Not being American, I perhaps pick up things with a different level of sensitivity. I am English and have spent more than half my life in Continental Europe, mostly in France. And so, each morning, I go through the blogs and other sources of news and information. Some of those blogs are written and commented by men who identify with a form of Anglicanism (something that would have been strange to me as an esrtwhile Anglican layman in the 1970's). I am mildly surprised to find comments written by priests who are neither Roman Catholic, nor Anglican or even belonging to a church of the Union of Utrecht. Well, I won't go on and on about the relative risks of walking into a Roman "fly-trap" or belonging to a small church body that has a more than doubtful future on its own.

My subject for this posting is a certain vision of Anglicanism that I can only perceive as unreal, a caricature like certain forms of extreme Catholic traditionalism like sedevacantism. Like the sedevacantists, certain priests I have come to label, tongue-in-cheek, as Anglo-Jansenists, become increasingly shrill and intemperate. What is it with these people? What is the vision they are trying to uphold, or is it merely a bid for power and spiritual monopoly? Under all the rhetoric, there is an underlying vision.

It is through something of a study of Church history, and with no small thanks to Fr. Guy Bedouelle OP, my old church history professor at Fribourg, that I coined the term Anglo-Jansenism – a vision of the Church similar to that of the French and Flemish Jansenists of the 17th and 18th centuries, but within an Anglican context. Jansenism was an exaggeration of the doctrines of Saint Augustine concerning original sin, human depravity, the necessity of divine grace, and predestination. Many of the proponents of Jansenism were deeply spiritual and literary men and women, particularly the Cistercian nuns of Port-Royal and fine authors like Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal, Jean Racine, and many others. I don't think most American Anglicans go to this extent, but the tendency is there, especially in the notion of Tradition I criticised above. The nuns of Port Royal were called as pious as angels and as proud as demons. It is a refusal of history beyond a perceived golden period and an illusory idea of restoring the norms of the primitive Church. Sometimes, it gets forgotten that Saint Augustine of Hippo did not use the 1928 American Prayer Book in his diocese in the 4th century! Archaeologism is a serious mistake to make, and this caused the heartache caused by the liturgical errors of the 1960's like Mass facing the people. Great scholars like the present Pope, Msgr Gamber and Louis Bouyer attested from their research that altars facing the people were unknown in the early Church and that their invention is modern and on an ideological basis.

It was Blaise Pascal who wrote: L'homme n'est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l'ange fait la bête. Indeed, the one who exaggerates his piety will fall into sin and evil. It was during the same period, in the mid seventeenth century, that Molière – that great French playwright – wrote Tartuffe, exactly about that most destestable kind of religious hypocrite that Jansenism produced. Which English schoolboy has not read Robert Burns' poem Holy Willie's Prayer?

Before the nineteenth century, the prevailing notion of Tradition was a simple transmission of a fixed body of practices and doctrines the Apostles gave to their successors, and through them to us, a corpus of teaching which the Church must preserve. This corpus of doctrine had to be what had always been taught, everywhere and universally, as expressed by the famous Quod Ubique, of St Vincent of Lérins. One would seek to establish that a given doctrine is explicitly or implicitly expressed in Scripture, taught by the Fathers, and continuously believed by the whole Church in all places and times. When you have people squabbling on the basis of the same premises, locked in the same essential mentality, things quickly became a situation of stalemate.

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), Bishop of Meaux put forward a theory by which all variation in religion was a sign of error suggesting that Christianity came from its Founder completely formulated, and had always been maintained in its integrity by the Magisterium of the Church. Therefore, any religion that varied in its teaching or practice was deemed heretical. Only the Catholic Church, according to the Bishop of Meaux, had remained immutable. It is not without significance that the theological movements both sides of the English Channel – the French Jansenists and the Caroline Divines – held to this fundamental view.

Jansenism consists not merely of this immobilist point of view, but also of archaeologism in the same way as many of the Reformers and an excessively pessimistic view of humanity as a creation of God. Go back to the primitive Church, refuse developments, because developments are accretions to be rejected as impure.

I think the real difference between some Anglican communities and the movement towards Rome on the part of the TAC and other Anglicans, especially English and Australian ones, is accepting the notion of homogenous development put forward by John Henry Newman. With Newman, the mainstream of modern Catholic theology and many of our own minds, we accept the notion of organic development of both doctrine and praxis in the Church over the centuries. We cannot return to the Patristic era any more than remain frozen in a particular era, be it the mid 17th century in England or the 16th in Italy. Many great things are learned from history, but things have changed – organically, we hope, and in a hermeneutic of continuity. Such changes are good and necessary. Others, in a spirit of rupture, have to be rejected because of their intrinsic contradiction against Tradition.

We in the TAC are Anglicans and have mostly been brought up in that tradition. At the same time, we are aware that our Church before 1530 was Roman Catholic in the same way the Church of France under Louis XIV was also Roman Catholic. Both Churches were at one time in communion with Rome whilst according great importance to the Monarchy and the Episcopate in the life of the Church. The English Church broke from Rome under Henry VIII, but Louis XIV remained in communion with Rome. Anglicanism, in our view, is a kind of English Gallicanism – a particular way of living the universality of the one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Under Benedict XVI, these particularities are welcome as long as we all profess the one Catholic Faith in its wholeness – in what is necessary, unity – in questionable matters, freedom – in everything, charity. Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI himself speaks of his Papal authority of one of service and ecclesial communion in love, and not political domination.

Some good things came out of the Reformation: the Bible in the vernacular, the liturgy in the vernacular, a great devotion to the Holy Scriptures, moral rectitude and seriousness in life, more confidence placed in God than in our own feeble human efforts, the wealth of humanist culture, and many more things. We are bringing many of these things with us, since they are no less parts of universal Catholic culture. But, Anglicanism has been mistaken in many things, and for this reason, Anglicanism must either be revised and transfigured or forsaken.

PS. If I have used terms or names you find confusing, look them up on Google or Wikipedia.

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