Leonel L. Mitchell has obviously devoted much of his religious life to the study of church history, particularly with respect to Christian initiation (including baptism, confirmation, anointing with oil ("chrismation"), the laying-on of hands, and the eucharist) and accompanying liturgical works which have been handed down through the ages. Indeed, he begins his introduction to Worship: Initiation and the Churches (Washington, D.C.: The Pastoral Press, 1991) with the statement: "Thirty years ago, in 1961, my first article on Christian initiation appeared in print" (v). Accordingly, the various chapters in this book are a compilation of other works which have been written and/or revised in the intervening thirty years. Dr. Mitchell is an Episcopal cleric who has served on the Standing Liturgical Commission of the Episcopal Church, taught at Notre Dame, and is currently a Professor of Liturgics at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary.
Worship: Initiation and the Churches is written principally to delineate to Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Episcopal clergy the practices which were adopted by the early Roman church, as documented in the writings of the church fathers such as Tertullian, Ambrose, Hippolytus, Augustine, and others, (particularly of the second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries), and which survive today as part of the rich traditions in these denominations. Subsequent writings from the medieval period in the Mediterranean churches and in Spain are examined and included, as are those from the later middle ages and the Reformation, including the Anglican Prayer Book of 1549, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and, more recently, doctrinal treatises issued by the Roman Catholic church in the wake of Vatican Council II, such as the Ordo Baptismi Parvulorum (1969) and Ordo Initiationis Christianae Adultorum (1971) (generally referred to as the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults--RCIA--after the English translation of ...