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Vol I No. 10

Robert Crouse and Prayer Book Catholicism

by
Gary Thorne

Robert Crouse inspired a generation of young scholars, laypersons, students, and priests to see in Anglicanism and the Prayer Book tradition a true catholicism. There was no doubt in the minds those who heard him preach or give his theological papers at the annual Atlantic Theological Conference he helped establish in 1981, that the Anglican way of life found in the Book of Common Prayer was thoroughly catholic. The task given to me is simply to highlight that teaching, and I am happy to do so.

But the Conference organizers seem to want more than this in that they have asked me to speak on Robert Crouse and ‘Prayer Book Catholicism’. Thus, they suggest that I should address the question of whether Fr Crouse saw in the Prayer Book tradition a pure ‘catholicism’, or something not quite catholic, or at least a peculiar type of catholicism called ‘Prayer Book Catholicism’.

Another way of putting the same concern might be to ask that if, as Fr Crouse insisted, the Anglican Church is accurately described as ‘catholic and reformed’ – or even a ‘reformed catholicism’ – does that ‘reformed’ bit compromise or water down the ‘catholic’ bit such that a true or pure catholicism must be looked for elsewhere.

Again, the question might take the form that not a few students over the years had put to Crouse in various ways, namely, ‘Since your Patristic and Medieval scholarship, your doctrinal commitment, and your devotional piety all so clearly embrace the catholic faith, why do you not go all the way to the fullness of that catholic tradition and convert to Roman Catholicism?’

In a lecture called ‘The Essence of Anglicanism’ delivered Regent College Vancouver in 2002, Crouse begins by stating the problem of identifying Anglicanism as catholic:

The Anglican Communion, the fellowship of Anglican churches throughout the world, exists by virtue of a voluntary allegiance to a common tradition of Christian faith and worship. Faithfulness to that tradition, and that alone, constitutes the definition of Anglicanism, and that tradition provides its principle of cohesion. The Anglican Communion has, after all, no racial unity, the people of Anglo-Saxon origin who once dominated its membership now form a small portion of it. It has little linguistic unity; its liturgies have been translated into many languages and most of the world’s Anglicans nowadays are not English speakers. [It] does not possess an organizational unity, not really. … No primate, no Conference, no Council has any legislative authority over the Anglican Communion. So the Communion coheres only by faithfulness to a common tradition, and if that faith and if that faithfulness falters, it moves towards disintegration. No one can legislate for the Anglican Communion; insofar as its member churches fail in their allegiance to the common tradition, the communion dissolves.1A lecture delivered by Robert Crouse at Regent College, Vancouver, on October 3, 2002, to the Vancouver Branch of the PBSC.

For Crouse, the ‘common tradition of Christian faith and worship’ that unifies all churches of the Anglican Communion is to be found in the Prayer Book tradition. Indeed, this Prayer Book tradition is the only significant principle of cohesion in the Anglican Communion, embodying not only the collective memory of Anglicans but the consensus fidelium or ‘common mind’ of the universal Church which is the sole principle of authority and cohesion of the institution and the guarantee of its catholicity.

Crouse saw the Prayer Book tradition as that which gathered up the interpretation of the revealed Word of God in holy scripture as it was clarified and distilled in the ecumenical councils and creeds of the early church, passed on unimpaired through the Body of Christ in the patristic and western Medieval church, and transferred faithfully to the first English Prayer Books of the sixteenth century from the Latin Sarum Missal. The Prayer Book tradition is not static but is in a constant state of reformation, alive to the Word of God in holy scripture as interpreted by successive generations. Thus Prayer Book revision is ongoing, but always faithful to the objective tradition of the Body of Christ as it has been guided by the Holy Spirit through the ages.

The consensus fidelium is the living, developing tradition, the agreed ‘common mind’ of the whole body of the faithful in relation to the revealed Word of God. Crouse explains that the consensus fidelium is:

[The] Church’s common mind which, over a period of several centuries – and not without dispute – established the canon of Holy Scripture; it was the Church’s common mind which promulgated credal affirmations and conciliar formulations; it was the Church’s common mind which defined the forms of apostolic ministry, and sacramental practice, and established the norms of moral and ascetic life.2R Crouse, ‘The Prayer Book and the Authority of Tradition’ in G. Jay and Richmond Bridge (eds), Church Polity and Authority (St Peter Publications, Charlottetown, 1984), 55.

The authority of dogmatic theology itself, continues Crouse, is nothing but the authority of God’s self-revelation, as that revelation is understood and interpreted in the developing tradition of the apostolic church, especially in creeds and decisions of ecumenical councils. The test of its authenticity is its catholicity or universality; as the Vincentian Canon puts it, ‘quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est’ (St Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium II).

It is in this sense that the claim was made by Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1951, that there is no specifically Anglican dogma. Crouse favorably quotes Fisher, ‘We have no doctrine of our own. We only possess the catholic doctrine of the catholic church enshrined in the catholic creeds, and those creeds we hold without addition or diminution. We stand firm on that rock.’3In a speech delivered in the Central Hall, Westminster, January 30, 1951, quoted in A. Hughes, The Rivers of the Flood (London, 1961), 50. Cf. Robert Crouse, ‘Quod Ubique, Quod Semper, Quod Omnibus: Dogmatic Theology in the Church today’, Conference Report: A Need for a Catholic Voice in the Church Today (St Peter Publications, Charlottetown, 1981), 11.

That is either a very bold, or a very humble claim. Regardless, it is not very helpful unless the Creeds themselves are understood in a catholic manner. The Book of Common Prayer may lay claim to be nothing but the liturgical expression of the doctrine, sacramental theology, and discipline of Christ, but to suggest that the Anglican Prayer Book liturgy is not a particular interpretation of catholic doctrine and sacramental theology surely is an overreach.

Yet that somehow misses the point of the Anglican position. Consider that in his notion of catholicism as the living, developing tradition of the agreed consensus fidelium of the whole body of the faithful in relation to the revealed Word of God, Crouse is not suggesting that it is unfortunate that Anglicanism does not have a more clearly defined structure of legislative authority. Rather, he is suggesting that to look for a legislative authority in Anglicanism is not to understand the church’s true claims to catholicity. That is to say, to see the Prayer Book as the liturgical locus of authority for Anglicanism is not a poor substitute for a papacy, but rather is the only proper form of authority in the church catholic. As Mascall put it:

[The] Church, as a visible and tangible society, living in the historic process, needs a visible and tangible organ of its unity, though that union is, as I have emphasised, an interior and mystical unity and not a moral or political one. The Church is a visible and tangible society, but it is a sacramental one, and the organ of its unity will be a sacramental organ. … [It] seems to me impossible to locate the organ of the Church’s unity in the Papacy, for the papal character is not conferred by a sacramental act at all, but by the purely administrative and organisational process of election. Whether the Papacy has, by divine providence, a unique status in the Church and, if so, what are the functions which rightly attach to it are, of course, important questions, but by its very constitution the Papacy does not, so far as I can see, possess the nature which is required in the organ of the Church’s unity.4E L Mascall, Corpus Christi: Essays on the Church and Eucharist Second Edition (Longmans, 1965), 17–18.

For Crouse, since the traditional consensus fidelium is the only fundamental authority in the church, he goes one step beyond Mascall and cautions Anglicans against an exaggerated notion of the authority of bishops. He suggests:

Bishops, in their magisterium (their teaching office) have true authority only as they are faithful guardians and interpreters of that traditional consensus. They have the particular duties of discerning and defending it, while all of us have the duty of shaping our thinking and our lives in accord with it.5Crouse, Church Polity, 56.

To summarize: for Anglicans, as for all Christians, the ultimate authority is the life of the Triune God Himself as revealed in holy scripture. The only begotten Son of the Father, the Word, is known in His gracious self-revelation in Jesus Christ for the redemption of the world. The essence of Anglicanism is fundamentally the authority of a catholic living tradition of prayer, praise and adoration in obedience to that Word as revealed in scripture. That living tradition is expressed liturgically in the Book of Common Prayer.

But is the Book of Common Prayer faithful to the historic consensus fidelium? Do we truly find there a catholic expression of Word and Sacrament? Or, to put it another way, what kind of catholicism is ‘Prayer Book Catholicism’?

It is a catholicism that asserts the primacy of God’s Word written as containing all things necessary to salvation, ‘ so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of anyone, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation’ (Article VI). Scripture and tradition are not independent, alternative, or rival authorities. Rather, to describe Anglicanism as ‘catholic and reformed’ is but a reminder of the Reformation principle of sola scriptura – that the ongoing and living tradition of the church is always being ‘reformed’ or brought into submission to the scriptures. Thus, for example, the truth embodied in the creeds is not something other than nor independent of the holy scripture, and the creeds have no authority other than to guide us in our appropriation and confession of the truth of scripture.

Reflecting on the contemporary focus on religious experience as authoritative, Crouse admits that reflection upon religious experience has always been an element in catholic theology. But, he says:

Catholic theology has always insisted that such experience is to be measured by an objective truth, authoritatively declared in divine revelation, in Holy Scripture, interpreted in the universal tradition of the Church. There is desperate need in the Church today for a Catholic voice, insisting upon the dogmatic truth of the Catholic Faith. What is generally called “relevance” must be a second consideration. As Fr. Mascall rightly says, ‘We have to speak the Word of God to the world of our time, but first of all we must be sure that is the Word of God that we are speaking’.6R Crouse, ‘Quod Ubique, Quod Semper, Quod Omnibus: Dogmatic Theology in the Church today’, Conference Report: A Need for a Catholic Voice in the Church Today (St Peter Publications, Charlottetown, 1981), 13.

It is in his teaching on the ancient lectionary that Crouse demonstrates most persuasively that Anglicanism embodies the fundamental doctrinal content of the early church in its Patristic interpretation of scripture. Indeed, in all of catholicism in the twenty-first century, Anglicanism alone preserves the one-year Eucharistic lectionary that had been fully developed

by the church by the seventh century. This ancient Eucharistic lectionary is a unique witness to how the early church interpreted the Word of God as it developed its theology, doctrine, and devotional practice of Christian conversion. Thus, Crouse argued that the continued embrace of scripture in the form of that lectionary is vital for maintaining a doctrinal coherence with the early church.

This one-year lectionary has its roots in the fourth through sixth centuries, was firmly established by the time of Gregory the Great in the seventh century and continued with very few minor adjustments throughout the whole of the medieval period. It was passed on in its integrity from the Sarum Missal to the first English Prayer Books in the sixteenth century. Thus this ancient Eucharistic Lectionary has been part of the Prayer Book tradition from the very beginnings of Anglicanism and has shaped Anglican spirituality by its abiding influence on Anglican preaching, doctrine, theology, and devotional practice, until the later part of the twentieth century. It has now fallen almost entirely into disuse and only in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer does this ancient Eucharistic lectionary survive.

In this Eucharistic lectionary we submit to the consensus fidelium of the early Church, or you might say, the catholic understanding of scripture. In it we experience in the logic of conversion and continuing conversion (or what would become known later in the tradition as the doctrine of justification and sanctification) as it was experienced and understood by the early church. The Epistles and Gospels not only relate to each other in the context of the Eucharist, but the readings of a given Sunday relate to those of the week before and point ahead to those in the week that follows, according to the seasons of the church year. Over the course of a year, therefore, this Eucharistic lectionary offers ‘a systematic, doctrinal, and spiritual teaching, by way of Biblical texts.’7R Crouse, unpublished sermon for Trinity III, preached in 1996. It teaches the regula fidei (rule of faith) as understood by the consensus fidelium by the seventh century and it leads, in the words of Matthew Olver, to ‘the fullness of saving doctrine’.8M Olver, ‘Why the RCL is Killing the Church and what you can do about it’, The Living Church, July 1, 2016. https://covenant.livingchurch.org/2016/07/01/why-the-rcl-is-killing-churches-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/ The centuries immediately following the Council of Chalcedon in 451 were a period of intense theological debate, especially about the character and relation of the human and divine natures of the person of Christ. Nonetheless, along with the three Creeds and the first four Ecumenical Councils that were also forged in times of vigorous theological debate, the ancient one-year Eucharistic Lectionary in these centuries became the consensus fidelium of what was to survive for 1500 years as the regula fidei of the Western Church.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Eucharistic Lectionary for the Anglican claim of liturgical catholicity. For example, in an essay on sin and grace, Crouse remarks:

[The] Augustinian and medieval doctrine [of sin and grace] is preserved in the Reformed liturgy of the English Book of Common Prayer, especially in the Eucharistic lectionary – the series of Epistle and Gospel lessons read at the Holy Communion service throughout the year. When the Reformers took over that lectionary from the Sarum Missal of the medieval Church of England, it already had a history of a thousand years, in large part dating back at least as far as a fifth-century table of lessons called the Comes of St. Jerome, and representing most perfectly the Augustinian doctrinal tradition of medieval Christendom, of which it was also the chief doctrinal instrument.9R Crouse, ‘Sin and Grace: From St. Augustine to Dante’
in S. Harris (ed), The Journey Home: Sin and Grace (St Peter Publications, Charlottetown, 2002), 45–46.

But now I want to make a little excursus to speak about the Prayer Book’s notion of ecclesiology, for it helps to highlight the important role that the lectionary plays in the developing consensus fidelium.

In 311 there was an ordination of the bishop Caecilian of Carthage. But then it was rumoured that in the Diocletian persecution of 303 one of the bishops involved in the ordination had been a traditor – that is, had handed over the scriptures to be burned by the authorities.

What to do? Was it a valid consecration or not?

With that question began a century of the bitter Donatist ecclesiastical heresy and schism that divided the church in North Africa. For the Donatists, a bishop who was a traditor had denied his Lord and betrayed the Church: he could no longer offer the sacraments. The consecration of Caecilian of Carthage was invalid. Consequently the Donatists established a separate church that flourished even under persecution, no doubt drawing to it ‘the brightest and the best’, the most zealous of Christians who sought a church untainted by apostasy. They declared the church and parish is called to be ‘a society which is de facto holy, consisting exclusively of actually good men and women.’10J N D Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (Adam & Black, 1960), 410; cf. J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, In The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (University of Chicago Press, 1975), 308–313.

In many places there arose two separate, competing Christian congregations, Donatists and catholic, each with a bishop.

Seventy years after the initial formation of the flourishing Donatist Church, St Augustine was consecrated Bishop of Hippo and he devoted continual attention for more than a decade to the problem of Donatism and working out what would become the traditional Western theological understanding of the nature of the church, the parish, and the sacraments.

Augustine’s final thinking on all this is to be found in the Book of Common Prayer. Here it is, in Article XXVI:

ALTHOUGH in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ’s, and do minister by his commission and authority, we may use their Ministry, both in hearing the Word of God, and in receiving of the Sacraments. Neither is the effect of Christ’s ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God’s gifts diminished from such as by faith and rightly do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ’s institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men.

What an extraordinary statement of ecclesiology!

It was the Donatist demand for the essential holiness of the visible church that led St Augustine to draw a fundamental distinction between the present and the future church, not as two churches, but as two moments of one and the same church. There is the true City of God which is the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’, outside of space and time, and there is an earthly City of God which is the pilgrim church on the way to the eternal City of God (De Civitate Dei XI.24). And in this earthly pilgrim church, ‘sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments’.

The parish is the Civitas Dei peregrinans, the pilgrim church, the corpus permixtum, the body mixed of the holy and the unholy, the church marred by sin longing for its perfection, the church within the shadow of the cross.

But how is the pilgrim church, made up of the holy and the unholy, not to lose its way? How was the tradition to remain catholic? Crouse suggested that this was precisely the type of challenge that prompted the early church to establish a fixed set of Epistles and Gospels for every Sunday of the Christian Year. Such a lectionary would be a practical instruction of Christian living within the doctrinal orthodoxy of the hard-won Creeds and first four Ecumenical Councils of the primitive church. This lectionary, shaped by the consensus fidelium of the Western Church in the seventh century, would be used throughout the entire Western Church, offering wholesome teaching through the fixed scripture readings, regardless of the varying gifts, competencies, scholarly abilities, or doctrinal haziness of local priests and preachers. Although it may be the case that ‘sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments’ a common lectionary would be a sure guide for the Christian pilgrim within the pilgrim church. And the lectionary would be a guide for every Christian soul whether monk, priest or layperson; educated or illiterate; neophyte, saint, or sinner. The logic of conversion, continuing conversion, and pilgrimage is the same for all pilgrims.

Finally, I must say a word about Crouse and his understanding of the catholic nature of the Eucharist in the Book of Common Prayer. In several sermons and essays over a 20-year period Crouse demonstrated how the biblical and Augustinian concept of sacramentum memoriae or anamnesis was ‘at the heart of the sacramental theology of the English Reformation as expressed particularly in the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer.’11R. Crouse, ‘The Biblical and Patristic Foundations of Anglican Sacramentalism as Understood by the English Reformers’, an unpublished paper presented at the Mere Anglicanism conference in Charleston, SC, February 1, 2008.

In a 1985 sermon,12Preached at the Atlantic Theological Conference, June 1985, in St Peter’s Cathedral, Charlottetown, PEI. ‘Eucharistic Doctrine in the Prayer Book’, Crouse points to the writing of Thomas Cranmer on the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Cranmer writes:

The same flesh that was given in Christ’s last supper was given also upon the cross, and is given daily in the ministration of the sacrament.13J.E. Cox (ed), Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer, vol 15 (Parker Society, 1844), 24.

I do not say that Christ’s body and blood be given to us in signification and not in deed. But I do as plainly speak as I can, that Christ’s body and blood be given to us in deed, yet not corporally and carnally, but spiritually and effectually…14Ibid.,37.

Through grace there is a spiritual mutation by the mighty power of God, so that he who worthily eateth of that bread, doth spiritually eat Christ, and dwelleth in Christ, and Christ in him.15Ibid., 276.

When pushed to respond to those who, in his day, accused him of denying the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament of Holy Communion, Thomas Cranmer replied in 1550 with his treatise, A Defence of the True and Catholick Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ. Against those critics, Crouse reminds us how Cranmer protested vigorously:

In my book I have written in more than an hundred places, that we receive the selfsame 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. For I say (as all the old holy fathers and martyrs used to say), that we receive Christ spiritually by faith with our minds, eating his flesh and drinking his blood: so that we receive Christ’s own very natural body, but not naturally nor corporally.16Cox, Writings and Disputations, 370.

Crouse was keenly aware that Cranmer’s critics continue in our day. They have not been silenced and that Anglican Eucharistic theology continues to be misunderstood as a nominalism or receptionism.

This continuing misrepresentation, claimed Crouse, stems, on the one hand, from a failure to appreciate the depth of the Augustinian notion of memoria or recollection called anamnesis.17Note, says Crouse, the Greek etymology with its implication of ‘causing [in the present] to remember’. Cranmer and the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Anglican reformers discovered the notion of anamnesis in the scriptures and the primitive church to be the assurance of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

On the other hand, Cranmer and the Anglican Divines saw how Chalcedonian Christology reveals the error of what Crouse calls a ‘a superstitiously materialistic notion of the Presence, popularly associated in his time with a debased idea of transubstantiation’18‘Eucharistic Doctrine in the Prayer Book’, The Prayer Book: a Theological Conference held at St Peter’s Cathedral, Charlottetown, P. E. I., 108 (St Peter Publications, 1986). that falls into the Eutychean heresy. The Chalcedonian definition of the person of Christ declares that the full and perfect human nature of Christ is not destroyed by the divine nature of Christ, and neither, says Cranmer, following the arguments of Eusebius and Ambrose, are the bread and wine destroyed in the sacramental mutation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Thus, concludes Crouse, the Prayer Book understanding of the Eucharist ‘exemplif[ies] the basic Augustinian and Thomistic theological principle, that grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.’19Crouse, ‘The Biblical and Patristic Foundations of Anglican Sacramentalism’, 2008.

He continues:

In the Chalcedonian sacramentalism of our Reformation Fathers, we have a rich legacy, Biblical and Patristic, which has shaped the mind and heart of Anglicanism; and in this time of disruption and a fragmenting church, we would do well to refresh ourselves in that inheritance. We need to recollect ourselves, to remember whence we have come, and to live afresh in that tradition. As memory is in personality, so is tradition in the church’s life. Tradition is the church’s memory, and without that recollection, it suffers a crippling amnesia: its judgements become arbitrary and capricious; it becomes—quite literally—idiotic.20Crouse, ‘The Biblical and Patristic Foundations of Anglican Sacramentalism’, 2008.

I have only been able to scratch the surface of ‘Prayer Book Catholicism’, but it is clear that ‘Prayer Book Catholicism’ is the only catholicism that there can be in Anglicanism. Take away the Prayer Book and we are idiots: private citizens lacking a corporate memory, reducing divine revelation and Christian doctrine to relative human opinion, and reducing divine liturgy to ephemeral forms of self-expression. The Book of Common Prayer is the form of the collective memory of Anglicans. Without the Prayer Book tradition the Anglican Communion loses its integrity

(unity) and catholicity by stepping outside the consensus fidelium, the common mind of the church shaped in response to the divine Word.

So now let us return to the two questions with which we began.

First, is there a distinct ‘Prayer Book Catholicity’?

Yes, in that it embodies a fuller catholicity than has been acknowledged in most periods of the Church. It is a particular form of catholic in its insistence that the catholic tradition can never be confined to a legislative institution, but rather is a living tradition of worship and adoration of the blessed Trinity according to doctrine of the ancient creeds and councils established by the consensus fidelium. Prayer Book Catholicism is a living tradition that is ever being enhanced and reformed in submission to God’s Word Written.

Second, why did Crouse not complete his journey into the fullest Western expression of catholicism and become Roman Catholic?

I imagine that he might say something like this: My soul has been shaped by a living spiritual tradition of adoration of the Blessed Trinity in a liturgical, sacramental, and spiritual discipline embodied in the Book of Common Prayer. This tradition can be traced back with doctrinal integrity through the Caroline Divines, the sixteenth-century Reformers, the medieval Sarum tradition to the ancient church fathers. It is thoroughly Augustinian in character. The habits of my soul have been shaped by such a Prayer Book Catholicism, and it is the way in which I know how to pray and live as a catholic Christian.

I pray to God that the habits of many souls in the twenty-first century be shaped by the consensus fidelium of the living, mystical Body of Christ, and that there be a renewal of Prayer Book Catholicism.

Footnotes

  • 1
    A lecture delivered by Robert Crouse at Regent College, Vancouver, on October 3, 2002, to the Vancouver Branch of the PBSC.
  • 2
    R Crouse, ‘The Prayer Book and the Authority of Tradition’ in G. Jay and Richmond Bridge (eds), Church Polity and Authority (St Peter Publications, Charlottetown, 1984), 55.
  • 3
    In a speech delivered in the Central Hall, Westminster, January 30, 1951, quoted in A. Hughes, The Rivers of the Flood (London, 1961), 50. Cf. Robert Crouse, ‘Quod Ubique, Quod Semper, Quod Omnibus: Dogmatic Theology in the Church today’, Conference Report: A Need for a Catholic Voice in the Church Today (St Peter Publications, Charlottetown, 1981), 11.
  • 4
    E L Mascall, Corpus Christi: Essays on the Church and Eucharist Second Edition (Longmans, 1965), 17–18.
  • 5
    Crouse, Church Polity, 56.
  • 6
    R Crouse, ‘Quod Ubique, Quod Semper, Quod Omnibus: Dogmatic Theology in the Church today’, Conference Report: A Need for a Catholic Voice in the Church Today (St Peter Publications, Charlottetown, 1981), 13.
  • 7
    R Crouse, unpublished sermon for Trinity III, preached in 1996.
  • 8
    M Olver, ‘Why the RCL is Killing the Church and what you can do about it’, The Living Church, July 1, 2016. https://covenant.livingchurch.org/2016/07/01/why-the-rcl-is-killing-churches-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/
  • 9
    R Crouse, ‘Sin and Grace: From St. Augustine to Dante’
    in S. Harris (ed), The Journey Home: Sin and Grace (St Peter Publications, Charlottetown, 2002), 45–46.
  • 10
    J N D Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (Adam & Black, 1960), 410; cf. J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, In The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (University of Chicago Press, 1975), 308–313.
  • 11
    R. Crouse, ‘The Biblical and Patristic Foundations of Anglican Sacramentalism as Understood by the English Reformers’, an unpublished paper presented at the Mere Anglicanism conference in Charleston, SC, February 1, 2008.
  • 12
    Preached at the Atlantic Theological Conference, June 1985, in St Peter’s Cathedral, Charlottetown, PEI.
  • 13
    J.E. Cox (ed), Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer, vol 15 (Parker Society, 1844), 24.
  • 14
    Ibid.,37.
  • 15
    Ibid., 276.
  • 16
    Cox, Writings and Disputations, 370.
  • 17
    Note, says Crouse, the Greek etymology with its implication of ‘causing [in the present] to remember’.
  • 18
    ‘Eucharistic Doctrine in the Prayer Book’, The Prayer Book: a Theological Conference held at St Peter’s Cathedral, Charlottetown, P. E. I., 108 (St Peter Publications, 1986).
  • 19
    Crouse, ‘The Biblical and Patristic Foundations of Anglican Sacramentalism’, 2008.
  • 20
    Crouse, ‘The Biblical and Patristic Foundations of Anglican Sacramentalism’, 2008.
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