As a Baptist, I came upon one church after another that had written its own statement of faith. Each one had a different phrase or point that they felt was essential that the others did not have. I, myself, had wanted some kind of "confession of faith" that was more broadly based. I sought after something that would have some historicity to it; I liked reading the Church Fathers, and I earnestly longed to be able to say, "our confession was first written hundreds of years ago" (to me that felt like it would be ancient). Eventually, I found the London Baptist Confession of 1689 and thought I had seen the shekinah glory. From there, the transition was quite easy to the Westminster Confession of Faith (the confession written by Presbyterians in 1647). The two were very similar and that meant there was little that was new. Though I had a few "exceptions" over issues that I was unconvinced about (I never believed the Pope was the Antichrist) I stayed with that as "my" confession for many years.

When I joined the Reformed Episcopal Church some of the priests referred to themselves as "Presbyterians with a Prayer Book" so that made the move into a logical next step in my spiritual journey. That meant the Thirty-Nine Articles. The substance of the Articles was not terribly different than what I was used to in Reformed Presbyterian circles. I read them, studied them, discussed them, wrote articles on them, and bought a number of books that gave deeply specific exegesis.

At this point, I became acutely aware of something that disturbed me. Whereas in Protestant Evangelical circles there were numerous opinions as to what each statement of the confessions exactly meant, they each believed that there really had to be only one true opinion. In all these Anglican commentaries, I was finding a resistance to "over-defining" and something of a joy in being non-specific. I even had one priest tell me that the "unofficial mascot" of Anglicanism was the duck-billed platypus; because he was so hard to narrow down and define, and "Anglicans like it that way". About the same time, I was at a synod meeting and listened to a debate over the particulars of one statement in the diocesan constitution. The first comment was, "can we be more clear and define exactly what it means for the priest to ensure 'reverent music' in the liturgy?" The response was, "no, most of us prefer things less specific, that is what it means to be Anglican after all."

Then I picked up a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and I started to read. By comparison with the Confessions I once held to, or the Articles that (I thought) I held to, this was massive. I even once asked myself if anyone could really be sure about that much? As I read, I found a wealth of information and specific definitions that was exactly what I had been looking for all my life. Yes, this "statement of faith" had only been written a few years before, but its content was the same as what the Church held to centuries before any Protestant Confession came on the scene. This was definitive truth that was not a resistance to clarity. With an allowance for variation in non-essentials, it was an encouragement to faithfulness in the essentials. Things that were left vague in the Anglican denomination I was a part of (artificial contraception, tradition, ecclesiastical authority, etc.), were now a "given", and with the authority of the historic Church behind it. I found such joy in digesting these words, that I began to find that the "via media" of Anglicanism was not much different than the "everyone interprets for himself" that I came across so often in Protestantism.

If being "non-specific" in the arena of theology and practice really is a part of the Anglican Patrimony, then that is something we should not try to maintain in the Ordinariates. Though there are Anglicans who are pleased with the specificity of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, there are others who prefer things left open and vague; apparently so that each priest can "choose for himself" and not have any rules to tie him down. This may work fine when everyone agrees on the historic faith, but when the historic faith is jettisoned (as in the TEC) chaos will soon follow. If we let each man decide for himself we are slowly, but surely, led into positions that our forefathers would have gagged at. The "undefined Anglican" way can easily be confused with being gracious towards our brethren and thus giving them the benefit of the doubt in those non-essential areas where we may not see eye to eye. The latter practice is a good thing, and it shows brotherly love and the biblical principle of treating others as better than ourselves. Yet, the desire to maintain a lack of clarity so that we can be free of restrictions is a dangerous thing. The sinfulness of our hearts cannot be trusted, and the latitude that comes with being "undefined" can only lead to another disaster like The Episcopal Church. When we enter the Ordinariate, let us rejoice in the specifics; thank the Magisterium for their teaching; and give praise to God that we have a clear direction to go in and a definition of who we are and how we are to live.

St. Paul on the facade of the Basilica of Ss. Peter & Paul, Philadelphia

Bishop Mercer’s moving address at the ACCC Synod brought to mind the section I had just read in Fr. Basil Maturin’s The Price of Unity, in which he recounts the Conversion of St. Paul.

In this section from the first chapter, Fr. Maturin speaks of how the experience on the road to Damascus left Paul the same man but completed him.  It has several parallels with Bishop Mercer's analogy of the Ordinatiate offering the opportunity to be Anglican but to be something more than one was before.  It is a fairly long section, so I won't block quote it.

* * *

At the moment of his conversion, St. Paul, as quickly as possible, escaped from the crowd, and in the solitude of, as some think, Mount Sinai, thought out seriously and deeply, for three years, the relations between the old religion which he had left, and the new into which he had entered.

… The change was overwhelming.  In a way, it affected his whole character, yet, in a way, it did not.  It transformed him, it endowed him with new gifts enriched, broadened, expanded his whole nature, it turned the narrow Pharisee, the typical Jew, who looked with religious contempt upon the Gentile world, and gloried in the Law, into the great Catholic Apostle.  But the man himself was always fundamentally the same, the new was grafted upon the old.  All that was good in him remained, all that was true in his old faith he clung to, to the end.  There was the same enthusiasm, the same whole-hearted devotion to what he believed, perhaps a little of the same intolerance.  May it not be said of him as he passed from his narrow creed to the larger faith of the Catholic Church, that he is a typical instance of the truth of our Lord s words, "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."  His character, his faith, were not destroyed by Christ, but fulfilled.

It would be difficult to find an instance of a man so changed as Saul of Tarsus, breathing slaughter against the followers of the Nazarene, and that same man, Paul the aged, writing from his prison in Rome: "Who is weak and I am not weak, who is offended and I burn not, I have become all things to all men, that by all means I might save some."  Yet he was the same man still, though transformed.

Yet, be it noted this transformation was effected not by revolutionary means, though it did effect a revolution in him, as it did in the world to which he preached, but by conservative means.

A new, an infinite, a blinding truth, suddenly burst in upon his soul, amidst a number of old, and some of them but partial truths.  The first effect of this amazing revelation must have been to blind him to everything else.  It took, no doubt for the time, complete possession of his mind.  "The Nazarenes are right, Jesus who was crucified is on the Throne of God."  This new Truth made an appeal that had to be acted upon, and at once. He cannot go on persecuting this sect which he now knows for certain to be right.  His mission is brought suddenly to an end, all kinds of complications involve him on every side, but for the moment this new Truth blinds his eyes to everything else, it rings through every chamber of his soul with pealing notes, which deafens his ears to every other voice.

But in time other things would begin to take their place in his mind.  All he had learned and believed so ardently in the past.  The training and habits of his whole life would begin to assert themselves.  The Rabbinical interpretation of the Scriptures which he had learnt from his youth, the received explanation of certain Messianic prophecies, and the words of those prophecies themselves, would again make themselves heard.  His old habits of thought, old memories and affections twined closely round the associations of a lifetime, the spiritual hopes and aspirations of one of the most ardent and religious natures, all began to awaken from the stunning blow they received on the Damascus road.  By degrees his mind would assume its normal life, and his mental powers regain their balance, but with this difference, that a new and far-reaching Truth had taken possession of him, and, like a search-light, was pouring its brilliant beams into the deepest recesses of his soul, and bring ing everything he had ever known and believed under its sway.

At first possibly it seemed to him that, if this Truth were to reign and rule him, everything else must go, it was so mighty, so startling, so different from all his traditional beliefs, that to all appearance it was impossible that anything of the old could remain with the new.  It was so utterly revolutionary.  But gradually the force of the past would assert itself, convictions that have held their sway all one s life are, not easily abandoned; doctrines, that have proved their worth and their truth by their results, are not lightly discarded.  And this new Truth, as it was turned on all those other beliefs that he had hitherto held, began to take its proper place, as Lord and Ruler indeed, but as a wise ruler who seeks to make alliances with friendly Powers and not to consider all the subjects of his new dominions as enemies.

The mind makes an effort at a synthesis.  Under the influence of the new Truth many old Truths are found to open and expand.  Many things that were looked upon as ultimate truths proved themselves to have been but half-truths.  Many puzzling anomalies in the old beliefs are removed.  Unexpected relations are discovered between paradoxes that seemed irreconcilable, and things that were clung to in spite of their apparent unreasonableness, are found to have their place.  Connecting links are discovered between doctrines that to all appearance had no relation to one another, and all that was unreasonable is discarded, and things that seemed meaningless are shown to have their meaning.  Dislocated fragments of unconnected truths take their place and find their true interpretation, and many a doctrine or practice that seemed at first sight as if it could no longer be held, if the new Truth is to be maintained, is found on the contrary to take a higher place.  And all that cannot be reconciled with the new Truth must go, but it goes, so to speak, of itself it is pushed quietly aside without much of a jerk or a jar, in the splendid synthesis by which all gathers around the new, central, all-combining truth, and discloses its place and meaning.

In the outburst of the light that shone upon the mind of St. Paul, it must have seemed to him at first that the newly received doctrine of the Incarnation was irreconcilable with his old monotheistic faith; but he found, on the contrary, that it enriched and enlarged it.  How was his mission to the Gentiles to be reconciled with the traditional belief that the Jews alone were the people of God?  It would seem as if they were irreconcilable, and that one or other must be abandoned.  He gives his solution in the Epistle to the Ephesians, and shows how, so far from being irreconcilable, one was the complement and expansion of the other.  The new Truth throws a new light upon the old, and so far from destroying it, showed that it had a power of broadening and unfolding, like a seed under the warmth and light of the sun.

Now I have taken this instance of St. Paul s conversion as a typical example of what I venture to call the conservative method of dealing with a new Truth suddenly and unexpectedly taking possession of a soul.  Of how, to a thoughtful man, who had hitherto lived in all good conscience in a system that was only partially true, and, mixed with what was true, had held certain traditional beliefs that were not true, of how such a man takes into himself the new Truth.  It destroys all that was untrue, and it fulfils and unfolds to its utmost capacities the more or less crude conceptions of truth that he already held.  It becomes the centralizing and developing principle of his life.  It brings together the past and the present.  It engrafts itself upon the old stock.  It shows hidden depths that he had hitherto never seen, in his old beliefs.  The new truth becomes a source of revelation of unperceived meanings in the old truths, but it preserves every fragment of truth which had ever been held in the past, and it destroys everything hitherto held that was not true.  It winnows the threshing floor.  As St. John Baptist says, it "gathers the truth into the garner, and burns up the chaff in fire unquenchable."  In the synthesis that follows from the light of the new truth, all that is untrue, automatically, and I may say almost unconsciously, drops out.

* * *

How would you define an Anglo-Catholic?

The Church of England contains many varieties of Christians. Those who are nearer to the Catholic understanding of Scripture, Tradition and the Church, and who express this in their language (speaking, for instance, of the Altar, rather than the Holy Table) and their practice (celebrating the Eucharist regularly and frequently, in many churches not simply every week, but every day) would be called ‘Anglo-Catholic’.

You have been an Anglican bishop for the past fifteen years. What has been your role as a ‘flying bishop’?

In 1992 the central Council of our Church, the General Synod, decided that women might be ordained to the priesthood. In doing so it also said that those who did not accept this innovation must have provision made for them to enable them to continue as faithful Anglicans. For this purpose each Archbishop (there are two in England) consecrated one or two bishops, themselves opposed to women’s ordination, to minister to individuals and congregations who voted to ask for such extra provision. They were suffragans of the Archbishops, and so known as Provincial Episcopal Visitors (PEV’s) or, colloquially, ‘flying bishops’. My remit, for six years from 1995-2001, was to travel the length and breadth of the Eastern half of the Canterbury Province. I was consecrated to the See of Richborough – a title taken from the site where St Augustine set foot in England on his mission from Pope Gregory. On my retirement I became simply a super-numerary and honorary bishop in the diocese where I live, Winchester. My successor as Bishop of Richborough is Bishop Keith Newton.

Did the creation by Pope Benedict XVI of new Personal Ordinariates for Anglicans who wish to enter full communion with the Catholic Church come as a surprise for you?

The Holy Father’s initiative, directed at Groups of Anglicans, came as a great and very welcome surprise.

Many people ask “why now?” If Anglo-Catholics wish to seek communion with the See of Rome, why have they waited until now? Is it just a matter of women bishops or something deeper?

Many of us have believed that the Church of England was moving, for the past century at least, in an ever more catholic direction. With the international conversations between the Anglican Communion and Rome (the ARCIC Conversations) we believed and hoped there would be corporate reunion for us in our lifetime. Since the ordination of women to the priesthood, and now the likelihood of their consecration as bishops, that has faded as an impossible dream.

What are the main elements of the Anglican Patrimony you would like the Ordinariates to preserve?

Our fathers in the faith spoke of “reserve” in matters of faith. That is, a sort of quiet and simple spirit in the best of Anglican use. It has seemed to me a religious voice, a tone, in keeping with our national character. The language of our Prayer Book which introduced the vernacular into our worship five centuries ago seems to catch something of this plain, undemonstrative but deeply felt religious sensibility. But in truth, I think we cannot discover our Patrimony until we see it in a completely Catholic context.

Do you expect the Anglican Ordinariates to attract many people in England and Wales? Will whole parishes take the plunge?

It is difficult at present to see how it will be possible for entire parishes to join the Ordinariate, simply because the Church of England is very territorial, and will not readily part with, for instance, its buildings. For all that, there are several priests I know who are preparing their congregations, and who will take the first opportunity of belonging whether they can retain their parish churches or not.

Do you believe some Anglican Bishops will enter the Ordinariates? Are you personally planning to avail yourself of this opportunity?

Certainly I know of several Bishops who are exploring the possibility, as I am myself. I can see no other future for catholics in the Church of England than this.

Would you be willing to seek ordination in the Roman Catholic Church? Would you consider ordination or whatever your role is in the Ordinariate a denial of your pastoral work in the Anglican Communion or rather a culmination of that work?

Because the Holy Father’s appeal is to Groups of Anglicans, I believe my personal future is unimportant compared with what is offered to us all. If it is decided that my ministry can continue, and that I may be ordained a Priest in the Catholic Church, then I should be delighted – but I should join the Ordinariate unconditionally, and let others decide whether there might still be something for me to undertake. I am sure that the simple fact of joining the Ordinariate will be the crown and completion of my ministry up to this point.

What are the main difficulties you envisage in this adventure, both for yourself and for most Anglo-Catholics? Will the need to accept the faith of the Roman Catholic Church as proclaimed by the Catechism be an obstacle for many Anglo-Catholics?

I think for some Anglicans there are stumbling blocks within the Catechism. We have been separated from the Catholic mainstream for five hundred years, and there have been developments in doctrine with which we are unfamiliar. As a frequent visitor to Fatima, I have no difficulty with the Marian dogmas. There was a time when I found it hard to accept the Immaculate Conception (for I did not properly understand it) and Papal Infallibility. Others may still find these to be difficulties for them – I do not. And I hope and believe the Church will be very understanding and patient in explaining these matters. Far more important for me is the readiness of the Holy Father to accept and ordain men who have been married Anglican clergy. My wife has been a great help and adornment to my ministry, and I am glad there is the possibility that, should I be ordained a Catholic priest, this would continue.

Some members of the Ordinariates will come from the Anglican Communion, while others will come from different groups, such as the Traditional Anglican Communion, or even from Anglican Use parishes? Do you think that diversity will be a problem?

I believe that Anglicans in North America and elsewhere have been in such difficult situations that for them actual schism from the Anglican Communion has been necessary. I know several such priests and parishes, and have no doubt that we shall learn from one another and come to value one another. One of my greatest friends is a Priest of the Anglican Use in Texas, and I think he and I have more in common than I do with most of those in England who call themselves members of our church.

Do the Anglican Ordinariates have a future in the Catholic Church? How do you envisage them in, say, one hundred years?

I believe the Catholic Church is very patient; and I am sure she will want to learn from this experiment. I hope, personally, that the experience of a married priesthood might at some future date enable the Church to recognise that it is possible to have a double vocation, to the priesthood and to holy matrimony. I am greatly impressed by the way the Holy Father has introduced Anglicanorum Coetibus, making it clear that this is not a short-term solution to present-day problems, but a generous open offer for many years, perhaps centuries, to come. So who knows, it may be that eventually the Church of England will indeed return to her roots and become part of the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church which she has always claimed to be.

How will the leaving (maybe we might say expelling) of Anglo-Catholics affect the Anglican Communion? Would it mean the end of its claim to be a branch of the Catholic Church? Do you expect the Anglican Communion to change much in the following years or decades?

It seems to me we are witnessing the break-up of the Anglican Communion – which was always a rather anomalous fruit of Empire. Gradually individual national churches will, I think, either join the Catholic Church, or dwindle into some amorphous protestant body, incapable of making any real witness to society.

What will the Roman Catholic Church gain by the ‘coming home’ of the Anglo-Catholics?

I hope we shall all gain enormously from this home-coming; it will be a reunion of friends, to replace the Parting of Friends of which Newman spoke.

How is Card. Newman regarded by Anglo-Catholics? Will you attend his beatification in September? Would you like to see him as one of the patron saints of the Ordinariates?

I believe John Henry Cardinal Newman has had a hand in what is happening in England today. Many of us are very glad to have him as a fellow-countryman. If I were permitted to be at his beatification I can think of no greater honour; and whether or not he is named as a patron of the Ordinariates, I am sure we should all be seeking his prayers at this wonderful time.

So this is Newman's prediction come true in our time and on our watch:

"In no other sense surely; the Church of England has been the instrument of Providence in conferring great benefits on me;—had I been born in Dissent, perhaps I should never have been baptized; had I been born an English Presbyterian, perhaps I should never have known our Lord's divinity; had I not come to Oxford, perhaps I never should have heard of the visible Church, or of Tradition, or other Catholic doctrines. And as I have received so much good from the Anglican Establishment itself, can I have the heart or rather the want of charity, considering that it does for so many others, what it has done for me, to wish to see it overthrown? I have no such wish while it is what it is, and while we are so small a body. Not for its own sake, but for the sake of the many congregations to which it ministers, I will do nothing against it. While Catholics are so weak in England, it is doing our work; and, though it does us harm in a measure, at present the balance is in our favour. What our duty would be at another time and in other circumstances, supposing, for instance, the Establishment lost its dogmatic faith, or at least did not preach it, is another matter altogether. In secular history we read of hostile nations having long truces, and renewing them from time to time, and that seems to be the position which the Catholic Church may fairly take up at present in relation to the Anglican Establishment.

Doubtless the National Church has hitherto been a serviceable breakwater against doctrinal errors, more fundamental than its own. How long this will last in the years now before us, it is impossible to say, for the Nation drags down its Church to its own level…"

What I am saying is that now the Church of England is rapidly losing this role as "a serviceable breakwater," the task of orthodox Christian apologetics becomes more urgent, not less, because we are engaged in a battle against heresy which will inevitably follow us wherever our final ecclesial destination may be. The victory of liberalism in the Church of England can only give encouragement to its supporters elsewhere.

Perhaps I'm an incurable romantic, but I don't believe this defeat was inevitable. If over the last fifty or sixty years Anglican Catholics had been better organised, better and more consistently led, and less easily convinced of both our own success and of our opponents' sense of  honour, and all of us less enamoured of the spirit of the age, things could have turned out very differently. What has now happened is in no sense whatsoever a victory and it should not give us cause for any kind of satisfaction, much less rejoicing.

But this is Newman again, once more from the Apologia, summing up what many of us are — with infinite regret – now feeling:

"…and, unwilling as I am to give offence to religious Anglicans, I am bound to confess that I felt a great change in my view of the Church of England. I cannot tell how soon there came on me,—but very soon,—an extreme astonishment that I had ever imagined it to be a portion of the Catholic Church. For the first time, I looked at it from without, and (as I should myself say) saw it as it was. Forthwith I could not get myself to see in it any thing else, than what I had so long fearfully suspected, from as far back as 1836,—a mere national institution."

Over the last few years my family has been excitedly discovering Catholic practices and expressions of faith. For them it is entirely new; for me, I have a vague recollection of some of these things. Sacramentals, feasts, fasts, the Baltimore Catechism, etc. Something as simple as not eating meat on Friday is a clear way of being willing to give up something for the sake of our Lord. While speaking with a friend recently, I was told that most Anglo-Catholics do not give a "hoot" about such practices. I hope he is mistaken on this.

As I talk with the local Catholic priest, it speaks volumes to display our willingness to practice certain Catholic traditions that most Catholics do not pay any attention to. No, we should not be trying to "one up" them, and come across as being "more Catholic than the Catholics" but we should be showing our willingness to be faithful to all things Catholic (especially those good practices which may not be necessary). An example may be helpful here. Children should never be thanked for obedience. It makes it seem as though their obedience to their parents is something they do as a favor (out of the kindness of their hearts). They should be commended and encouraged ("good job, son"), but never thanked. A "thanks" goes to something that is done unnecessarily (merely out of the desire to do something for the other person); thanks should be given when the child goes out of his way to show love on his own initiative.

It is these "extra special" acts of willing submission to simple practices like I am speaking of that shows to the world (and to God) that we enjoy following our Lord. So, if you had bacon for breakfast, or ham for lunch, or a steak for dinner today, you can still do something different next week. Most restaurants have "fish Friday" for that very reason. So plan ahead with your family; choose something different on the menu when you order; be willing to say "no thank you, I'm Catholic." Not with selfish pride, but with joy.

However, if the recent proposals of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York are passed without amendment, and that is a long way from being even a racing certainty, those who stay and minister within the new dispensation (often trapped because of circumstances of various kinds, together with those who have no other theological place elsewhere) will be faced with a very much compromised and impoverished ecclesiology (even for us Anglicans who, the ecclesiastical world knows, don't do ecclesiology) and a future which falls far short of Forward in Faith's express aim of  providing a secure ecclesial future for our children and grandchildren, and which certainly does nothing to address the aim of promoting ecumenism with Rome and the East, save providing the Anglican establishment with a handy figleaf with which to clothe their essential indifference and even hostility towards catholic ecumenism.

We know very well, wherever we ourselves end up, that the question of any Anglican decision as to its future direction (posed starkly by Cardinal Kasper at the last Lambeth Conference) will, GAFCON notwithstanding, have been decided in favour not only of Protestantism, but liberal revisionist Protestantism. Anglican identity will have undergone as radical a shift as has occurred anywhere in its history, and the remaining rump of 'Catholic' sacramentalists committed to apostolic faith and order, will be completely powerless to change that. For as long as they (are permitted to) remain, they will be perhaps a nagging and increasingly uncomfortable reminder to the rest of the Communion of what might have been had the convergence of the ARCIC process not been sabotaged by Anglican unilateralism, but I suspect only the space of a short generation will put paid to their resistance.

So, whatever our individual decisions might be now or later this year in terms of joining the Ordinariate, we should certainly all pray for its success; because it alone is capable of guaranteeing the true spirit of the Oxford Movement and any long-term future Anglo-Catholicism may have.

Certainly one historical parallel we should strenuously resist as being applicable to our current problems is that of the situation prevailing in the Church of England following the conversion of John Henry Newman in 1845.

Here is Edward Bouverie Pusey writing perhaps more appositely to our present circumstances:

…"and we shall then see, I hope, that all which hold 'the deposit of the faith' (the Creeds, as an authority without them) will be on one side, the Eastern, the Western, our own', and those who lean on their own understanding on the other. I wish you would not let yourself be drawn off by your fears of 'Popery'. While people are drawn off to this, the enemy (heresy of all sorts, misbelief, unbelief) is taking possession of our citadel. Our real battle is with infidelity, and from this Satan is luring us off."

[from a letter of 1844 to W. F. Hook]

And again:

"I look with terror on any admission of laity into Synods. It at once invests them with an ecclesiastical office, which will develop itself sooner or later, I believe, to the destruction of the faith."

[from a letter to John Keble]

But even Dr Pusey reckoned without the Anglican trahison des clercs, always present to a greater or lesser  extent throughout our separate history, but which gathered pace from the middle of the twentieth century until the citadels indeed were captured.

So, in the present confusion, what would Dr Pusey have done?

"There has been a lot of quite triumphalistic stuff around, ‘Catholicism without Peter is not Catholicism’; well, quite; I believe that myself. But the trouble is that Anglicanism, despite the common assertion, is not so much Catholic and Reformed (meaning 100% of both), because that, frankly, would be contradictory. It means that there are compromises, and elements of both, in differing cocktail strengths, plus other stuff (liberalism, for instance). One might call oneself a Catholic (within the C of E, I mean) but not actually share all the teachings of Vatican II, Vatican I or even Trent. What it means is that one believes in a cocktail that is Catholic-heavy, if I can put it like that, and the elements that go to make up the Catholic bit can differ from person to person.

To some, union with Peter may indeed be desirable, one day, but there is a lot of other stuff to get out of the way first. Such a person may nevertheless feel much more comfortable in the company of Catholic-minded colleagues than among the usual mix in his deanery chapter. He may even belong to SSC and Forward in Faith. He may hate the notion of women’s orders. But is he really expected, then, to believe also in Papal Infallibility and the wrongness of artificial contraception, and, most painful of all, to submit to ordination in  forma absoluta…?"

Read it all.

For many clergy — in Wales certainly, but throughout the Anglican world — the sticking point where it comes to the Ordinariates is precisely this question of (re)ordination. It's not a concern I share myself, having enough anxiety about the doctrinal history of Anglicanism (not exactly diminished by recent decisions) to be too bullish about the sufficiency of our orders by themselves. From the perspective of both sides, some further act of sacramental validation is necessary to remove all vestiges of doubt. It's the price that has to be paid for sacramental certainty (not to mention reunion with Peter) and I don't think we should complain about it.

But do I understand those who say to me: 'How can I deny the validity of my priesthood and my sacramental actions in (say) decades of  pastoral ministry? How can I say that what I have always regarded as Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is, in effect, a piece of bread and no more? I'm not at all convinced that that is what submitting to further ordination does commit us to, but there is a lot of work which needs to be done within our tradition in order to allay quite understandable fears of this kind. In the end, of course, these kind of  worries may be as much emotional as theological, making them so much more difficult to overcome. Given the fact that this will be an ongoing process over a period of years not months, what more should we be doing in this regard?

I found myself in agreement with most of what Fr. Rutler said, but I was a bit discomfited by his pessimistic assessment of contemporary Anglican liturgy.

As far as aesthetic patrimony goes, the typical Anglican forms of worship are no more elevated than the ordinary Catholic liturgy of our day, now happily under revision.

Setting aside the fact that he paints a rose-colored picture of the Roman Catholic liturgical landscape (which, admittedly, is slowly but assuredly being renewed), if Fr. Rutler's point of reference for Anglican liturgical forms is the current state of PECUSA, then this observation might well be reasonable, but it certainly does not take into account the generally quite dignified liturgical praxis of those Anglicans actually planning to avail themselves of the Holy Father's offer.  As Fr. Rutler's name has intriguingly — and quite unexpectedly — surfaced in conjunction with the anticipated personal ordinariate in the USA, I, for one, am eager to hear more from Fr. Rutler about his affinity with those of us who will soon be filling the ranks of the new jurisdiction.

* * *

The Present Importance of Newman's View of Anglicanism
Fr. George William Rutler

On my 60^th birthday, friends gave me a spiritual bouquet and, as there are a variety of spirits, they included a bottle of 1945 Armagnac.   When I open that bottle I shall be able to smell the liberation of Paris, but the question is: when should I open such a valuable thing?  James Anthony Froude recalled that “though (Newman) rarely drank wine, he was trusted to choose the vintages for the college cellar.”  While good souls have been sipping the wine of Newman all these years like sommeliers arguing over the taste, it is now time to drink it full.  For when Pope Benedict beatifies the great man, Deo volente, this year,  he will be telling the world that the vintage pressed long ago is full ready for general consumption.  Newman has been remaindered too often to the pantheon of beloved intellects whose poetic charm overcame the distractions of their religion, the same way temperamentally fragile revisionists played down Francis of Assisi as a mystical stigmatist, and turned him into an ecological birdbath ornament.

Newman was born in his day for today.  The Established Church of his youth, which seemed like a flagship of empire is now breaking on the shoals of reality, and what Newman proposed as a challenge to something mighty is now a call to rescue survivors.  Yet in any such calamity there are both flotsam and jetsam.  Pope Benedict’s decision on November 4 of 2009 to receive Anglicans in a canonical personal ordinariate, was a response to an appeal.  He is not rummaging for flotsam, those floating logs who will drift to any safe shore. The Pope welcomes a full profession of faith in the Catholic creeds and a rejection of all that the sectaries have said in their contradiction.  The jetsam are those who have been propelled by circumstance into a positive recognition that their old craft was not the Barque of Peter.  In the opening paragraph of the apostolic constitution “Anglicanorum coetibus,” the Holy Father says,  “The Apostolic See has responded favorably to such petitions.  Indeed, the successor of Peter, mandated by the Lord Jesus to guarantee the unity of the episcopate and to preside over and safeguard the universal communion of all the Churches, could not fail to make available the means necessary to bring this holy desire to realization.”

I may stand accused of mixing metaphors of wines and ships but sailors have never thought the two incompatible.  If it is time to break open the wine of Newman, it is not like drinking the last dregs on a sinking ship, for it is very like uncorking a noble vintage that has been waiting for a special celebration.  What Newman preached in his “Parting of Friends” at the time of his conversion, and what he wrote heart to heart in his “Apologia” and what he summed up in his “Biglietto Address” have all found their moment now.

It is important to remember that Newman was classically trained. It is difficult for us to recreate a semblance of what that means in our coarsened culture, whose leaders are so bereft of those articles of civility and wisdom which were the common language of types diverse as Cicero and Lord Chesterton and Harry Truman.  Newman’s classical acuteness enabled him to tell the real thing from a sham. The logician Richard Whately said he had never known such a clear thinker.  The Established Church of his youth was a mixture of spiritual aridity and institutional confidence, well expressed by Mr. Thwackum in Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” who says: “When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.”  We can go back earlier.  One of the most splendid, if also most obtuse, lines ever uttered about churchmanship, was that of the seventeenth century Anglican Bishop of Ely, Simon Patrick, who praised “that virtuous mediocrity which our Church observes between the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles.”  Newman, though, knew that classical mediocrity is not what fuzzy thinkers today think it to mean when they address the religious controversies of our time in the turgid diction of Delphic oracles.  Horace praised the man who loved well the Golden Mean, "Auream quisquis mediocritatem diligit."  It was golden, not because it was a compromise between truth and falsehood, but because it was like a laser beam pointing the way between every mistake.  Anglicanism, by force of political circumstance and religious confusion, had settled on a wrong idea of the Golden Mean as a “via media” of a bit of this and a bit of that, reducing the apophatic spirituality of Byzantium to polite ambiguity.  Newman gave a series of lectures between 1830 and 1841 in defense of Anglicanism’s via media as spiritually prudent and the work of divine grace, but the scandal of the Jerusalem bishopric in 1841, which laid aside religious differences between Anglicans and Lutherans for the sake of practicality, would open Newman’s eyes to the fact that the true “via media” is a declaration of precision and not vagueness.  So he says, “Take England, with many high virtues, and yet a low Catholicism.  It seems to me that John Bull is a spirit neither of heaven nor hell . . . Has not the Christian Church, in its parts, surrendered itself to one or other of these simulations of the truth? . . . How are we to avoid Scylla and Charybdis and go straight on to the very image of Christ?"

This subjective substitute for the classical Golden Mean is not modern but post-modern, since the philosophical quality of our culture has tumbled from those parapets upon which wrong but well-trained thinkers could declare that the only certitude is that nothing is certain.  Today, what Pope Benedict has tagged “the dictatorship of relativism” is seen in a blithe rejection of Christian essentials by vestigial Anglicanism, not because they are hard to believe but because they were never learned.  So let us uncork the wine of Newman, for what he preached while still an Anglican has now found its target:

“Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for a general Apostasy from it.  Whether this very Apostasy is to give birth to Antichrist, or whether he is still to be delayed, as he has already been delayed so long, we cannot know; but at any rate this Apostasy, and all its tokens and instruments, are of the Evil One, and savour of death.  Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones who are taken in that snare which is circling around us!  Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison!  Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the Truth?  No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.  This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, —he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind.  He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them.  He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you.  He bids you mount aloft.  He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.”

Pope Benedict XVI has done a stunning thing in providing such an ecclesial structure as described in the Apostolic Constitution “Anglicanorum coetibus.”  The dilemma of Anglicans maintaining  a firm if incomplete belief in the supernatural character of the apostolic Church, when contradicted by post-modern forces who would reduce the creedal formulas to impressions of reality, is a cultural icon of the spiritual combat between virtue and egoism which defines the crisis of our age.  While only the Pope knows what he is doing, I suspect that this Constitution is a shot fired over the bow of secular cynicism which is entwining its fingers with those of the men and women of our generation, to make us one with the enemy of our Creator.

Consider many Catholics have reduced sacred worship to a suburban expression of goodwill.  It is evidence of the creeping banality by which the Prince of Lies would seduce Holy Church herself, though he is bound to fail, with that same mediocrity which repulsed Newman, for he knew that banality is indeed evil, and possibly crueler than pre-Christian paganism which danced its sensuality in Arcadian groves without feeling a post-Christian need to declare perversity a sacrament.

As late as 1835,  ten years before his conversion, Newman associated the Anti-Christ with the Papacy and returned from his first visit to Rome in 1833 calling Catholicism “polytheistic, degrading and idolatrous.”  Gradual experience of alternatives to Catholicism, however, especially the skepticism of the Broad Church Anglicanism of his coterie, trimmed his judgment: “We are much disposed to question whether any tests can … prove that the Roman communion is the Synagogue of Satan.”  His friendly battles in Oxford with his mentor, Richard Whately, whom I have mentioned, professor of political economy (battles which he said continued when he was starting the Catholic University in Dublin where Whately had become Anglican Archbishop), moved him to reflect more on the Catholic claims.  Whately was a fair minded man who advocated civil rights for Catholics and Jews.  He had his own sense of humor, which inspired him to satirize the new skeptical Biblical critics by using their critical methods to prove that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed.  In this, he was a precursor of Ronald Knox who, a century later, used modern canons of literary criticism to prove that Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam” had in fact been written by Queen Victoria.  In treating virtue ethics, and the Greek ideal of happiness as “eudaimonia” it was Dr. Whately who said, “Happiness is no laughing matter.”  Newman inherited something of this subtlety, and this should  help to make sense of what Newman meant later when he said, “…as a Protestant, I felt my religion dreary but not my life – but, as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion.”  Understanding true happiness as the attainment of truth, he was ready to sacrifice lesser  consolations to find it, like Augustine exulting in the discovery of “beauty ever ancient, ever new.”  The recent proposal of a personal ordinariate for Anglicans, is an invitation to such “eudaimonia.”

Newman preached big words to a small scene in his day.  He was addressing a “national apostasy” which is now universal.  If “national apostasy” seemed an inflated term when Keble decried the government’s confusion of bishops with state managers, Newman did not see it so and he called it the start of the Oxford Movement.  The Oxford Movement has now become a World Movement,  sometimes called a “Reform of the Reform,” the kind of “aggiornamento” optimistically envisioned but imprecisely achieved in the years after Vatican II.  “Anglicanorum coetibus” may well be the ecumenical movement come of age, a correction of the disoriented notion that unity in the Church happens by confederation.  While the number of ecclesial communities that will join this new structure for Anglicans may be small, the initiative itself could encourage relations with the separated historic Churches.

More than thirty years ago, John Paul II approved a “Pastoral Provision” to receive Anglicans into the Catholic Church.  This followed the 1976 decision of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church to ordain women.  Some five years before that, I had written my first, and perforce juvenile, book which was a small study of this question.  In it, I maintained that to deny gender as a charism in the sacrament of orders, was a Gnostic heresy, for it dismissed the prophetic significance of sexuality.  In phrases subtle because I knew the subject would be scandalous, I contended that such ordinations would irreparably destroy chances for unity with the Catholic Church and that this a Gnostic abuse of anthropology would logically lead to what is now called same-sex marriage.  Some reviewers said that was absurd.  What I predicted in 1971 has happened.  There have been many division since then within the Anglican structure which prided itself on its unity, even in this country through the trials of the Civil War.  The original Pastoral Provision provided welcome for over one hundred clergy and several thousand laity, including one religious community of women.  These are small numbers, but they have established several flourishing parishes with an approved Anglican Use for worship which is attractive even to cradle Catholics.  While the most important aspect of this provision was the clear signal of Rome indicating that the question of women’s ordination belongs to the irreformable deposit of sacred tradition, the part of it that got most attention was permission for the ordination of married men, with the understanding that, as in the Eastern rites, there could be no marriage or re-marriage, in the instance of widowhood,  after ordination.

It seems logical that this provision, while continuing as an entity, would be subsumed by the new personal ordinariates.  The chief difference between the former pastoral   provision and the new ordinariates is precisely that, while the former was part of the regular diocesan structure, the new ordinariates would have their own bishops and ecclesiastical superiors similar to military ordinariates.  This is something of which Newman, with all his prophetic gifts, could not have anticipated.  While he encouraged a scheme of Ambrose Philip de Lisle for a sort of Anglican Uniate Church for converts, he knew that it was impractical.  Yet, his comment in a letter to de Lisle in 1876 is significant: “Nothing will rejoice me more than to find that the Holy See considers it safe and promising to sanction some such plan as the Pamphlet suggests.  I give my best prayers, such as they are, that some means of drawing to us so many good people, who are now shivering at our gates, may be discovered.”  It is also the case that in his day the invalidity of Anglican orders was not a settled question as it is today.  Newman was ordained a priest in 1846 less than a year after he had been received into the Church, and Manning’s ordination in 1851 took only nine weeks, and within fourteen years he became Archbishop of Westminster.  That was during the pontificate of Pius IX who was not given to impetuosity or neglect of doctrine.

The new apostolic constitution expectedly has had its doubters .  The Holy Father made this a personal initiative to the surprise of some ecumenicists whose more relaxed instincts had not encouraged traditionalist Anglicans in their petitions.  I do not make an exact parallel with the present situation, but in a letter of 1859 to Lord Acton, Newman wrote: “There will necessarily always be round the Pope second-rate people, who are not subjects of that supernatural guidance which is his prerogative."  Newman was certain that the Catholic Church in England could not flourish if it remained under the jurisdiction of the Propaganda Fidei, but he was often stymied in getting his message through bureaucratic tangles to the Pope.  He said, “…the Rock of St. Peter on its summit enjoys a pure and serene atmosphere, but there is a great deal of Roman malaria at the foot of it.”

The uniqueness of “Anglicanorum coetibus” naturally begs questions.  Not least of these is the “patrimony” of Anglicanism which the apostolic constitution seeks to safeguard, not temporarily but as a permanent ornament of the richness of the Latin Church.  But this patrimony is not defined.  Anglicanism has gone through transformations since the Elizabethan Settlement, and the engine of its motion, which is now proving itself to be not perpetual, has been its effort to define itself in various moods, Catholic, Calvinist,   Laudian,  Erastian, Deist,  Evangelical, Tractarian, Ritualist, Liberal, and Post-Christian, all bobbing on the surface of the endemic Anglo-Saxon bias of Pelagianism.  The “patrimony,” however re-imagined from time to time, would have been more Protestant from the start, were it not for the theological conservatism of Elizabeth I.  Surely there were clerics, especially of the Laudian period, who were “stupor mundi” in their Patristic erudition, but often what claimed to be a return to sources, was a sort of theological bottom-feeding made palatable by a knowledge of Greek.  To speak in generalities of a patrimony risks becoming nostalgic, bearing in mind that nostalgia is history after a few drinks.  John Jewell and Richard Hooker in the seventeenth century had a romantic notion of the sub-apostolic church which easily accommodated what their king decreed.  Even Jewell had a functional but not sacramental concept of episcopacy and his confidence was in Sola Scriptura.  Anglicanism was not originally confessional but statist, and what is of the state dies with the neglect of the state.  As Caesar’s eye grows cold,  so does what glimmered in his glance.

As far as aesthetic patrimony goes, the typical Anglican forms of worship are no more elevated than the ordinary Catholic liturgy of our day, now happily under revision.  Newman was sensitive to signs; he remembered wearing black gloves in Trinity College Chapel when mourning the daughter of King George IV, the Princess Charlotte;  and everyone knew he had abandoned Anglican orders when he appeared one day in grey trousers.  If he who blushed at the most innocent pun had seen some of the liturgical aberrations of our generation, he would have lapsed into a coma.  There is a cottage industry of polemicists who claim that the Catholic Newman used to haunt old Anglican churches to hear the voices of distant choirs gilding the rafters.  There is no evidence for that.  His frequent discouragements were not from a loss of what he had sternly rejected.  He writes of those who claimed that the convert keep looking back over his shoulder: “This is said of every one in turn – and in every case which I am acquainted with most falsely – There is but one feeling of joy and happiness among those persons with whom I am acquainted who have become Catholics.”

Newman was actually repulsed by much of what passed for prayer in the churches of his early years and said that the thought of the Anglican service made him “shiver.”  The services in his own university church of St. Mary in Oxford were “intensely dreary.”  The Tractarians spent little time on the liturgical romanticism of the ritual movement which was to follow. But that movement was a recovery of a patrimony not unique to the English church.  Perhaps in recognition of this, it has been suggested that the new personal ordinariates should revive the Sarum Rite to be distinct.  In  my Anglican days, I knew no one who had ever seen the Sarum Rite.  That would just be a homemade historicism, which in part is why a proposed revivial of the Sarum Rite for the new Westminster Cathedral was rejected in the nineteenth century.  The personal ordinariates will fail if their concept of preserving a cultural patrimony is the creation of an Anglo-Saxon Theme Park, or an ecclesiastical Williamsburg.  It would lack the spiritual dynamic the Church needs for revitalizing a dispirited segment of our anemic culture.  Pope Benedict’s focus has always been on Newman rather than on Anglicanism, but in the foreword to a book “Turning Towards the Lord” by the Oratorian priest, Father Lang, he commended the “ad orientem” position of the celebrant at the altar and  described “the contribution made by the Church of England to this question and in giving, also, due consideration to the part played by the Oxford movement in the nineteenth century…”  Many of the present Anglican clergy were not reared in the Anglican tradition themselves, and this adds a difficulty if the “patrimony” which the Constitution seeks to  encourage is in no small part an “ethos” which comes by a long lived experience of a cultural heritage.

There follows another questions about the expectations of Anglican stalwarts so long to become Catholic, since more than thirty years ago all veneer of Catholic simulation was shattered by the ordination of women.  Catholicism is a commitment and not a last resort.  Pusey was discomfited when Newman continued to attract converts after his conversion.  After an awkward encounter in Prior Park in Oxford, Newman wrote to his friend Dalgairns saying that Pusey had expected the Catholic converts to be nothing more than vinedressers who had simply “transferred to another part of the vineyard.”  Newman became aware, and expresses this in multiple ways in his lectures on “Difficulties of Anglicans,” that High Anglicanism is a delusional ecclesiology supported by cultural affinities holding sway over logic.  Newman’s dispatches this with curt words in the “Apologia" when he says, “It is not at all easy (humanly speaking) to wind up an Englishman to a dogmatic level..”

The Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,  Cardinal Levada, said on March 9 of this year that “among the distinctive elements of Anglican heritage should be included the spiritual and intellectual gifts of the Oxford movement in the 19^th century, the then-Anglican cleric Newman together with his fellow Tractarians have left a legacy that still enriches a common Catholic patrimony.”  Thus the Anglican patrimony consists in a style of living the apostolic life.  Newman and his fellows gave it new life by opting for the fullness of Catholicism, in an action rooted in an intuition of history ignored in our own day.  Newman’s argument for the development of doctrine as an economy requiring what he called “preservation of type” and “chronic vigor” is the antecedent cousin of Pope Benedict’s “Hermeneutic of Continuity.”  The Holy Father might paraphrase with benevolent Bavarian courtesy, what Newman said rather curtly: “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”

After attending one of Newman’s twelve lectures on “Anglican Difficulties” delivered in London in 1850, which  provide a guide for wavering Anglicans today, Thackeray rose from his seat, daunted by the Newmanian logic, and cried out: “It is either Rome or Babylon, and for me it is Babylon.”  The case is the same today, to a larger audience: It is either Rome or Babylon. These lectures, treated nervously by some who would tone down Newman’s popery, are the beating heart of the exhilarated Catholic Newman.  It is noteworthy, but not inexplicable, that perhaps the leading modern Anglican interpreter of Newman, Owen Chadwick, in his book “The Spirit of the Oxford Movement” (1990) does not once refer to the lectures on “Anglican Difficulties.”  In them, Newman said, “All depends on the fact of the supremacy of Rome,” and "One vessel alone can ride those waves; it is the boat of Peter, the ark of God."

In 1988 I made the longest of all possible trips on this planet, the treacherous and usually fruitless journey from Oxford to Cambridge.  I went to hear a lecture by Cardinal Ratzinger.  To the dismay of some of the faculty who attributed the vast outpouring of undergraduates to what one professor called the current young people’s fad for mediaevalism, Ratzinger spoke of eternal verities in a way which I imagined might have been composed by Newman.  Both are musicians – Newman a violinist and Ratzinger a pianist.  And you see that I speak of Newman in the present, because he is being brought back to us by Ratzinger whose own name will never be in the past perfect.  The Pope’s overture to Anglicans is not polemical but pastoral.  Newman said “Denunciation neither effects subjection in thought nor in conduct.”  In the new apostolic constitution, the Holy Father denounces no one, but as the Father of Christian Unity, in the succession of  Peter who was commanded by Christ to confirm the brethren in the Faith, he would that none be lost.

In this conference you will hear talks more serviceable than mine, I am only here as the sommelier, to recommend the vintage wine of Newman.  He uncorked it in the finale of the “Apologia pro Vita Sua” when he listed his friends who had joined him in the fraternity of converts, and also those who were moved in mind but not enough in will to embrace the ancient beauty.  He wrote one last line: “And I earnestly beg for this whole company, with a hope against hope, that all of us, who once were so united, and so happy in our union, may even now be brought at length, by the power of the Divine Will, into one Fold and under One Shepherd.”

Fr Philip North used the Pusey House Conference on Anglican Patrimony to say how very C of E he was; and if he could not be C of E with all its privileges, its capacity for being accepted in schools and other institutions and being part of the fabric of society, then he would become a Roman Catholic – but not via the Ordinariate.  It seemed to me at the time that he had an unduly romantic notion of the place of the parson in England.  He might have carved out a niche for himself in Camden, but Fr Philip is so much larger than life that he would carve out a niche anywhere – and he is just the sort of priest which the Ordinariate needs to get up and running quickly.  And since the Holy Father has made this offer, what gall to say we know better than he does!

Then this week, while my server was down and my computer inoperable thanks to a new router from AOL, Fr Trevor Jones of the famous St Peter's, London Docks, expressed his own reservations in his blog.  His preferred choice, he says, would be 'a continued future as an Anglican'.  Well of course, that's a lovely idea.  But not one ot be accepted on any terms.

What these two good Fathers have been saying (and no doubt others feel much the same), is that if promises made in Synod in 1992 were kept, then we might just about hang on in the sort of way we have hung on since that time. This is a dreamworld.  The promises have been broken consistently.  I have been in the House of Bishops and seen it at work, diocesans blatantly ignoring their own 'guidelines' and using all their considerable power to undermine anything remotely catholic in their dioceses.  The two parishes where I ministered for twenty years are now indistinguishable from their neighbours.  A century of catholic practice has been dismantled within a decade.  Fr Jones only has nine years before he  must retire.  The Bishop of London, on whom he and Fr North rely, has an even closer sell-by date.  We said we wanted provision for our children and grandchildren.  That has not been granted, and will not be.

Possibly next month's General Synod meeting will cobble together something which will salve the consciences of those who say they want a "catholic element" to remain in our church.  That will not do, however you dress it up. Either the Church of England is catholic, part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, or it is not.  What it is currently deciding is to become a Protestant sect.  The Act of Synod made it clear, and Archbishops spelled it out, that we were in a process of "Reception" (which includes "non-reception") and it was perfectly possible that the C of E would eventually have to admit  that it was wrong in ordaining women as priests.  Everything that is happening now, concerning women as bishops, means that "Reception" is over.  Cantuar locuta, causa finita — the Church of England will have women whom it regards as bishops, and it will be necessary for everyone, priests, ordinands, laypeople, to accept that fact.

The alternative outcome of July's group of sessions (knowing Synod as I do from many years bitter experience) is that they might kick the ball into the long grass, say "too difficult" and leave it for the next Synod (to be elected this Autumn) to come up with new answers — thus simply prologing the misery, both for the women queuing up to be measured for mitres, and those of us who remain implacably opposed.  I am no longer prepared to wait upon the good pleasure of the General Synod.

So to turn to Fr Trevor Jones' specific points:

Firstly, he asserts it would be a "priest-heavy" organisation.  That certainly is not what many of my Catholic friends tell me.  They want our priests to set up the Ordinariate so that they may worship with us.  It may be that they will not 'join' the ordinariate, formally; but there are many Catholic laity who want to be with us at the altar.  Morevover, I believe Fr Jones is being unduly pessimistic about our own laity.  Many are already signing up, and I am sure many more will do so once the chocks are away and good ship Ordinariate slides down the slipway (if that isn't mixing metaphors – or even if it is!).  Of course, if their own parish priests are lukewarm they may hold back — all the more reason for our anglo-catholic clergy to look carefully at the proposals, hear what the Bishop of Fulham and the two Southern PEVs have to say about it, and begin to be enthusiastic instead of carping.

I am not sure what to make of Fr Trevor's second point, about there being a "radical distinction" in the path to reordination for married and unmarried clerics.  Maybe he has read something I have not — or maybe he is guessing.  Perhaps he will use his blog, or this one, to enlighten me.  It will be for the Ordinary, in consultation with the Vatican, to decide about the path to ordination for our priests and deacons.  If we are really fortunate, then the Ordinary will be one of our current PEVs, someone who really knows us and whom we can trust.

Thirdly, Fr Jones is "not sure the structure would have a future".  Again, this seems to be his own crystal ball malfunctioning.  Of course people want to find churches where the spirit is at work.  But why does Fr Joness suppose that churches in the Ordinariate will spend their time seeking a "way of being and Anglican in full communion with the Holy See?"  Those priests I know who are enthusiastic about the Ordinariate are looking to be what they have always hoped they were, English Catholics.  Since that is no longer possible within the structures of our increasingly confused and 'liberal' State Church, the offer of the Holy Father for an Ordinariate is the answer to prayer.  So, dear Frs North and Jones, and any others whose misgivings threaten to hobble you, give it a chance.  It is the best offer there is, it is all we asked Synod for and were refused.  Let's set to and make it work.

Br. Stephen's aim is to underscore genuine personal conversion as the proper motivation for an individual's participation in the anticipated personal ordinariates, and, in doing so, he takes a deliberately modest view of the scope and significance of the provisions of the Apostolic Constitution.

The great weakness of the ethnic parish metaphor, it seems to me, is its failure to account for the breadth and depth of the Anglican Patrimony, which far surpasses the significance of the cultural eccentricities of Polish, German, or Italian Roman Catholic communities.  Though Anglican churches may in some sense be "defective," the treasures of Anglicanism are genuinely ecclesial contributions to the Universal Church which the Holy Father has recognized "as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared."

* * *

Ethnic Parishes for Anglicans:  A Provocatively Modest View of the Ordinariates

When I worked with prisoners and their families, I learned the importance of expectation management: Never excite extravagant hopes based on wishes if there are too many unknown factors that could line up to produce despair when a more measured initial response might have produced only slight disappointment. I begin to worry, in the case of the Anglican Ordinariates, that too many hopes are being excited in the absence of many facts and a wishful reading of those that are known such that, when all of the details are eventually known, the failure of these more optimistic readings to have been the case may cause some people to despair or even to feel that they have been actively misled by the Holy See. I sensed a bit of this sort of disappointment in the Internet reactions when yet another well-placed Catholic official made it clear that celibacy would be the norm within the Ordinariates during the recent Anglican Use conference in Newark.

I am not saying that all or even any of what follows is the way that things will fall into place for the Ordinariates, but I do think, based on official documents and statements to date, that the following are all plausible interpretations of how the Ordinariates might function within the larger Church. My purpose here is to paint a minimalist vision of the Ordinariates so that people can ask themselves if they would still want to be a member of such a body. Obviously, as a former Anglican turned Roman Catholic monk, I think that the answer should still be yes, but I think that it may be healthier to assume the minimalist scenario and then to be pleasantly surprised if some things turn out differently rather than to be cast into despair if the rosiest possible picture fails to materialize.

Let me start with a quote from Fr. Basil Maturin, the great Anglo-Catholic convert of a century ago, who, unlike most of his fellow converts of that era, never tried to stampede Anglicans who were looking Romeward to cross the Tiber. Instead, in The Price of Unity, he encourages people to convert only when their conscience will not allow them to do otherwise. He says,

Go and live where the Church is at the lowest and the scandals are real; if you cannot keep your faith in Rome in the face of all such things you do not really believe in her.

And here, I expect, I will meet my first objections. Some will say, “But we’re not converting, we’re entering Communion.” My reading of the documents says that conversion is what is being asked. It is being asked as pastorally as possible and with all due respect for the riches of the Anglican patrimony, but members of the Ordinariate are being asked to enter full, visible communion with the Universal Church from bodies that the Holy See does not recognize as properly constituted churches. To enter an Ordinariate is to believe that you are currently a member of a body that is defective in some way that the Catholic Church is not. True, this is a package tour with a protected enclave waiting on the other side with many familiar furnishings, but it remains a new ecclesiastical address and you can only get there by the narrow gate of conversion or, in the traditional idiom, which we current and former Anglicans love, by making your submission to the Holy See.

And here, I expect I will meet a second set of objections: “But we’re not becoming Roman Catholics. The Ordinariates are for Anglican Catholics.” To this I would say, based on my reading of the official documents issued to date, it depends on what you mean by “Anglican” or, perhaps better still in this case, “Anglo-.” If one uses the term as it would be used of a “Greek Catholic” or a “Ruthenian Catholic,” clearly that is not the case, though generous provisions have been made. If, however, you are using the term “Anglo-Catholic” in the same way as one might say “Polish Catholic” or “German Catholic,” meaning, in the U.S. in particular, a group that has been granted parishes in which special safeguards have been enacted to protect a cultural and linguistic patrimony, I do think it is fair to speak of “Anglican” or “Anglo-” Catholics.

And here I expect I will meet a third objection: “But our bishops are being given hats and sticks so we must be something more than ethnic parishes.” In an Anglican understanding, that would be true, but that is not necessarily the case among the Orthodox or within churches under the Holy See. Perhaps someone else can flesh-out all of the implications of a mitred archpriest in Orthodoxy, but let me give three examples from the Latin Rite where hats and sticks do not a bishop make. First, we have the case of the Cardinal who is not a bishop, but is entitled to pontificals. Cardinal Dulles, who received the red hat in recognition for his work as a theologian, would be a prominent American example. Second, we have the historic example of the highest grade of monsignor, the protonotary apostolic, who until 1969 was entitled to the mitre and ring and to celebrate Pontifical Mass. The third example, and I think this is perhaps the closest, is the territorial abbot or abbot nullius, who, though not necessarily a bishop, wears full pontificals in recognition of his governing a specific territory attached to his abbey and is a member of the local conference of bishops. North Carolina’s Belmont Abbey would be a famous American example of this type of jurisdiction from the past while Subiaco in Italy would be a notable contemporary example.

Historically, hats and sticks always mean honor, but they do not always mean full or even partial jurisdiction and clearly, from these examples, hats and sticks do not a rite make. Add to this the fact that while the Apostolic Constitution and the Complimentary Norms make the Ordinary’s membership in the local episcopal conference explicit, they do not make reference to a body of these ordinaries with governing or even deliberative functions and it seems reasonable to infer that the Ordinary is more like someone with delegated authority over a national enclave of especially privileged ethnic parishes than he is like a bishop of a (forgive the term) uniate church. The Rt. Rev. Msgr. Graham Leonard, sometime Anglican Bishop of London, might be a better model for Anglican Bishops who enter the Ordinariate but are not the Ordinary than the various grades of eparchs of the Oriental Churches. That is still a great honor and an incredible act of love and respect on the part of the Holy Father.

Being a member of an ethnic parish (or “personal” parish, as they are now called), albeit one with some very special dispensations, is still a very generous offer. As in a German, or Italian parish, there will be special safeguards that protect an Ordinariate parish’s historic patrimony from the majority culture and, as a double safeguard, these parishes will be governed by an Ordinary in sympathy with that heritage. (I am reasonably certain that more than one person at the Vatican and the USCCB wishes in hindsight that something similar might have been done to prevent the Polish schism in the U.S. Church in the 19th Century.) But, like those other ethnic parishes, those in the Ordinariate will be expected to be active cooperators in the life of the local diocese. I worry that too many people see this as a threat rather than an opportunity. To be a member of the Ordinariate means to engage with the richness of other ethnic and historic traditions within the Catholic Church. The documents to date seem to say that there will be no standing alone or going one’s own way. In addition to the Holy Father and the London Oratory, members of the Ordinariate will be in full communion with bingo, the chicken polka, the St. Louis Jesuits, and all of the other things that some Anglicans like to look down their noses at.

To be an Anglo-Catholic of the Ordinariate will be no more or less special, in the larger scheme of things, than to be an American Polish Catholic belonging to a personal parish. In fact, it seems that those who belong to ethnic minorities within the Catholic Church in the U.S. might feel a bit slighted that they were already in full communion with the Holy See and received so little while Anglican converts are receiving so much. Anglicans looking at the Ordinariates who are tempted to think that they have been given too little might do well to remember the parable of laborers who came at the end of the day and received the same wage as those who worked through its heat.

Some Ordinariate parishes will no doubt face mistrust and even, perhaps, hostility at various levels in the local diocese to which they will belong. Were that not the case, these elaborate canonical safeguards would not be necessary. I think that it is best not to minimize this potential reality and, instead, to trust that grace and steadfast witness will make the Ordinariate parishes come to be seen as wonderful places in the wider diocese as seems to have been the case of most of the current Anglican Use parishes, which were given no canonical safeguards when they made their leaps of faith.

Obviously, the ethnic parish metaphor is not perfect in its parallels, both because of the generosity of the provisions made by the Holy See and because global Anglicanism holds within itself the treasures of many cultural patrimonies, but I think that this more modest vision of how the Ordinariates might be understood will temper the potential wind of despair and allow those considering this option to weigh their choice with a most Anglican sobriety.

Let me close with a thought exercise that parallels my opening quote from Fr. Maturin. Do you agree with this statement:

I believe that to join an Ordinariate is to promise before God that, when I am traveling and not able to attend an Ordinariate parish on Sunday, under pain of mortal sin I will assist at a folk Mass with streamers and liturgical dancers, if that is all there is to be found, in order to fulfill my Sunday obligation.

That’s the somewhat provocative crux of what I understand it to mean to join an Ordinariate and I think that this is the level of love for the Catholic Church you will need to have or to hope to be given by grace to be happy over here. You have to have come to love the idea of the Catholic Church in its fullness more than the reality of the Anglican patrimony at its best. You need to strongly suspect that there may be something ontologically present in a progressive, praise-band parish in a scandal-ridden Roman Catholic diocese that is lacking in Anglicanism’s greatest shrines, because, contrary to what may seem to be much visual evidence to the contrary, the former is a constituent member of the body in which the fullness of the Catholic Church subsists while the latter is not.

If those words seem overly jarring or exclusivist to you (and remember I am speaking here to those who are actively considering conversion, not to Anglicans who are not interested), I suggest that you think carefully about your reasons for considering converting. If it is to escape the turmoil of Anglicanism, it will not be worth the dislocation that goes with it. If it is out of a desire to validate or improve your ecclesiastical standing, I assure you that the Roman Catholic Church can teach you humility in ways that you have never imagined. If you are entering the Ordinariate, it needs to be because you have come to believe what the Catholic Church says about herself in spite of the ten times a week you will be reminded how much the Church on earth falls short of the ideal in heaven.

I know that this is a time of pain in many parishes and dioceses. There is a great temptation to paint the best possible picture of the Ordinariates so that as many people as possible will make the journey together and the pain of separation and loss will be minimized, but I do not know that this approach will serve souls best in the long-term. The Holy Father’s offer is open-ended. It is perhaps best that some should come now and that others come later, when, like St. Thomas, they may touch and see, rather than for those who are eager to come now to pressure friends who doubt into a disappointment that may lead them to reject the Catholic Church permanently should it turn out that things are different after all.

I may be wrong in every word that I have written about the future implementation of the Anglican Ordinariates and will be glad if I am, but I still think the exercise of thinking of yourself as a member of an odd sort of ethnic parish in a church that doesn’t quite know what to make of you is worthwhile. What I have outlined above is provocatively modest, but a pessimist can only be pleasantly surprised.

Marital indiscipline seems to afflict all Western Christian churches and bodies to some degree or other, and even to an extent those in the East (the theory and practice of the Eastern Churches, which rested originally on a basis quite distinct form that of Western Catholics and Protestants, I will not discuss here) as well.  Suffice it to say that, on a theoretical level at least, no Christian church or “denomination,” Eastern or Western ever accepted the practice of “divorce” in the modern sense of the term (that is, the dissolution of a valid marriage with one or both of the parties to that dissolved marriage being free to marry again), however much “pastoral compassion” (or “overlooking, deliberately or otherwise, irregular marital unions”) may, especially in the East, have allowed for the toleration of “marriages” of individuals whose spouses had disappeared some considerable time in the past.  At the Reformation, however, all of the leading Protestant Reformers embraced the view of Erasmus that there were circumstances in which a valid marriage might be dissolved and the parties to it, or at least the “innocent” party, be allowed to remarry, which meant remarry in church, as in Catholic and Protestant countries alike there was no other form of marriage (beyond “common-law marriage” in a few countries such as Scotland — but this was a form of “marriage” of which the offspring were technically illegitimate, and so lacked clear inheritance rights).  Moreover, Protestant church bodies, both Lutheran and Reformed, quickly came to permit divorce, and remarriage after divorce (hereafter termed DaR for short), in a variety of circumstances, among them, for instance, Scotland, where divorce in the modern sense became legally available in 1560, and has remained so ever since.

In England, however, the position was different, despite some initial irregularities, and the Church of England adopted what can be described as the most severe position on DaR of any Western Christian tradition whatsoever. The historic Anglican position on "divorce and remarriage" is clear enough — a resolute “no, never.”

King Henry VIII was firmly and explicitly opposed to DaR; he never in his life had a "divorce" in the modern sense as defined above (although in the 16th Century the term was used to denote any separation of the parties to a marriage during the lifetimes of them both) as all of his four "divorces" were "annulments" (granted by his complaisant Archbishop Cranmer).  Cranmer himself, as a firm Protestant, came to favor DaR in a wide variety of circumstances, and shortly after Henry VIII's death in 1547 he granted a divorce (in the modern sense) to William Parr, then Earl of Essex, later Marquess of Northampton, who subsequently "remarried." (He also granted Sir Ralph Sadler permission to remain married to a woman whom he had married over a decade previously, some years after her husband had disappeared, when that first husband reappeared and tried to extort money from Sadler.)  Provision for DaR was embodied in Cranmer's proposed reformed Code of Canon Law, but that proposal was rejected by the House of Commons in 1553 (as it was again in 1571 when reform-minded MPs tried to pass it despite Elizabeth I's objections).  Under the Catholic Queen Mary, Parr was forced to separate from his wife under threat of excommunication and prosecution for bigamy — and while after Mary’s death in 1558 and the succession of her ambiguously Protestant half-sister Queen Elizabeth I he resumed living with his second wife, one of Elizabeth I's "Ladies in Waiting," the Queen more than once publicly reproached him for "bigamy" — and when he wished to marry again after his second wife died in 1565, she forbade the marriage and refused to permit it until after Parr's original wife died in 1571 (Parr survived his third marriage by only a couple of months).

Under Elizabeth DaR was non-existent and illegal in England under both Common and Canon Law.  Church courts continued to grant "separations from bed and board" to incompatible couples, but these did not allow, and in fact specifically and explicitly forbade, remarriage of either party during the life of the other.  Sometimes it happened regardless: John Thornborough, a clergyman, was granted such a separation from his wife in the 1580s, but went on to contract a remarriage shortly thereafter.  In 1592, when he was appointed Bishop of Limerick (in Ireland), seemingly as a reward for his Catholic-hunting activities, the (Calvinist) Archbishop of York, Matthew Hutton, objected violently to Thornborough's appointment, on the grounds that he was an open bigamist — another Elizabethan bishop, Marmaduke Middleton of St. David's, bishop there from 1582, was deprived of his bishopric for such bigamy just a year later in 1593 — but his letters of protest to the Queen seemingly did not reach her, and the consecration went forward (Thornborough died as Bishop of Worcester in 1641, a firm Calvinist and one of the most stalwart opponents of "Laudianism").

In 1604 new canons promulgated in the Church of England ruled out DaR in all circumstances whatsoever, making provision for "separation" and (in very restricted circumstances) "annulments."  This remained the formal position of the CofE down to (I think) the 1980s — although in Scotland, by contrast, DaR was available in a wide variety of circumstances from 1560 onwards.  From 1670 onwards there was in England there was the phenomenon of "Parliamentary divorce:" an Act of Parliament would grant a couple a divorce, give one (or sometimes both) of them legal permission to remarry, and exempt any clergyman performing the remarriage full exemption from the penalties of the law, both Common and Canon/Civil (the study of Canon Law in England had been abolished in the 1530s, and most of the officials who staffed English church courts thereafter were trained in Roman, or “Civil,” Law): almost 300 such divorces were granted between 1670 (Lord Roos's case) and 1821 (when the farcical public fiasco of George IV's attempt to get such a divorce from his estranged wife ended in failure).  Modern-style divorce became available in England only in 1857, and although after that date no legal penalties could be levied upon clergymen who performed such "remarriages," right down to the 1960s clergymen who did so were effectively "blacklisted" by just about every diocesan bishop, and denied all further preferment within the CofE.

Generally, "low church" or "evangelical" clergy tended to favor DaR in this period (in some circumstances), not least because all foreign Protestant churches, both Lutheran and Reformed, allowed it, and "high-church" (later "Anglo-Catholic") clergy to oppose it in almost all circumstances — but in 1670 it was the strenuous support of "Lord Roos's Bill" by the "Laudian" Bishop of Durham, John Cosin, in the face of the opposition of most of the other bishops, that persuaded the House of Lords to pass it.

I am, however, totally ignorant of the practice of PECUSA from 1785 onwards on this matter, although right down to the 1940s/50s divorce was strongly disapproved of in that church, especially for clergy, for whom , with rare exceptions like the notorious Bishop Pike, divorce alone, with or without remarriage, generally ended all hope of a “successful clerical career.”

We are not finished with this subject yet, but already certain implications have begun to emerge.  Above all, it is clear that a loose marital discipline, whether tricked out in the robes of alleged "pastoral care" or "meeting people where they are," is no part at all of that "Anglican patrimony" which is seeking to be resituated in and restored to Catholic communion.  Rather the contrary: the "Anglican patrimony" is one that has upheld the traditional marital discipline of the pre-Reformation Western Church to a degree that is unparalled among Reformation bodies, and one which was profoundly uncongenial to the Erastian powers-that-be in post-Reformation England — as witness the phenomenon of "Parliamentary divorce."  Another is that in the context of this resituated "Anglican patrimony" one of its functions will be to witness to and uphold the longaeval marriage discipline of the Church, as a counterpoint to those sad failings of Henry VIII that led to the original breach between England and Rome, and thus in a way vindicating the stand of Clement VII, Paul III and Cardinal Pole in opposition to that monarch.  And finally, although there is the hopeful possibility of the ordination of suitable married men to the diaconate and presbyterate in the soon-to-be-erected ordinariats, it has to be emphasized that there is little or no possibility of those in irregular marital situations, and certainly not in DaR situations, to be ordained or to serve in any clerical capacity in them.

(to be continued…)

Though, judging by the event web site, the conference may admit of a broader definition of Anglican orthodoxy than many in our audience would acknowledge, the conference would seem to have much to commend it.

Date:

From: Jun 25, 2010 – 6:00 PM
To: Jun 27, 2010 – 1:00 PM

Venue:

St Paul's Anglican Church
233 Lock Street West
Dunnville, ON
Canada

Click here to download the event flyer.

* * *

The quintessence of Anglo-Catholicism is the ability to practice the most riotous liturgical excess and yet make it seem natural and even restrained. That was my experience of Whitsunday Evensong at St. Thomas, Huron Street. Let me assure you this was no Romish Second Vespers of Pentecost. It was the much-discussed and rarely seen full-on Prayer Book Evensong with all of the trimmings right down to apparelled amices on the servers’ albs and choral ululations by Britten. I knew not whether I was in Toronto or Primrose Hill.

Let me back up to where I come in. After wrapping up my twenty-six-hour-and-fifteen-minute adventure with the delayed baggage computer system and phone sirens at American Airlines, the afternoon was gone. I pinned my hopes of redeeming the day on one event: Evensong at St. Thomas, Toronto’s great Anglo-Catholic shrine, which is only a few minutes’ walk from the college.

Why, you may ask, was I scampering back to Anglicanism on one of the great days of the liturgical year? Well, who else would be having the celebration of the Divine Office on a feast day?

(And, for the hundredth time, shame, shame, shame on all of the Roman Catholic expositors of the Extraordinary Form and the Reform of the Reform who can rustle up a choir, servers, and a photographer for High Masses of Aida-like proportions but can’t seem to summon up any enthusiasm for putting on a cotta, unlocking the church doors, and reciting the office on Sunday afternoon, but I digress.)

I arrived about ten minutes before the 7:00 p.m. service. (I’ll skip a description of the Arts and Crafts building. Suffice it to say that the church is a gem of one of my favorite periods.) I got my service sheets and parked myself in a pew. The prelude was a big Durufle variation on the Veni Creator. I haven’t heard big blaring organ since entering Spring Bank and I found myself carried away as I knelt in prayer. I’m always conscious of what liturgical prose, incense, and architecture contribute to prayer in their stimulation of the senses, but this was a wonderful reminder of the raw power of an instrument in good hands.

By the time the service began there were around 40 people in the nave and another 30 or so choristers and members of the altar party processed in with the English-surpliced choristers following a crucifer in alb with apparelled amice. Next came torchbearers dressed as the first crucifer flanking a second in tunicle followed by the sacred ministers in varied red copes. Thirty-six candles burned on the High Altar in preparation for “Devotions,” the old school AC name used for Benediction or something Benediction-like to placate the sensibilities of Protestant bishops. This was Prayer Book mit schlag, but executed with that lack of self-consciousness that is the secret grace of good Anglican liturgics.

Blessed Adrian the Describer long ago pushed most of what I once knew of Prayer Book Catholic ceremonial out of my head, so I can’t tell you what bits came from which editions of the Parson’s Handbook and Ritual Notes. This is a school of churchmanship that allows for considerable creativity, much to the intellectual enjoyment of clergy and laity alike. What you may miss in the agreed-upon, objective standards is made up for in exuberance.

Not long after the announcement of Anglicanorum Coetibus, I wrote a piece called One Last Evensong, recounting what I presumed would be my farewell to Prayer Book liturgy at All Saints, Margaret Street during the summer before I entered Spring Bank. That was a deeply-moving but melancholy event. Whitsunday at St. Thomas was just good fun as I joined in while wondering what would happen next and how, enjoying it all as it unfolded and belting out some good hymns in the process.

St. Thomas seems to be solidly university-orbit Prayer Book Catholic with, I would assume, a fair amount of theological diversity not unlike Boston’s Church of the Advent as I remember it from my student days. I doubt that anyone here will be going anywhere, as much as many of us might wish and pray that the case were different, but that also meant that there was sufficient distance for this to be a relaxed and cordial encounter. As an Anglo-Catholic of the Romish persuasion, I’m sure I would have had a snappy comment or two about St. Thomas’ British Museum Religion, but, as a Cistercian, I am honor bound to defend the alb for servers and, as a Roman Catholic, the intramural battles of Anglo-Catholic Churchmanship no longer send me to the barricades. I have finally reached the place where I can see, and hope for, the good of all my former coreligionists.

At the outdoor reception afterward, the curate told me that this wasn’t too far from an average-sized crowd for a Sunday Evensong, which impressed me as much as the service itself. Over punch, I met a combox acquaintance from The New Liturgical Movement, with whom I had a long exchange about Cistercian and Anglican liturgy, and I chatted with several others as well. (One piece of the Anglican patrimony no one has mentioned in discussions I have seen of Anglicanorum Coetibus is the high quality of coffee hour chit-chat.) Canadians are nice. Anglicans are nice. Canadian Anglicans seem to be doubly nice. I expect I’ll be back and will also drop by for the daily office.

(Yes, that was “daily office,” meaning daily Morning and Evening Prayer. Are you catching that priest readers on this side of the Tiber? Try it; your people may like it. I mean, you’re already doing it yourself anyway. Right?)

In the old days (up to the 1960’s), Romanism in terms of the appointments of churches and liturgical “trapping” meant the baroque, as embodied in the two older foundations of the English Oratory and numerous Catholic parish churches. Baroque and Counter Reformation aesthetics were already in the nineteenth century superseded, not only by mediaevalist aesthetics, but also by the other styles that prevailed in that period. Cultural styles in churches have changed over the centuries, and particularly when human life changed radically, such as at the onset of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the brief aesthetic reaction between about 1890 up to World War I and Modernism (theology, politics and culture).

Things are just not so simple, and this is why I have stressed time and time again – when pushing for the Use of Sarum – that it is not so much a question of mediaevalist aesthetics but of recovering a proper rite. In France, up to about 1870, most dioceses had some distinctive characteristics in their liturgical usages, and some dioceses kept their old Uses (even if some were quite mutilated by Jansenist-inspired modifications in the early eighteenth century). An example is Lyons, where the rite is more markedly different from the Roman rite. Other examples are Rouen and Paris, which were closer than the Roman rite, and prior to their Jansenist modifications, were similar to the Sarum Use. The question here for the Anglican Ordinariates is, with the principle of a particular liturgy having been granted, having a traditional basis for future corrections in Anglican liturgical usage.

One regular reader and occasional contributor of The Anglo-Catholic reflects an easy attitude to adopt: stop messing about, think about things other than liturgy and conform to the prevailing usage. The prevailing usage, as we are moving towards Rome, is the modern Roman rite. Go all the way! The problem is why the Holy Father responded positively to the various requests from Anglican groups, the TAC Portsmouth letter being one of them. He intends for there to be diversity, exactly where he could have said "individual conversion – take it or leave it". Sooner or later, there will be an official rite for the Ordinariates, and – of course – I will comply by it unless I use the Roman rite to serve other Catholics.

This is a much more pragmatic basis than mere romanticism or mediaevalist nostalgia. However, with the cultural shifts mentioned above, we search in vain for a contemporary cultural idiom that is both inspired by Christianity and supportive of Christianity. It is possible to celebrate the liturgy in a modern “god-box” with a minimum of adaptation, but it is not ideal. It is little more than adapting a secular building for worship on a temporary or permanent basis.

Sarum for me is not a matter of antiquarianism, but a way to recover a hermeneutic of continuity in the Anglican Prayer Book tradition without giving in to internal and external pressure to adopt the old or new forms of the Roman rite. It is a reference, either a complete rite to be used “neat”, or a source for versions of the Anglican liturgical tradition adapted for pastoral needs.

It is a red herring to go on about riddle posts, apparelled amices and albs, tonsured heads and epidemics of plague! These arguments will be used by some to bully others into submission. It is a point that many early twentieth century medieavalist Anglican clergy became Catholics, but not always to become partisans of the Counter Reformation. The Tridentine Mass is nearer to the medieval liturgical tradition than the Prayer Book they were obliged to use as Anglicans. One such priest I knew was Fr Quintin Montgomery-Wright (1914-1996) who had been an Anglo-Catholic priest in London and converted during the war. Over the few months I spent with him in the summer of 1982 in his parish of Le Chamblac, he explained to me the reasons why he left England and came to France in the late 1940’s. He could no longer stomach exactly this eternal and intestine dispute between mediaevalism and Italian “counter-reformation”, which led to the “heresy of formlessness” of the 1960’s! He joined the Diocese of Bayeux. Gone were the disputes and he found himself in something that was so much more naturally Catholic.

I understood this priest profoundly, even though he was doing no more or less that any pre-conciliar Catholic priest. Percy Dearmer “sarumised” the Prayer Book, and Fr Montgomery-Wright did the same to the Roman rite! It was surreal in 1982 to see these usages, which were not his invention, but simply the erstwhile usage of the diocese in which he was ordained. From his testimony, I can appreciate the stuffiness he must have suffered in the Westminster Archdiocese (what remained of it after the effect of Hitler’s bombs) and what drove him to another vision.

Our friend from London protests about being viscerally Roman, but it is difficult to know which Roman. Things are changing again under Benedict XVI. My intimate experience with Romanism and Tridentinism perhaps is the opposite from his, of which I will speak more openly after my incardination into an Ordinariate.

I would hope that the Ordinariates will overcome the old battle lines between mediaevalism and baroque by blurring the boundaries between Anglicanism and European Catholicism. We do definitely need our own liturgical traditions and we need to correct them at this point of our integration into the Universal Church. I think there should be the option for people who think along the lines of Fr Hunwicke to be married Tridentine-in-English priests, also for those who prefer a more English style, and those of us who would like one to melt (partially) into the other to allow that seamless transition between eras and cultures.

I find the English religious mentality, as I often read it expressed on the Internet, too sceptical and cynical for anything worthwhile to be able to take root. I fear that the de-christianising of England is far more profound than even here in France where the Church suffered two major persecutions over the past 220 years and almost complete indifference and conflict that has not forgotten the collaborators and resistants of World War II and the Occupation. This is something I think, and above all feel, having lived on the Continent for longer than I spent in my native England. It is far from being paradise here. The churches are empty and 95% of Catholics couldn’t care less about the Church except when it is useful for a family celebration. The Solemn Communion of a kid here is very often his or her first – and last. Materialism reigns over here too, but perhaps lacks that soul-numbing cynicism I find in England. I would appreciate hearing from English people who live in other parts of the world, to hear about their experience and innermost thoughts.

I hope and pray that something can be rescued from the embers and provide part of a basis for a revival of both the Catholic Faith and a new spiritual understanding of the Gospel and Christ’s mission. The prospect of the future of Christianity being in the hands of Pentecostalists and the sects is too bitter to face. Christ without his continued Incarnation in the Church, the Priesthood and the Sacraments is no more than a children’s fairy-tale myth to be discarded as we grow up. Despite my love for the mediaevalist and “local Catholicism” idea, I do see the real issues and dangers.

Will there be Ordinariates, or must we remain at sea in our rudderless lifeboats? It’s up to us.