ROBIN MAR . IIN perpetuates an old chestnut in trying to prove

that Article 31 does not condemn the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and also that it was a popular view that each Mass was a new sacrifice.
Let me remind him of the words of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer who I would suggest is the best authority on the Book of Common Prayer. 'All such priests as pretend to be Christ's successors in making a sacrifice of him, they be his most heinous and horrible adversaries. For never no person made a sacrifice of Christ but he himself.
'What needs any more sacrifices if Christ's sacrifice be perfect and sufficient. Wherefore all Popish priests that presume to make every day a sacrifice of Christ either must they make Christ's sacrifice in vain, unperfect and insufficient, or else is their sacrifice in vain which is added to the sacrifice already sufficient and perfect. But it is a wonderous thing to see what shifts and cautels the Popish antichrists devise to colour and cloak their wicked errors.
'The Papists, to excuse themselves, say that they make no new sacrifice nor none other sacrifice than Christ made (for they be not so blind but they see that then they should add another sacrifice to Christ's sacrifice and so make his sacrifice imperfect) but say that they make the self same sacrifice for sin that Christ made himself and here they run headlong into the foulest and most heinous error that was ever imagined.'
Cranmer died for the heresy in Article 31. To infer that he did this due to ignorance of the Mass is an insult to his courage, however mis guided. Gerald B Lyons Leeds ROBIN MARTIN (February 20) asserts that Article 31 of the 39 Articles only condemns abuses of the Mass and that after the Elizabethan religious settlement Anglican clergymen continued to offer "sacrifice" in the traditional Catholic sense of the Mass. I am afraid he is wrong.
Whatever local abuses of Mass offerings existed at the time, the full, authentic Roman or Sarum rite of the Mass was being properly enacted in every cathedral and parish church in England immediately prior to the Tudor religious upheaval.
If Article 31 was only referring to irregularities in the doctrine and enactment of the Mass. and not to the hallowed Eucharistic sacrifice the Anglican Church was supposed to be perpetuating, then why did it not explicitly say so?
It did not say so because the whole intention of Cranmer and the succeeding reformers was to abolish the notion of a sacrificial Eucharist and priesthood in the new liturgy. As that great liturgist Fr Adrian Fortescue wrote in his definitive study of the Roman liturgy: "The Protestant reformers naturally played havoc with the old liturgy. It was the very ideas of the Real Presence and the Eucharistic Sacrifice that they rejected. The Communion Service in the Anglican Prayerbook is essentially a new service made up by the reformers, its chief elements being adapted from a Lutheran form." D G Galvin