Tag Archives: Anglicanism

Editor of The Tablet on Papal Donation

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Here's an interesting article in The Guardian thanks to a tip from a distinguished English Ordinariate priest.  The writer is editor of The Tablet (a modernist, left-wing rag).

I'd suggest this is about more than money. It gives an intriguing insight into church politics, Benedict's vision of the church, his personal thinking, and the way he perceives Britain.

News of the donation came hard on the heels of a talk given by the papal nuncio to Britain to the bishops of England and Wales. You might expect a talk on the issues facing the church here would have focused on attendance of mass, priest shortages, and the response of English Catholics to the new version of the English mass, imposed by Rome and not exactly going down a storm in the parishes. Instead, top of the nuncio's agenda was the ordinariate.

Now if the man who is the pope's number one diplomat in the UK makes what is officially known as the personal ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, top of his agenda, you can take it as read that the message has come from on high and that it is seen as being of the utmost importance. And what Archbishop Antonio Menini said to the English and Welsh bishops was: "Do please continue to be generous in support of their endeavours." That's code for: "Knuckle under and make this work." And it wasn't the first time that the bishops got this message: Benedict urged them to be similarly enthused about the ordinariate during his final message to them at the end of his 2010 UK papal visit.

Read the whole story here.

Perhaps the Holy Father, having been informed of the mischief and villainy on this side of the Pond, may soon bring his will to bear on his disobedient and arrogant American bishops?

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Br. Stephen, O.Cist. Joins The Anglo-Catholic!

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Br Stephen four wheeler Br. Stephen, O.Cist. Joins The Anglo Catholic!Br. Stephen Treat, O.Cist. is a monk of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank in Sparta, WI.  Like many others, his path led from an evangelical childhood in the South to Anglicanism and into the Roman Catholic Church.  He was received from Anglicanism in 2006 at the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Philadelphia.  He studied religion and public policy in graduate school, writing his thesis on the social politics of the 19th Century Anglican Customaries and earned his living in the NGO world working in public policy, fundraising and communications in Boston and Philadelphia until entering Our Lady of Spring Bank in the summer of 2008.

Our Lady of Spring Bank is a small Abbey of the Order of Cistercians, generally known as the “Common Cistercians,” located on 600 acres near La Crosse, Wisconsin.  The monks of Spring Bank divide their day between prayer, study, and manual labor, going to the oratory seven times each day to sing the Divine Office in Latin with English translations that would be familiar to most Anglicans.  The Abbey supports itself through LaserMonks.com, a leading provider of computer printer ink and toner cartridges and reseller of monastic products from around the world.  LaserMonks has received significant attention in the US press both as an entrepreneurial success story and as a pioneer in the area of socially responsible business practice.

At the Abbey, Br. Stephen is the assistant to the Conventual Prior, a student for Holy Orders, and drives a mean snowplow during Wisconsin’s long winters.  His interests include apologetics, Cistercian history, and the re-enchantment of culture.  He blogs at Sub Tuum and has been a supporter of the Apostolic Constitution since its announcement.  As someone who still has a great love for the Anglican Patrimony, he agrees with the great 19th Century convert, Fr. Basil Maturin, that our goal should be “to hold on to all that was good and true in the past, and to engraft the new upon the old."

The Anglo-Catholic is now very proud to count him amongst our staff of distinguished contributors.  Please join me in welcoming Br. Stephen to the team!

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The Present Importance of Newman's View of Anglicanism

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Fr. George William Rutler, pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in New York City, delivered the following talk at the Portsmouth Institute 2010 Conference on Friday, June 11, 2010.

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.

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

On my 60th 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.

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Divorce and Remarriage in "Historic Anglicanism" (Part I)

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*** UPDATED 06/08/10 9:18 PM EST ***

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…)

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Salvete, fratres!

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I would like to thank Christian Campbell and everyone at The Anglo-Catholic for their kind welcome. It seems peculiarly appropriate that I should be able to write this, my first post, on the feast of the Chair of St Peter, as much for the fact that it represents the feast of the Communion of the Churches in communion with Peter, as for the fact that it is the special day of prayer in the British Isles for those contemplating taking Pope Benedict’s offer in Anglicanorum Cœtibus, and again the patronal feast day of the principal church in the parish where I serve.

I am very touched to have been invited to contribute to such a site: after all, I am a ‘Roman’ Catholic, and a convinced one. I suppose that my presence here as an invited participant on this blog is the most tangible evidence of the extraordinary times in which we live: Pope Benedict, the ‘Pope of Christian Unity’ as he is becoming known, has simply cut the Gordian knot to present to you, those who I hope very soon to call my brothers and sisters in the faith, a chance to share the riches of your tradition with what one might call the Catholic mainstream.

My own interest in Anglicanism, though, goes back a long way: as a teenager, I was the organist in a Roman Catholic parish some four miles from my home, and so was required to walk there twice a week. The route took me past two Anglican churches, the second of which, St Martin’s, Epsom, had (and for all I know still has) a fine choral tradition. I would pause outside on my long walk listening to their choir practice, and was, frankly, envious. I longed to participate in this myself. Not long later, one Friday evening, I presented myself at the other church, St Paul’s, Nork Park, a few doors away from the house in which I grew up, during the choir practice, and was taken on as an occasional assistant organist and choir member.

My goodness, it was a steep learning curve! St Paul’s had a liturgical tradition of the three major services on a Sunday; Sung Eucharist, Sung Matins and Sung Evensong, all with organ and choir. This was made all the more impressive for the fact that St Paul’s was no major town-centre church, but an unremarkable mid-twentieth century building lost down an ordinary residential road in a suburb; as plain as you could find. And yet it managed in those first days of the late 1970s to produce a truly respectable music list, typical of its day. Not only were there the regular services, but there would be the occasional extra thing to work on, such as Maunder’s Olivet to Calvary or Stainer’s Crucifixion; there were always enough singers of sufficient talent to provide the solo parts.

At the organ, I sweated! Anglican chant was a new world to me, and I struggled with chant book, psalter, manuals, pedals and registration, trying to get the notes right in the right place and absorb not just the strange rhythms but the received manner in which the chant was to be sung; the particular pacing that everyone but me had grown up with; nice and straight through the verse, and then at the end, just as it gets all complicated, speed up through the difficult bit and then, before you have time to select a fresh registration, corner on two wheels and on to the next verse without a breath.

Then there were the Coverdale psalms. My first shock was on my first singing engagement at St Paul’s. I was duly engaged among the gentlemen to sing bass or to reinforce the tenors when required. Psalm 68, Exsurgat Deus, was on the menu, and my jaw nearly dropped off when the verse ‘Praise him in his Name, JAH!’ (pronounced like the vessel you put jam into) was bellowed into my ear by my South African neighbour. Then, on another occasion, there was ‘One deep calleth another, because of the noise of the water-pipes’ which gave me the giggles.

Another problem concerned me on the organ. Not only was the organist required to accompany the psalms, and, with contortions, manage not only his instrument but also several books with several pages to turn at the same time, but he was required to 'illustrate' the psalms too. ‘Glory be to the Father’ was fine (loud!), but what was I supposed to do with ‘I am become like a pelican in the wilderness, and like an owl that is in the desert’? An owl’s hoot, I suppose I could approximate with a good stopped diapason, but a pelican……? What noise does a pelican make, for Heaven’s sake? I nearly gave myself a hernia with ‘The words of his mouth were softer than butter, having war in his heart; his words were smoother than oil, and yet be they very swords’. I smiled to myself when required to accompany the ‘Tedium’, or the ‘Benny Die City’.

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The Anglo-Catholic Welcomes Dr. William Tighe!

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I am very pleased to welcome Dr. William J. Tighe to the staff of The Anglo-Catholic as a regular contributor.  Dr. Tighe is Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania.  His papers have been published in numerous scholarly journals and his work has been featured in popular publications such as Touchstone and New Oxford Review.  Dr. Tighe has provided the following biographical sketch for our readers.

I was born May 5, 1952 in Lowell, Massachusetts, and since 1990 have been married to the former Silvija G. Sterns.  We have three children, Augustine Leo Tighe (b. 1992), Kirill Alexander Tighe (b. 1995) and Aija Theodoti Tighe (b. 2001).

I was born and bred a Roman Catholic, but as a graduate student at Yale drifted away and began to attend Episcopalian services.  Had it not been for the decision of the Episcopal Church in 1976 to approve the ordination of women, I would most likely have become an Episcopalian, but that decision gave me pause, although not enough to drive me away from Anglicanism.  When I left Yale (and America) for Cambridge (I lived in the UK from 1978 to 1986), I was able to cultivate an acquaintance with the late Anglo-Catholic theologian Eric Mascall (1905-1993), whose works I had discovered on my own as an undergraduate in the early 1970s and whom I had met in New York City on Good Friday 1977, and as a result of conversations with him, as well as with other new English Christian friends, I came to the conclusion that I could not justify formally becoming an Anglican, but, rather, should return to the practice of the Catholic Faith in the Catholic Church, which I did.  Shortly after taking up my present position at Muhlenberg College in 1986, I began to attend the local Ukrainian Catholic parish, and in 1995 petitioned for, and received, a formal "transfer of rite" to become, with my children, a member of the ecclesia sui juris Ukrainian Catholic Church.  I will acknowledge as well that I have been influenced by the admirable writings of Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP, whom I am pleased and honored to count as a friend.

My academic interests include the English Reformation (and its long-term "working out") as well as the Reformation in the Scandinavian realms, and, additionally, the Orthodox Church and its relations with the West.  I teach courses on various aspects of European history between the Renaissance and the French Revolution, as well as one on (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity.

Please welcome Dr. Tighe to the site!

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Gore on Artificial Contraception

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Pope Paul VI Gore on Artificial ContraceptionIt is an unfortunate — but not altogether infrequent — occurrence to find a "traditional Anglican" who believes that his faith permits the use of artificial means of contraception despite the difficult moral teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.  It is supposed (by the ignorant) that our acceptance of the courageous teaching of Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae and reinforced in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (the doctrinal standard proposed by Anglicanorum Coetibus) would be, at least, a novelty, a rigorous discipline beyond what has been required in the past.  But it is important to understand that with respect to this now controversial point of moral teaching, the Church of England, and her daughter Churches throughout the world, followed the tradition of the Church Catholic from the earliest days.  Only with the Lambeth Conference of 1930 did the Anglican Communion begin to depart from the ancient doctrine, and, in retrospect, it may clearly be seen that this moment was the beginning of the rapid descent of the Anglican Church into modernism in the 20th century.

The extract below, from a pamphlet by Charles Gore, theologian and sometime Bishop of Oxford, and authored shortly after the disastrous Lambeth Conference, fairly reflects the teaching of the Anglican Church until the first half of the last century.  It is precisely the teaching of Humanae Vitae, and with or without reunion with Rome, it is that commended to all Anglicans as having "divine sanction".

It should be noted that the human infirmity that makes this teaching so difficult (especially given the pressures of the modern world and the prevailing culture) and the resulting accommodating attitudes that rationalize artificial contraception are no less prevalent in the Roman Catholic Church as they might be in Anglican churches.  Evidence suggests that there is a general disregard for this hard doctrine in much of the modern Church.  This reminder of our traditional moral teaching is offered only as a education to those who maintain that birth control is an acceptable practice in Anglicanism.  It is not and it never has been.

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CharlesGore Gore on Artificial ContraceptionThe fact is that our Lord, though He must be acknowledged to have given one specific law to His Church—on the indissolubility of marriage—on the whole abstained from legislating for His community, as, for instance, Plato legislated for his ideal community in The Laws. He gave the Church moral principles both in His teaching and by His example; and He founded (or refounded) the Church, to which, or to the ministers of which, He gave the power of legislation and spiritual discipline with a divine sanction. ('What things soever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what things soever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven': 'whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.') Certainly the earliest Church, as pictured in the Acts and the Epistles, knew that it possessed these powers, and confidently used them. I am not raising the difficult question of infallibility in their exercise. Even Innocent III at the height of ecclesiastical idealism admitted that 'it sometimes happens that the Church looses one whom God has bound, and binds by the judgement of the Church one who in God's sight is free'; but I see manifold reason to believe that in the case of Birth Prevention the 'very strong tradition in the Catholic Church ' has been in the right, and has divine sanction. It is a practice which it has rightly judged to be unnatural, like other sadly common misuses of the sexual organs.

There is nothing really more astonishing than that in the course of nature a spiritual power so great as the production of a new personality, destined for immortal life, should have been entrusted by God to that in man which is so easily misled and misused as his sexual instincts and powers. But so it is. And the propagation of the species is in the order of nature judged to be of such importance that man is, like the lower animals, induced to it, with all its attendant pains and cares, by a desire more passionate and a pleasure more intense attaching to the sexual act than to almost any other kind of human action. But the justification of the pleasure lies primarily in its direction towards the end of propagation. This is assuredly the lesson of biology and the lesson of Holy Scripture and of Church tradition. Mankind in its wilfulness has been always seeking to separate the pleasure from its end by different kinds of practices which have been condemned by the Church as unnatural.

Now it is true that the sexual intercourse of married people has other recognized ends than the production of offspring. The Church has always declined to say that this is the only end. And it has never prohibited such intercourse when the laws of nature make generation improbable or impossible. But it has said steadily or constantly that this is the primary end of marriage, and it has condemned as unnatural and as a sin the attempt by any devices to separate absolutely the satisfaction of the physical desire from its chief end. The methods provided by Birth Prevention are not wrong because they are mechanical. But legitimate mechanism should tend to promote the ends of nature not to obstruct and defeat them. The Church has regarded Birth Prevention as sinful because, like other sensual practices commonly called unnatural, it is a deliberate enterprise taken in hand to separate absolutely the enjoyment of the sexual act from its natural issue. It is thus to be reckoned among the 'unfruitful works of darkness.' I must add that the Church has always and rightly bidden us have regard in our individual conduct to the general effect of what we are proposing to do. We are not allowed in judging of any matter to isolate our private interest from the general interests of the kingdom of God.

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Anglo-Jansenism and Immobilism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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