The Rev. Leo Malania Dies, Held Key Prayer Book Post
Episcopal News Service. September 8, 1983 [83158]
NEW YORK (DPS, Sept. 8) -- The Rev. Leo Malania, who served as coordinator of Prayer Book revision from 1968 until 1980, died Sept. 1 in Cooperstown, N.Y. He was 72.
As senior staff officer to the Standing Liturgical Commission Malania was responsible for overseeing and coordinating the work of the writers, editors, scholars, consultants, musicians and test congregations who were involved in the revision of the Church's Book of Common Prayer.
The Rt. Rev. Chilton Powell, retired bishop of Oklahoma, who served as chairman of the Standing Liturgical Commission during the revision years, said that Malania was responsible for the whole process of trial use over the nine-year period, including gathering and publication of the trial books, dissemination of the material and collation of the results for the Commission. He also coordinated the work of all the subcommittees, kept their correspondence and made it available to the Commission and maintained correspondence with diocesan liturgy and music commissions, and all bishops.
"It was a tremendous task of communication," Powell commented, adding "in addition, his own expertise as a liturgiologist was brought to bear on the Commission's editorial work on all of the texts."
Malania's gifts of handling tremendous detail and potential controversy were developed in a career that occupied him before his ordination. He served as special assistant in the United Nations Secretary General's office from that organization's founding through 1965.
"He was a committed, competent and hardworking priest, of course," Powell stated, " but, in addition, because of his work with the United Nations, he had a great deal of expertise in working with a variety of groups and viewpoints."
A native of Tiflis, in what is now the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, Malania was a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Education. He was special assistant at the United Nations secretariat from 1946 until 1965 and served as director and chief editor of that body's publication board.
He received his theological training at the Mercer School in the Diocese of Long Island and was ordained, took a parish in the borough of Queens, and joined the Mercer faculty in 1965. He continued those associations after he took on the Prayer Book task in 1968 and retired from them only this year.
He was a fellow of the North American Academy of Liturgists among other liturgical and homiletical panels and was honored for his work with honorary doctoral degrees from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific and Nashotah House.
A Requiem Eucharist was held in Cooperstown -- where he was vacationing with his wife, Fae, when he died -- and memorial services were held at St. David's, Queens, where he had been rector, and at Mercer.