then you will change what they believe. Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1549) began a process that changed the Catholic Church in England to the Anglican sect. Davies compares these changes to the modern liturgical "reforms" and the similarities are shocking.
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and Edward VI and architect of the new liturgy, was a master of the theology of the Mass, and hated it. The parallels between the Anglican liturgy and the New Mass of the 1960s will be uncomfortably obvious!
This book forms volume one of Davies's Liturgical Revolution series. Nowhere will you find a more thorough example of the axiom Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi est - "As you pray, so will you believe."
372pp. Color hardcover, illustrated.
