Now for the first time since Cardinal Gasquet's excellent work on the subject in 1891 and with the added benefits of modern research, there is made available a Catholic interpretation of Anglican liturgy. It is a work that traces the entire historical synthesis of the Reformation which Anglicanized the Catholic Church in England and analyzes in detail the liturgy that was consequent upon the Henrician schism with Rome.
Beginning with Henry VIII's revolt against Rome in 1534, Father Rust undertakes to show that Cramer, Redley, Hooper, Latimer, and other Protestants, who had a hand in the compiling of Edward's Books of Prayer, have not been accorded their proper allocation in Church history. Neither Catholic nor Henrician, these men, these first Puritans of the Church in England, were ultimately the spiritual ancestors of the Puritans who sailed into the harbor at Plymouth in 1620.
The author's proofs are clear. He shows how the Book of Common Prayer destroyed the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and how Pope Leo XII was acting wholly within the realm of fact and the interest of the Church of England when he pronounced Anglican Orders null and void from the beginning. A lengthy Appendix of articles, injunctions, proclamations, and mandates by which the throne wrested authority from the Church supplement the book.
Under the brilliance of the Light of Faith which, the author prays, will seep through the mists of error in the Church of England, he has recounted the story boldly and completely. It rests upon a reverence for historic truth and upon a sincere desire to be useful to the clergy and to the laity of that especial body of Christians for whom the saintly remembrance of the sufferings of English martyrs daily inspires a respectful and deep affection.