Celtic Rite

The term "Celtic Rite" is applied to the various liturgical rites used in Celtic Christianity in Britain, Ireland and Brittany and the monasteries founded by St. Columbanus and Saint Catald in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy during the Early Middle Ages. The term is not meant to imply homogeneity; instead it is used to describe a diverse range of liturgical practices united by lineage and geography.

Before the 8th century AD there were several Christian rites in Western Europe. Such diversity of practice was often considered unimportant so long as Rome's primacy was accepted. Gradually the diversity tended to lessen so that by the time of the final fusion in the Carolingian period the Roman Rite, its Ambrosian variant, and the Hispano-Gallican Mozarabic Rite were practically all that were left.

British bishops attended the Council of Arles in A.D. 314 and the Council of Rimini in 359. Communication with Gaul may be inferred from dedications to St. Martin at Whithorn and at Canterbury, from the mission of Victridius of Rouen in A.D. 396 and those of Germanus of Auxerre, with St. Lupus in 429 and with St. Severus in 447, directed against the Pelagianism of which the bishops of Britain stood accused.

However much of Britain derived their religion from Irish missionaries. Aidan of Lindisfarne, Foillan, Diuma, Finan of Lindisfarne, Jaruman and others evangelised the Anglo-Saxons. Ia of Cornwall and her companions, Saint Piran, St. Sennen, Petroc came to Cornwall and probably brought with them whatever rites they were accustomed to. Cornwall had an ecclesiastical quarrel with Wessex in the days of St. Aldhelm, which appears in Leofric's Missal, though the details of it are not specified.

The certain points of difference between the British Church and the Roman in prior to Bede were: (1) The rule of keeping Easter (2) the tonsure (3) the manner of baptizing. Gildas also records elements of a different rite of ordination.

There is a Mass, probably of the 9th century, apparently Cornish since it mentions "Ecclesia Lanaledensis" (perhaps St Germans in Cornwall, though this was also the Breton name of Aleth, now part of Saint-Malo) and in honour of St. Germanus. It is quite Roman in type, probably written after that part of Cornwall had come under Saxon influence, but with a unique Proper Preface. The manuscript also contains glosses, held by Professor Loth to be Welsh but possibly Cornish or Breton. There is little other evidence as to what liturgy was in use.

Anglicans of the 19th century such as Sir William Palmer in his Origines Liturgicae and the Bishop of Chichester in his Story of the English Prayerbook proposed that Irenaeus, a disciple of St. Polycarp the disciple of St. John the Divine, brought the Ephesine Rite to Provence whence it spread through Gaul to Britain and became the foundation of the Sarum Rite.

The Ephesine origin of the Gallican Rite rested first upon a statement of Colmán of Lindisfarne in 664 at the Synod of Whitby respecting the origin of Easter and second upon an 8th-century Irish writer who derived the divine office from Alexandria. Archbishop Nuttall also asserted the Eastern origin of the Irish rite. The Catholic Encyclopedia disagreed, asserting (see also Ambrosian Rite) that the Sarum Rite is "merely a local variety of the Roman, and that the influence of the Gallican Rite upon it is no greater than upon any other Roman variety".