Formation & Education · Study

The Permissive Prayer Book

How the 1928 revisers made room for the reform William Palmer Ladd went on to ask for

William Palmer Ladd died on 1 July 1941, and the book that carried his influence furthest appeared the following year. Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School from 1918 until his death, he had spent his last years writing short, plainspoken columns for the magazine The Witness — a fortnightly piece begun about 1938 at the invitation of its editor, W. B. Spofford. He gathered them himself into a single volume, finishing the manuscript in June 1941 with his wife's help; she prepared the index, and after his death worked his remaining notes into the chapter called "Fragments." The book was published as Prayer Book Interleaves: Some Reflections on How the Book of Common Prayer Might Be Made More Influential In Our English-Speaking World.

Fifteen years later, introducing the second edition, Massey H. Shepherd Jr. — Ladd's student, and afterwards one of the principal architects of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer — described what his teacher had left the Church as a testament and a prophecy whose full weight was only beginning to register.

That prophecy concerned a single stubborn fact: since Cranmer's day the Holy Eucharist had steadily lost its place as the normal Sunday service of the Anglican and Episcopal churches, ceding ground to Morning Prayer. Ladd wanted it back. What makes his argument worth reading closely against the actual rubrics of the 1928 American Prayer Book is that he never called for revolution. He read the book in his hands as an unfinished reform already pointed in the direction he wanted, and he built his whole programme out of small openings its rubrics had left in place.

Four threads in Prayer Book Interleaves make that case, and they tie together into one continuous argument.

I.The Diagnosis: An Inherited Habit, Not a Rubrical Mandate

In the chapter he called "The First Sunday in the Month" (pp. 53–55), Ladd traces the American once-a-month Communion pattern back through history with some care. The primitive Church aimed at weekly Communion, he argues, but the ideal frayed early; by the fourth century Chrysostom was already complaining that his Constantinople congregation left before the consecration. Medieval practice slid further, to the point that the Fourth Lateran Council had to set annual Communion as a floor, and Benedictine houses needed repeated papal reminders to keep even a monthly rule. The Reformers wanted weekly Communion restored, but in Ladd's judgement they badly underestimated how immovable the lay mind can be; and by the eighteenth century the ordinary English parish had settled into a single monthly sacrament Sunday. America, he concludes, simply inherited that eighteenth-century habit of a late Communion on the first Sunday of the month.

This history matters for a reason Ladd does not spell out but the rubrics confirm: the pattern he describes was never required by the American Prayer Book. The 1662 English book states plainly that "every Parishioner shall communicate at the least three times in the year, of which Easter to be one," and separately requires that in cathedral and collegiate churches and colleges, "where there are many Priests and Deacons, they shall all receive the Communion with the Priest every Sunday at the least, except they have a reasonable cause to the contrary." Neither provision survives into the American tradition. Neither stands in the Standard of 1892, and neither stands in 1928. The Communion office of 1928 — its General Rubrics and its Exhortations included — carries no minimum-frequency requirement at all, for parish or clergy alike. Whatever the canons of any given decade may have said, the Prayer Book itself was silent. The first-Sunday custom was inherited habit operating in a rubrical vacuum: nothing in the book required it, and — the point that mattered to Ladd — nothing in the book stood in the way of a parish doing otherwise.

Ladd does not treat this as cause for despair. He refuses to weep over it, calling it instead an excellent starting point for a return to the evangelical standards of the primitive Church. The following chapter, "The Parish Communion" (pp. 55–57), is his practical playbook for making that monthly service the real thing: parish announcements and vestry reports woven into the intercessions; the names of the baptized, married and buried read aloud; the newly confirmed received at this service; the housebound visited from this same altar; a preparatory service on the Friday or Saturday before. The goal, stated plainly in the Appendix, was never to stop at monthly — he wanted the Holy Eucharist made the chief service on every Sunday in every parish (p. 155).

II.The Mechanism: A Rubric That Carried the Word Service

If the first-Sunday habit was not required, what made it liturgically workable? The answer is a general rubric near the end of the Communion office. In the 1928 book it reads:

Upon the Sundays and other Holy-days, (though there be no Sermon or Communion,) may be said all that is appointed at the Communion, unto the end of the Gospel, concluding with the Blessing.

This is the formal basis of what is usually called Ante-Communion — the Liturgy of the Word said on its own when there is no celebration — and it is the mechanism that let a parish carry the pre-Communion elements through every Sunday while reserving the full rite for the first Sunday alone.

Two things about that rubric are worth stating precisely, because the usual account of it is loose on both.

The first is its extent. The English provision of 1662 runs considerably further than the American one: there, on a Sunday without a Communion, the priest is directed to say everything appointed "until the end of the general Prayer [For the whole state of Christ's Church militant here in earth], together with one or more of these Collects last before rehearsed, concluding with the Blessing." The American books cut that back to the end of the Gospel and added the words "though there be no Sermon." What an American congregation heard on a Sunday without a celebration was therefore a good deal shorter than what an English one heard — the intercession, in particular, fell away.

The second is its force, and here the American revisions part company with each other. In 1662 the rubric is a direction: on such Sundays this shall be said. The Standard of 1892 keeps it a direction in the same terms — "shall be said all that is appointed at the Communion, unto the end of the Gospel, concluding with the Blessing." Only in 1928 does shall become may. Until that revision, Ante-Communion was not a permission a parish could take up; it was the required Sunday morning service wherever there was no celebration. It is 1928, and 1928 alone, that turns it into something a parish may do or not do as it judges best. That single word is worth holding on to, because it recurs.

Two further 1928 additions matter for what follows, because Ladd builds directly on both. The revisers inserted a rubric permitting the priest, before the Prayer for the Church, to ask the secret intercessions of the congregation for any who have desired the prayers of the Church. Nothing of the kind stands in the Standard of 1892 — the word does not occur in that book's Communion office at all. They also changed the offertory direction: where 1892 has the priest "then place upon the Table so much Bread and Wine as he shall think sufficient," 1928 has him "then offer, and shall place upon the Holy Table, the Bread and the Wine." The oblation was given back its own verb, and so its own standing as an act. Ladd wanted the separation carried further still: among the ten suggestions he set out in the Appendix, the eighth is simply that the offering should be separated from the Prayer for the Church (p. 156).

Ladd invokes this same rubric, and reads it constructively. In "The Holy Eucharist and the Old Testament" (pp. 57–58), lamenting that the Reformation had stripped the great Old Testament passages out of the eucharistic lectionary, he points out that the rubrics already provide for Matins with an Old Testament lesson before the Eucharist, and that where Matins is not said it would be a simple matter to introduce an Old Testament lesson at each Eucharist immediately before the Epistle. He treats the flexibility as an opportunity for enrichment rather than a licence for neglect — and later, in the Appendix, flags the underlying problem as unfinished business, arguing that if the Eucharist is not to be preceded by Matins, as the first revisers had expected, then provision for Old Testament lessons ought to be made (p. 156). Even in a book calling for the Eucharist's independence, Ladd concedes that the rite as it stood was still structurally built around the assumption that Matins would come first.

III.The Reform Method: Extending a Change 1928 Had Already Made

The clearest evidence that Ladd saw 1928 as an unfinished project rather than a fixed text lies in how exactly his own proposals mirror changes the revisers had already made elsewhere in the same office.

Consider what happened to the pre-Communion Exhortation. In 1662 the priest shall say it at the time of the celebration, every time, with no relief. The Standard of 1892 keeps the direction but adds an escape: it may be omitted if it has already been said on one Lord's Day in that same month. By 1928 the requirement has been inverted — the priest may say the Exhortation, and it is fixed as obligatory on three days only: the First Sunday in Advent, the First Sunday in Lent, and Trinity Sunday. The Decalogue moved the same way. In 1892 it might be omitted provided it were said once on each Sunday; in 1928 that becomes once in each month. In both cases, material that had been ordinary and mandatory was made occasional and discretionary, without being taken out of the book.

And there is a third case, the plainest of all, in the very rubric considered above: the Ante-Communion direction of 1892 was shall be said, and the 1928 revisers made it may be said. Nothing else in the sentence changed.

That is precisely what Ladd asks for — and he asks it twice, in two different places in the rite.

The first is the penitential cluster standing between the Prayer for the Church and the Sursum Corda. In "A Shortened Eucharist" (pp. 105–107) he sets out an inventory of what a simplified rite would drop: the commandments and the Kyrie, the creeds, the confession and absolution, and the Gloria in excelsis. The confession and absolution, he holds, are not to be found in the primitive Eucharist — the communicant was expected to have made his peace with God beforehand, and one needing reconciliation withdrew before the solemn celebration began; confession at the Eucharist came into vogue only at the end of the Middle Ages, and the Comfortable Words are a Reformation addition (pp. 106–107). He dates the insertion to the revision of 1552 (p. 96), and objects on theological as well as historical grounds — the confession is of individual rather than corporate sins (p. 110), which cuts against his larger case for a congregational Eucharist. His remedy, at the end of "Revision," is not excision but permission: the service should pass directly from the Prayer for the Church to the Sursum Corda, and the only revision required would be changing shall to may in the intervening rubrics (p. 109). He repeats the point in the Appendix, where shortening the service by omitting the confession, absolution and Comfortable Words is something he wants allowed, and could usually be accomplished by a simple change of must to may (p. 156).

The second comes a page later, in "More Revision," and it is the more revealing of the two. Ladd objects that at the climax of the service the communicant is turned back upon himself by the words of administration — given for thee, preserve thy body and soul, Christ died for thee. His proposal is the same operation on a different rubric: if shall were changed to may in the rubric before the words of administration, the communicant could forget himself and receive in silence, or the priest might say simply, "The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ" (pp. 110–111).

That second proposal is worth dwelling on, because of where it falls. The rubric before the words of administration reads identically in 1892 and in 1928 — in both, the priest shall say them. It is one of the few places in the office the revisers left exactly as they found it. So Ladd is not asking for an innovation. He is pointing at four rubrics the revisers had already converted from requirement to permission, and then at one they had passed over, and asking why the same hand should not finish the same work.

A qualification is owed here, because Ladd's own position is more radical than his proposals. What he asks of General Convention is permissive throughout — shall to may, nothing struck from the book. But the simplified rite he printed in his Appendix does strike these things, and "A Shortened Eucharist" is written for clergy who already depart from the Book without authorization, whom he describes without reproach as subordinating the letter of the law to the larger spiritual good as they conceive it. The permissive route was the one he thought a revising Church could actually be persuaded to take. It was not the limit of what he wanted. The first of his ten suggestions is that the Church cut loose from the habit of treating every sentence of the Communion service as fixed and inalterable, and interpret its rubrics liberally (p. 155) — which is an instruction to parishes, not a petition to Convention. And on at least one point he found room without any rubric at all: his remedy for the long wait during the administration is that the laity be encouraged to return to their seats before the cup, which he notes would need neither revision nor legislation (p. 157).

That is not a new kind of Prayer Book. It is the identical operation the 1928 revisers had already performed four times over, applied to the places they had left alone. Ladd was not asking the Church to do something it had never done; he was asking it to keep doing what it had just finished doing.

IV.The Larger Stakes: A Norm Obscured by Cranmer's Own Success

The deepest layer of the argument concerns the daily office, and here Ladd is more generous than a casual reader might expect. He does not treat Morning and Evening Prayer as a rival to be defeated. He calls them admiringly a layman's service, arranged by a layman, St. Benedict, for the use of laymen (p. 137), and he records without irony the remark of a learned Roman Catholic — a disciple of Maria Laach — that Anglicans were envied their Morning and Evening Prayer (p. 24).

The trouble, as Ladd frames it, is an accident of success. The daily monastic services had always been congregational; Cranmer made them popular, so popular that his Matins tended to become the chief act of Sunday worship — and it is a pity, Ladd writes, that Cranmer did not make the Eucharist equally congregational and popular (p. 24). Four centuries later the imbalance had barely shifted. A considerable majority of churches still had Morning Prayer as the chief Sunday service, and the laity attended it to the neglect of the Holy Communion; in spite of the efforts of the preceding seventy-five years to replace Matins with the Mass, he observes, the church statistics showed the same state of affairs (p. 136).

He had no patience for the compromise some parishes attempted in response — alternating Mass and Matins Sunday by Sunday, often with a quiet preference shown to the Mass by assigning it the fifth Sunday when a month had one. Such a scheme, he says, tries to carry water on both shoulders, pleasing the Mass-lovers and the Matins-lovers at once and settling nothing (pp. 114–115). The echo of the first-Sunday pattern is deliberate: Ladd is tracking, across the whole calendar, exactly how the two services had been carved up between them, and rejecting every arrangement that stops short of restoring the Eucharist to primacy.

His warrant is not sentiment but history and a measure of ecumenical agreement. He locates weekly Communion as the apostolic norm — the Christian family meal, the chief community service on each Lord's day — and holds that this was the custom until the Reformation (p. 136). He is careful to note that the two chief Reformers agreed on the point: Luther believed it strongly, and Calvin, though more concerned for the word and for preaching, likewise held that the Holy Communion should be the central act of devotion every Sunday. It was the next generation of Protestants, taking up the more radical memorialist views associated with Zwingli, who severed the connection Luther and Calvin had both wanted kept.

The Synthesis

One thing should be said plainly before drawing the threads together, because a study that suppressed it would be the poorer. Ladd is not a comfortable ally for everyone who values the 1928 book. In the same chapter where he calls the confession an intrusion, he is sharp about clergy who add the Agnus Dei at that point and who borrow the non dignus from the Roman Mass, and he reads such additions as piling penitence on penitence until a congregation might wonder whether the unpardonable sin were its own. His inventory of what a simplified rite would drop takes in the Kyrie, the creeds and the Gloria in excelsis besides. A priest who celebrates the 1928 rite with missal interpolations is doing very nearly the opposite of what Ladd wanted done, and is not entitled to claim him without saying so. Nor was the Prayer Book rite itself his ideal. Addressing a theological society, he was explicit that he was not appealing for the Roman Mass — which he calls a degenerate liturgical form, full of interpolations and confusions of thought — but equally that he was not commending the Communion service of the Book of Common Prayer, which he judged too much the chance product of the clashing medievalism and Calvinism of the sixteenth century. What he wanted for a Sunday congregation was a combination of the primitive and the modern (p. 159). The 1928 book was the ground he had to work on, not the building he would have put up.

What can be claimed from him — and it is the substantial thing — is his reading of the rubrics, and the direction he showed the rubrics were already facing. That reading stands whether or not one follows him to his conclusions.

Read together, these four threads make a single case, and it is worth stating plainly for anyone working with the 1928 Prayer Book today.

The book's silence on minimum communion frequency, its Ante-Communion provision, and its reduced Exhortation and Decalogue rubrics were not concessions to weakness. They were the residue of an unfinished reform — and, in the case of Ante-Communion, an active loosening, made deliberately in 1928 by the same hand that fixed the Exhortation to three days. The result was a rubrical structure permissive enough that any parish could work toward Ladd's stated goal without waiting on General Convention to legislate it: to make the Holy Eucharist the chief service on every Sunday in every parish, not by returning to the Middle Ages and copying Roman methods, but by going forward, gradually, to a real parish communion (p. 155).

His two chapters on the first Sunday in the month and the parish communion are the practical instructions for exactly that gradual path — written not around a hypothetical ideal book, but around the actual 1928 rite as it stood, with all its historical scar tissue still visible. That a set of columns written for a small church newspaper between 1938 and 1941 reads today as a roadmap toward what the 1979 Book of Common Prayer would afterwards set down as the norm is the clearest evidence of how accurately Ladd had read the direction in which the 1928 rubrics were already, quietly, pointing.