I have given one subject quite an amount of thought, that of defining Anglican patrimony in relation with the Counter Reformation patrimony in Catholicism. It seems to me that this point has been narrowly missed in our postings and threads of comments, but never really addressed head-on.
The Counter-Reformation was the Catholic Church’s answer to the scourge of Protestantism, the loss of parts of Europe to the Church, and also to its own corruptions and problems in the clergy in the late middle-ages. It was therefore defined by the Protestantism challenging the Catholic world, and less by the early pre-decadent medieval tradition.
Europe was, from the late sixteenth century, divided into two kinds of reformations, one within the Church and the other against the Church. It is true that the Counter-Reformation brought many improvements into Catholic life like the revival of preaching, vernacular Bibles, practical mysticism of the Devotio Moderna, movements for ecclesistical reform headed by Saint Charles Borromeo among other great reforming bishops in Europe.
Most prominent in this movement, other than Popes like Paul IV and Saint Pius V, was Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the Society of Jesus. We see here the inspiration in the traditional Catholic movement of our own times in the foundation of several priestly institutes and religious communities following a strict rule. In the sixteenth century, several orders of regular clerics came into existence including the Theatines and the Barnabites. The Oratory of Saint Philip Neri was something absolutely unique and not at all typical of the authoritarian Spanish spirit.
The missionary work of the Jesuits, along with their work in education, theological research and preaching, was astounding in its brilliance and effect. Jesuits went to the Far East, and, a couple of centuries later, to South America .
The Roman Inquisition was established in 1542 by Paul III against Lutheranism in Italy. Many Popes from that moment onwards were former Inquisitors General, like Cardinal Caraffa who became Paul IV, and the Dominican Michael Ghislieri who became Pius V. What was corrupt in the Church was swept away by Protestantism or reformed by Catholic authority. The Church was faced with the challenge: “Put your house in order or we’ll come and do it for you”.
Bishops began to take their responsibility for their dioceses seriously and established seminaries for the training of clergy. Some Protestant gains were reversed by the influence of the Jesuits or remarkable saintly bishops like Saint Francis de Sales. The Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation strengthened the position of the Pope, leading to the Ultramontanist movement, and consolidated clericalism and authoritarianism. One unfortunate side-effect of this movement was the quest for absolute uniformity and the crushing of local traditions, perceived as a weakness in the reform movement. It was only with difficulty that the Byzantine communities were allowed to keep their traditional liturgies. The much-exalted Missal of Saint Pius V severely curtailed many wholesome and traditional aspects of the previous editions of the Roman Rite.
There were many shining aspects to the Counter Reformation, which are conspicuously absent from the thought and actions of Pope Benedict XVI. The present Pontiff is not a reformer or a counter-reformer, and this is, I am convinced, the key to understanding why Anglicanorum Coetibus saw the day only two years after a pastoral provision was requested by the Traditional Anglican Communion.
Many would like the Catholic Church to go back to Counter-Reformation ways, to the scholasticism of Bellarmine and Cajetan and to aggressive apologetics – and Pharisaical bigotry. We have had plenty of comments from a minority on The Anglo-Catholic showing this state of mind. Along with zealous orthodoxy comes the very real risk of falling into heresy – Donatism, the opinion that denies any Christian value or divine grace in schismatic or heretical communities of Christians. Anglicans are considered as suspect, and even more so when they are perceived to be imitating Catholics and “causing confusion”.
One effect of the Counter-Reformation was to marginalise a sense of history and tradition beyond the reforming movement. The Tridentine Fathers were concerned for keeping Tradition and referring to the ancient Church and the Fathers, but there was a movement seeking to break with the old established medieval Church. Emphasis would be put on the missions and a dynamic vision of the Church’s ministry. The liturgy was preserved, but it was also deprived of its character of organic development. It was hyper-legislated, codified and micro-managed. Nothing was to be left to anything other than the Congregation of Rites down to the least detail. Now, this might seem desirable in our age of total liturgical anarchy, but living in that policed and regulated environment must have been quite stifling between the late sixteenth century and the 1960’s.
The Catholic traditionalists of the Society of Saint Pius X founded in 1969 by Archbishop Lefebvre and the “dissidents” of that Society who accepted the deal from Rome in 1988 have followed Counter–Reformation spirituality and that way of thinking. I have a tremendous esteem for the Fraternity of Saint Peter and the Institute of the Good Shepherd among the various priestly societies, monasteries and religious congregations in full communion with Rome. Counter-Reformation Catholicism depends on strict authority and a cooperative secular authority. This is where the involvement of some of those people in extreme right-wing and nationalist politics comes from. They have seminaries, schools, dynamic parishes – many wonderful things and virtues – but do we want to conform to that mould. They have scouting movements and pilgrimages, the most famous of which is the Chartres Pilgrimage in France, held each Feast of Pentecost. Their way is not ours, even though there are many parallels.
We Anglicans are coming from somewhere else, even if some of our trappings look quite Counter-Reformation. We don’t like heavy-handed authority. English Anglo-Catholicism in the nineteenth century was quite “left-wing” in certain ways. The Establishment did not want Ritualist priests, so they established parishes in the poor districts of our cities and the slums. Tied up with Romanticism and medievalism, Anglo-Catholicism looked towards the Middle Ages and sought to recover something from that era of history and culture.
Anglicanism has always had that establishment character about it, not only its subservience to the State, but a stable and established local Church. I perceive the Anglican Patrimony as a kind of English Gallicanism, local Catholicism that fits into its ambient culture (I don't mean the anti-Christian "culture" of our time – I say this, as I can already hear you wince!) as well as maintaining links of communion with the Church elsewhere. Anglicanism broke from Rome, so this desire for universal communion manifested itself in the early Ecumenical movement.
This is the main thing I think we need to preserve. More than trappings or even particular liturgical rites, or things we can see and touch, our Patrimony is a spirit by which we live in the communion of the Universal Church. We eschew excessive authority and totalitarianism. I don’t know about the Americans and other Anglo-Saxons, but we English like to think we do things, not because we have to on pain of punishment, but we because we believe it is right. I have written on this stuff before, but not so far so explicitly in comparison with the Counter-Reformation spirit.
The Catholic Church sought to slough the Counter-Reformation image with Vatican II, but unfortunately many old assumptions and habits went unchallenged, and the intended renewal is still in our hopes and expectations. Many things were scrapped that should have been kept, and some of the worst aspects of totalitarian clericalism remained in the Vatican and dioceses around the world. Pope Benedict XVI lived all the way through those years, and it is fully understandable how he would not want to return to the kind of Church he knew as a boy and a young priest, or "evolve" to an extreme progressivism in the way Hans Küng did. The Church cannot go on oscillating between radicalism and reaction, but needs to find a solution above the old liberal / conservative dialectics. This, for Benedict XVI the visionary, is the interest of Anglicanism – if enough of us can be astute enough to go beyond our own institutional inertias and parochial concerns.
There’s the big picture! I hope we can rise to the challenge.
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Thank you Father. I couldn't have put it better myself. I attend what is often regarded as the most conservative Roman Catholic diocesan seminary in the United States. I know that there was a great deal of that Counter Reformation zeal in regards to the Ordinariates when they were first announced. Anything not Roman was considered bad. I pointed out to several of the students that the immense similarities between the Anglican and the Roman churches seemed to make this situation worse. After all it's easy to be in full communion with the Syro-Malankar church. You don't have to worry about a cultural "contamination," as it was often phrased. Over time however, and after repeated exposure to the best of the Anglican church ( i.e. I'm taking a group to go visit a TAC parish in two weeks), this attitude began to crumble. Now the seminarians and priests at the seminary are over the moon about the Ordinariates. Hopefully this will happen on a global scale where a simple exposure on both sides will smooth a lot of things over for both the Romans and the Anglicans. Once we start thinking of each other as "united family" and not "other" my personal experience tells me that the worst of the Counter Reformation spirit will fail. They'll always be a few hold outs but in the long run I think love and mutual appreciation will win over. The Church that comes out of this will be better because it is is both Roman and Anglican.
Father, you always manage to say what I'm thinking. Another excellent post. I've always tried to verbalize what exactly it was about "Traditional Roman" Catholicism that provided so much interior hesitation… I guess it's because I'm secretly a "Medievalist," not a "Traditionalist."
Some Protestant things are good and ought to be incorporated in the Catholic Church – some already are.
And the attempt to portray Cranmer, Luther and co, as villains is idiotic.
Whilst one could argue that Luther was an honourable man who lost his way in his zeal to cleanse corruption from the Church, Cranmer was a perfidious, conniving, coldly calculating Erastian. No "portrayal" as a villian is necessary. The facts speak for themselves.
Spot on. The more Roman Catholic than the Pope crowd are a worry. As a Catholic Jew I have encountered their rigidity and bigotry. I have been rediscovering Father Paul Levertoff who was an Hasidic Jew who became an Anglican priest and developed a Hebrew Anglican liturgy called "The Meal of the King' combining Anglican and hasidic liturgical elements. He was the vicar of Holy Trinity Shoreditch- his predecessor was a Anglo-Catholic priest Father Jay who converted a number of Jews to the faith that formed the base for Father Levertoff's experiment in a Hebrew Christian congregation approved by the then Bishop of London. Many Hebrew Catholics are watching the Anglican ordinariates with interest as a model for a possible future Jewish ordinariates. is it possible that the liturgy of Levertoff's group could be seen as part of the patrimony that the Anglican will bring into the Catholic Church?
I met Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (former Archbishop of Paris) several times, and there was a deep piety about him. I would love to see communities of Christians of Jewish origin. I am sure many of the rites of Judaism could continue to be used in a Christian context, and I have often heard of the Seder meal on Maundy Thursday. I welcome the idea of a Hebrew Ordinariate.
Some of the traditionalists are anti-Semitic, believing that the Jewish people are involved in some kind of conspiracy to rebuild the Temple and establish a World Order. I have never met a Rome-bound Anglican with any trace of anti-Semitism. The Holy Father has shown a great example to us all by visiting Auschwitz and the Rome Synagogue, and asking us all to revere the spiritual heritage of the Old Testament and honour the memory of those who have died by man's inhumanity to man.
We read the Old Testament and the Psalms – this cannot leave us indifferent!
You might be interested in the following web site: The Association of Hebrew Catholics.
I think you must have misunderstood my post. I am a Roman Catholic and have been for over 20 years and I am also a member of the Association of Hebrew Catholics.
There is, of course, an awful lot in this article that is impossible to disagree with. But I do think two things should be kept in mind in this area:
1) The linkage of Conservative Catholicism with the Right in Continental Europe and Latin America is the result of the path history took in those lands. Imagine what Anglicanism would look like had there been neither a Restoration nor a "Glorious" Revolution and subsequent compromises, and that England had subsisted all this time under a Cromwellian Republic (doubtless metamorphosing with time into something approaching the current moral mess). Without a doubt, Jacobitism would be seen by many as THE political position for believing Catholics and Anglicans.
On the other hand, imagine that the liberal Monarchies of 19th century France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc. had subsisted, and that sort of Whig compromise had become part of the fibre of those cultures. Without a doubt, most of the Catholics in those countries would be as malleable as the Anglican establishment is to-day (come to think of it, many of their bishops are!).
2) Many of the attitudes Father rightly decries were reinforced amongst Catholics in the English-speaking diaspora by the discrimination received by them at the hands of the Protestant and often Anglican social and political establishments in those countries (which in turn led to many, perhaps most, English-speaking Catholics failing to discern the differences within Anglicanism, nor the to take seriously the real accomplishments of Anglo-Catholicism). Of course, now believers of all stripes suffer the same sort sort of discrimination from establishments shorn of any real faith.
My point is that we cannot see Church history (and so the present) in a vacuum. So many times, Catholics (Roman, Anglo-, or Eastern) are faced with issues that ust be addressed in the immediate, and with solutions that are from ideal. In the aggregate, and over time, these very often provide the seeds of future problems.
As an aside, I very much hope that the future Ordinariates will be able to retain some sort of devotion vis-a-vis Charles I — if not as a Blessed, than at least as much as that which prevails in France and elsewhere for Louis XVI. After all, one of the reasons for his murder as cited at his trial was his fitful negotiations with Rome; and three of the four patrons of the Society of King Charles the Martyr are Roman (although I am aware that his memory is often invoked by those of the Continuum opposed to the ordinariates). I think his memory, and that of the Stuarts in general, can be very useful in showing English-speaking Catholics that there have been connexions of various kinds between Rome and Anglicanism since almost the beginning.
My apologies for an overly long post!
Yes, indeed, everything around us is the result of history. If history had been otherwise, the present would be different. We can't change the past, but we can work in the present to influence the future to some extent (as today is tomorrow's history).
I insist very strongly on a historical view of everything. Knowledge of history enables us to learn!
Just so! And, of course, virtuous acts in the present transform the significance of the past. One Saint in a family of sinners gives meaning and value to all that came before (though, of course, it does not excuse it). St. Augustine of Canterbury's work made the Anglo-Saxon invasion much more than the mere ruin of Roman Britain, and forced Catholics to look at England in a different light.
"Along with zealous orthodoxy comes the very real risk of falling into heresy – Donatism, the opinion that denies any Christian value or divine grace in schismatic or heretical communities of Christians. …..
….. . The liturgy was preserved, but it was also deprived of its character of organic development. It was hyper-legislated, codified and micro-managed. Nothing was to be left to anything other than the Congregation of Rites down to the least detail. Now, this might seem desirable in our age of total liturgical anarchy, but living in that policed and regulated environment must have been quite stifling between the late sixteenth century and the 1960’s."
An earlier link from this blog to Father Z's blog called the recent LA religious education conference "three days of darkness". This runs the same donatistic risk of calling that which is good, bad. We need reform of liturgical abuses without extinguishing that which is good.
Ultramontanism I find amusing. My family is Italian…not from Rome proper but close enough to be in its orbit and to have been under the rule of the Papal States for a long time. The blustering swagger of the ultramontanist traditionalists may seem understandably threatening to Anglo-Catholics and others….to me it is just laughable parody. Romans don't think this way–as some of you probably know better than I. And ultramontanism really is not where most contemporary Roman Catholics are philosophically, so I would put little stock in what the carping bloggers and commenters have to say.
But a couple of points. First, I don't think the Counter-Reformation period was quite the liturgical bulldozer that it is often made out to be. Quo Primum was certainly an attempt to standardize and limit. But it left in place all the local uses of the High Middle Ages. And the Jesuit missions of the Counter-Reformation period showed great adaptation liturgically. China was the most prominent example; but also here in North America by the 1680s the Roman Rite was being sung in the vernacular at the Indian Missions–up until, actually, the 1960s and the ICEL English liturgy. An interesting case of the Vatican II era squashing the liturgical diversity of the Counter Reformation.
As to a kind of "English Gallicanism." I'm no ecclesiastical historian, but from what I've read, the Gallicans of the Counter Reformation were a rather insufferable bunch who felt free to take a hatchet to the liturgy when it suited their ends. I believe they gutted the calendar in particular. I think Anglo-Catholicism is much a more authentic stream of Catholic thought and suffers from the comparison.
I would agree with you. Indeed, I made the point that the Church parted company with the Counter-Reformation with Vatican II and earlier in some places. The Counter-Reformation only reached France in the 17th century, and was never entirely implemented until the intégriste period of the early 20th century, imitated by some of the modern traditionalists.
The standard Roman Missal of 1570 respected all rites of more than 200 years standing. The Use of Sarum in England qualified amply. The Ambrosian, Lyons, Dominican, etc. rites continued in their respective places and communities. But, they were warmly encouraged to go Tridentine!
Gallicanism in 17th and 18th century France was a double-edged sword, and the simple priests readily accepted Ultramontanism for the simple reason that a far-away tyrant (the Pope) was better than a dictator Bishop on your own doorstep. Gallican reforms were never respecting of Tradition, but they were more conservative than their Anglican counterparts. French liturgies tended to be sumptuous, something like Sarum in its heyday. The Anglican equivalent was the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. So, if the French took a hatchet to their liturgy, the preferred tool of the English was a high-explosive bomb!
In reality, the Counter-Reformation arrived in Anglicanism from about the time when the English Missal began to be used – about 1912. It was simply the Roman rite in English. Victorian Anglo Catholicism was more influenced by Romanticism, medievalism and the dream of an English Church than by Anglo-Papalism. Newman sympathised more with men like Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans and Bishop Strossmeyer at Vatican I, than with the direction taken by the Jesuits and Pope Pius IX (La tradizione son'io!). I don't think Anglo-Catholicism (at least its 19th century expression) suffers excessively from a comparison with moderate Gallicanism.
And yet there was a warmth, I recall, in even the Anglo-Papal adherents. Having tea with the elder monks of Nashdom Abbey circa 1976 – there was no rigidity here compared with ultra-montane Romanist counterparts. Perhaps because they didn't possess a shred of ecclesiastical power. Even amongst the Roman counterparts, there were numbers of warm grace-filled papalists as well as the cold pelagian Latinists. Born again all, by the Holy Ghost, through the instrumentality of the Holy Sacraments, whether Anglican or Roman. Wheras with the cold pelagians, the flesh too strongly resisted its regeneration and its concomitant, Romans 8, walking and living by the Holy Spirit.