Another senior Church of England cleric [at Synod] who did not want to be named, told me he believed that those who turned to Rome would see their Anglican traditions diluted. He said that a lot of people would laugh at the idea of a distinctly Anglican body within the Roman Catholic Church, adding “Many of them have been using Catholic rites (illegally) anyway – so I would ask exactly what authentically Anglican aspects will they be taking with them. The only thing authentically Anglican would be their wives.”

Marching Orders by Sam Adams, 17 July 2010

Well, this rather gets to the heart of things, doesn’t it? Here in the (Roman) Catholic Church over recent months we have been becoming far more familiar with things Anglican than in the past. ‘More Roman than Rome’ has been a long-standing joke on both sides of the Tiber, and we have been at turns amused, bemused and occasionally irritated at Anglo-Catholic practice which appeared to ape us and yet, somehow, not quite ‘get it’.

I am well aware that the situation is different in other parts of the world, but here in England we, too, are left wondering what is going to be the practical difference between St Charles the Martyr Ordinariate parish and Our Lady of the Anguished Expression Roman-use parish. Both are probably going to use the Roman Rite; the only external difference is likely to be that St Charles may use the English Hymnal, whereas Our Lady’s will use Laudate and sometimes use guitars and things. We, too, wonder whether the only real difference is going to be Mrs Priest (and we have quite a lot of priests’ wives already).

I suspect that it is going to be necessary for those who join the Ordinariates in the British Isles, ironically, to be quite a lot more Anglican than they are now. And, even more ironically, to be more Anglican (in the right sense) than the Church of England they are leaving behind. A friend of mine, who would identify with the Anglo-Catholic movement commented to me the other day that at his (mainstream, not Anglo-Catholic) theological college, ‘Anglicanism’ was studied very little indeed. The ‘divines’ were never mentioned, for instance. The strange thing is that just as we are asking what ‘Patrimony’ is, there is no clear answer because the Church of England no longer sees itself as having any particular patrimony but only ongoing revelation of new and different truths (such as the 'truth' that women should be ordained).

The person who seems to understand this most clearly is the estimable Fr Hunwicke. I asked some time ago about the identity of the patrimony, and I have got the clearest answers from his blog, though I think his approach is not as complete as it could (and possibly should) be. He is most fond of the pre-Reformation period (which I would be reluctant to concede as specifically Anglican patrimony; this stuff is surely shared between us) and, quite rightly, the twentieth century, especially as found in the work of Dom Gregory Dix and Canon Eric Mascall, surely two of the most towering scholars of the century in any communion.

The writers in both these periods, of course, were keen to identify themselves as Catholic in one way or another. But the Anglican Patrimony necessarily also involves the writings of some who would be more reluctant to adopt a specifically Catholic label. One does not have to accept the stuff that is obviously contrary to the faith, but simply to be aware of it, while sucking the nectar still to be found there, and which may provide a real source of nourishment not just for the ordinariates, but for the whole Catholic Church in time. The Syrian Catholic Church owes a great deal to the thought of Babai the Great, who lived and died out of communion, but was in a real sense the father of the group of churches inaccurately but commonly called Nestorian. There is no reason why Ken, Hooker, Lawes, Nicholas Ferrar and even Cranmer should not continue to be studied appreciatively within the safe context of the Ordinariates; once one’s feet are on the Rock, one can see all sorts of good things within them; securus iudicat orbis terrarum. All one needs is good and erudite guidance to see the good and avoid the pitfalls.

The irony of this is that in a sense, the ordinariates, rather than being more Roman than Rome, would become more Anglican than Anglicans. They would preserve the very thing that Anglicanism would appear to be casting off; its own patrimony. I cannot imagine that average seminary training in the Ordinariates would be shorter than four or five years; during this period, a major course for the seminarians will need to be the Patrimony. What has, in a sense, been despised as non-Catholic by Anglo-Catholics until now needs to be brought in from the cold, to find a new home and context. After all, it went to build up the platform upon which the Anglo-Catholic movement stands.

In this way, Anglicanism, as a true school within the Western Rite would be secured for future generations in a way that it is very unlikely to be within the Church of England, the Church in Wales, or the Episcopal Church of Scotland. Ironic, eh?

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.”

We all know the questions which are being asked. What is Anglican Patrimony? Does it in fact exist at all in a form which is capable of “repatriation” within the Catholic Church? Who exactly is Anglicanorum Coetibus aimed at, and what is its essential purpose? There is at the moment (to put it mildly) a certain understandable agnosticism felt by many Anglican Catholics in Britain on the subject of patrimony and the Anglican liturgical inheritance.

The reasons behind this are complex and they have been fairly exhaustively explored here and in other places. Following the Second Vatican Council many parishes adopted the post-conciliar vernacular Roman liturgies wholesale and largely uncritically, not merely out of imitation (or entitlement, perceiving ourselves to be part of the Western Church, if separated by historical accident) but also perhaps due to an increasing impatience with what has been seen as the inevitable doctrinal and liturgical compromises of a divided communion which has approached liturgy particularly in a spirit of studied textual ambiguity and, increasingly in an age of liturgical revision, through the flawed processes of synodical political horse-trading.

It has also become very clear as a result of contemporary historical scholarship that we have to recognize that the first Anglican reformers were considerably more influenced by continental Protestantism (and identifying wholly with it) than was at once thought, at least in establishment Anglican circles and modern official Anglican pronouncements, and that a “catholic and reformed” interpretation and justification for the separate identity of “Anglicanism” had to wait until Hooker (to a degree) and to the Caroline Divines and, in its most explicit form, to the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Not that any of this should have come as a startling revelation to anglo-papalists; it was our historical interpretation long before it was rediscovered by the academic world.

Add to these perceptions our defeat at the hands of the liberals in the “culture wars” of modern Anglicanism and the re-emergence of an a-historical evangelicalism as the predominant force in the Church of England, and it can’t be a matter of surprise that we are feeling somewhat uncertain, not to say disillusioned, about our ecclesial heritage. If Anglicanism has led us to this pass, can there be anything much of lasting value within it?

I think that is largely a mistaken view and one can’t help but notice the irony that the Apostolic Constitution itself is far warmer in its commendation of the ‘Catholic – compatible’ liturgical, spiritual and pastoral elements of Anglicanism than are many of us who belong to the Anglo-Catholic tradition itself and have been formed by it.

Without excluding liturgical celebrations according to the Roman Rite, the Ordinariate has the faculty to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and the other Sacraments, the Liturgy of the Hours and other liturgical celebrations according to the liturgical books proper to the Anglican tradition, which have been approved by the Holy See, so as to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared.

Which brings me back to my original questions, what is the Apostolic Constitution for, and who is it aimed at?

Is Anglicanorum Coetibus purely and simply a life-line thrown to this generation of “displaced Catholics” within the Anglican Communion who have found themselves without a spiritual home and have come to recognise the need for the gift of papal primacy and authority in the Church? Or should we also view it as part of a much larger and longer term vision which seeks to heal historical wounds and to gather together the scattered fragments of the sixteenth century schisms in the face of the assaults of an increasingly aggressive post-modern secularism?

What is the purpose of the Ordinariates?  If they are to succeed in being a bridge which can lead Anglicans (in all parts of the world) into full communion with the Holy See, then surely it’s essential to look beyond the immediate liturgical needs and preferences of those first groups who will make up the Ordinariates and ensure that we can continue to speak the same liturgical and spiritual language (of course, stripped of ambiguity and made more explicitly Catholic in its theology) as those Anglicans we hope and pray may join this project at a later stage. Or am I being unrealistic?

In England, of course, Henry VIII’s breach with Rome (1532-34) had nothing to do with Protestant doctrinal ideas of any sort, although to be sure it is doubtful that if the continental Reformation had not happened Henry would have had the willingness or the ability to break with Rome and to have himself declared to be “only Supreme Head under Christ of the Church of England” in 1534. Although Henry came to see himself as a “reformer” as well as a “godly prince” his idea of “reform” extended only so far beyond despoiling the Church as to attack “superstitious devotion” to saints and images, as well as, half-heartedly, the existence of Purgatory. (Henry allowed the existence of Purgatory to be denied, but believed in prayer for the dead; towards the end of his reign he signed a law allowing him to dissolve chantries, endowed foundations that provided for Masses for the dead, but in his own will he endowed thousands of Masses for the repose of his own soul.) For political reasons Henry engaged in sustained negotiations for an alliance with the Lutheran princes of Germany in the 1530s, and since these princes insisted that a religious/confessional agreement had to accompany a political alliance he allowed reform-minded English theologians, among them Archbishop Cranmer, to strive to come to a theological agreement with the Lutherans. Among the results of these negotiations were the Wittenberg Articles of 1536, the Ten Articles later in the same year and Cranmer’s own Thirteen Articles of 1538. These all showed a good deal of practical reform-mindedness, but although they all employed to a greater or lesser extent Lutheran-sounding terms and phrases, they were never promulgated or ratified: Henry had an abiding, if uncomprehending, hostility to the Lutheran doctrine of “Justification by Faith Alone” and an equally abiding devotion to clerical celibacy, and once it became clear by mid 1539 that he had no need for a Lutheran alliance, he cast them aside and upheld a strongly Catholic view on all controverted theological issues for the remainder of his reign.

England had a Protestant Reformation imposed on it in the course of Edward VI’s reign (1547-1553), although the rapidity and spontaneity of the restoration of Catholic practice and rites after Edward’s death in July 1553 and the succession of his catholic half-sister Mary, even before the law was altered to legalize and restore Catholicism, shows how superficial was its effect. Under Edward, changes in practice — the replacement of the Latin Mass by successive Books of Common Prayer in 1549 and 1552, the implementation of communion in both species in 1548, the allowance of clerical marriage in 1549, the removal of altars in 1550 and their replacement by wooden tables, to name the most notable — preceded changes in doctrine, and it was only in June 1553, less than a month before the king’s death, that 42 “Articles of Religion” drafted by Archbishop Cranmer were promulgated by the authority of the Privy Council (no ecclesiastical body or assembly ever debated or approved of them), and they died with the king. Nevertheless, as they formed the basis for the later 39 Articles, it is only right to glance at a few of their distinguishing features. Taken as a whole, they are Protestant, they are Reformed and they are unCatholic (and certainly not in any sense “Anglo-Catholic”). As they were formulated in the 1550s they do not dwell upon matters such as predestination, election, perseverance in grace and assurance of salvation which were to agitate the Reformed world generally and English Protestants particularly from the 1580s onwards, but on matters such as the Eucharist, on which a great chasm had opened between the Lutheran and Reformed camps in the 1520s and which was rapidly becoming more embittered in the 1550s, the 42 Articles took a decidedly Reformed stance. For example, Article 29 (which corresponds to Article 28 in the 39 Articles) “Of the Lord’s Supper” contains a passage, subsequently omitted, which runs “For as much as the truth of man’s nature requireth, that the body of one and the selfsame man cannot be at one time in diverse places, but must needs be in one certain place; therefore the body of Christ cannot be present at one time in many and diverse places. And because, as Holy Scripture doth teach, Christ was taken up into heaven, and there shall continue until the end of the world, a faithful man ought not either to believe or openly to confess the real and bodily presence, as they term it, of Christ’s flesh and blood, in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.” Taken together with the “Black Rubric” (which rejected “anye reall and essencial presence there beeyng of Christ's naturall fleshe and bloude” in the eucharistic elements) of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer their fully Reformed stance is clear enough. The 42 Articles also contained condemnations of universalism, millenarianism, and the “sleep of souls” until the general resurrection which were omitted from the later 39, as well as the clear statement that “the decrees of predestination are unknown to us” to which many later Calvinists would have objected (if it was interpreted to mean that the elect could not be aware of their own election).

No doctrinal stance beyond the mere repudiation of the papacy and whatever was implicit in the restoration of a slightly modified version of the 1552 Prayer Book (from which the “Black Rubric” had been removed) was mandated by or in the 1559 “Elizabethan Settlement.” It was not until the Convocation of Canterbury (the assembly of bishops and clerical representatives of the Province of Canterbury under its Archbishop, which met in tandem with Parliament) assembled in the period from 13 January to 10 April 1563 that the newly re-reformed Church of England’s leadership was able to reformulate its theological stance, in the form of 39 Articles. This they accomplished by 29 January, and it appears that the process of revision was largely undertaken the bishops, who first considered a revision of the Articles (still keeping to the number 42, but involving deletions and rewritings) which some of their number had prepared for consideration, and then went on to revise it further, producing 39 Articles, which were approved in Convocation and subsequently presented to Elizabeth I. The Queen, it appears, made two changes, insisting on the total omission of Article 29 (“Of the Wicked which do not eat the Body of Christ in the Use of the Lord’s Supper”), probably because of its clear repudiation of the Lutheran sacramental teaching that both the good and the wicked do indeed receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the sacramental elements, the former to their benefit, the latter to their condemnation — she allowed the inclusion of Article 29 only in 1571, as we shall see with an accompanying qualification — and insisted that the phrase “The Church hath power to decree rites and ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith; and yet” be prefixed to Article 20, before authorizing their promulgation (as 38 Articles) later in the same year.

It is no part of this essay’s purpose to enter upon an detailed theological analysis of the Articles. It is important to note, though, that at a time when Lutheran and Reformed confessions were becoming more detailed and specific in their affirmations and repudiations as old controversies continued and new ones arose both within and between these groups, the reduction of the 42 Articles to 38 or 39 was at the same time a movement towards imprecision and, if one may write anachronistically, “inclusivity,” and that without any clear guidelines as to its limits. The Articles as they emerged in 1563 were somewhat more strongly worded in their implicit or explicit condemnation of certain traditional Catholic practices or beliefs than their earlier counterparts — Article 24 was stronger in its condemnation of non-vernacular worship, Article 34 in its assertion of the competence of “particular or national churches” to alter rites and ceremonies on their own authority, Article 6 in distinguishing between Old Testament canonical books and other apocryphal books (some of which had been declared fully canonical by councils considered by Catholics as ecumenical) and Article 30 (a new article) insisting on communion in both kinds — but on specifically theological matters they were less specific and less comprehensive. The articles on the Eucharist are a good example of this. As mentioned above, the rejection of the Real Presence on the basis of the “localization” of Christ’s body in Heaven was removed from what became Article 28, and in its place there appeared the statement that “The Body of Christ is given, taken and eaten in the Supper only after an heavenly and spiritual manner; and the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.” The “feel” is clearly Reformed, rather than Catholic or Lutheran, but Catholics, and “traditionalists” in general, could without too much difficulty interpret “after an heavenly and spiritual manner” and “faith” in such a way as to allow their own views. And we know that this was intentional, because it was done. The author of this portion of the article was Edmund Guest (1518-1577), Bishop of Rochester from 1560 to 1571 and of Salisbury from 1571 to 1577. We know Guest to have been Reformed in his general theological outlook, like almost all of Elizabeth’s initial Episcopal appointees, and we also know that, again like most of his colleagues, he would have preferred a religious settlement that in its liturgical provisions and as regards clerical vestments had been more sweeping in its purge of Catholic survivals; but he also seems to have been more accommodating in his views, and deferential to the queen’s religious eccentricities (he may have prepared a revision, one that proved to be abortive, of the 1549 Communion Service at the queen’s behest in the opening months of the reign, until she realized that she had little choice but to accept the more Protestant 1552 service, modified in a slightly more “traditional” direction) than many of his colleagues. In any event, when the most conservative of Elizabeth’s first bishops, Richard Cheyney (1513-1579; bishop in 1562) of Gloucester, refused to subscribe to this article in 1566 on the grounds that the word “only” in this section denied the presence of the body of Christ in the sacrament, Guest replied that “it did not exclude the presence of Christis body fro the Sacrament, but onely the grossnes and senseblenes in the receavinge thereof.” Cheyney appears to have been less than fully convinced by this explanation, as he persisted in his refusal to subscribe when all 39 Articles were ratified in 1571, and as a result was briefly excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury — and even then he may have been absolved without giving in — and it is less than clear whether Guest’s explanation revealed his own views or were an attempt to accommodate Cheyney’s. In a similar manner, Article 35, which affirmed the validity of Cranmer’s Ordinal for ordaining bishops, priests and deacons, when taken together with the insistence of Article 23 on a formal public call for preaching and ministering the sacraments in a congregation, could be read as either interpreting the particular form of ecclesiastical polity in the Church of England (episcopacy) as a matter of indifference (an adiaphoron), or else as endorsing its continuance without any suggestion that it might be subject to alteration.

For reasons which remain obscure, Queen Elizabeth yielded to the insistence of almost all of her bishops in the 1571 Convocation that the Articles be reissued, this time with the inclusion of the previously vetoed Article 29, and this despite a last-minute plea from Guest that it remain excluded. At the same time, however, this same Convocation passed a canon asserting that the Articles were in agreement with the “Catholic bishops and fathers” of the Early Church and insisted that they be interpreted accordingly. This was a remarkable canon, for despite the fact that advocates of all sides to the 16th-Century religious conflict, Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed alike, were given to claiming that their particular doctrinal stances and, in some cases, distinctive practices, were in accord with those of the Early Church Fathers, or at least with those of high standing (such as St. Augustine), none were willing to require, or even permit, their confessional stances to be judged by, or subordinated to, a hypothetical “Patristic consensus” of the first four or five centuries of Christianity. Even in England the canon had very little effect at first, beyond, perhaps, serving as an encouragement to “conformist Calvinists” in the 1570s and 80s who were unsympathetic to the “puritan” campaign to substitute a presbyterian polity for the traditional episcopal order to carry the battle into the enemy’s camp by vaunting the universality and antiquity of episcopacy, as opposed to the novelty of the “Geneva Discipline.” Once Reformed and, more specifically, Calvinist ideas on predestination, election and perseverance, which had dominated the English academic/theological scene from the 1560s began to come under attack from a small number of academic theologians, especially in Cambridge, in the 1590s, some of whom were foreign Reformed refugees and most of whom — Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) being a big exception and the discreet-to-the-point-of-silent John Young, Bishop of Rochester from 1578 to 1605 another — were “recovering Calvinists,” however, and it became clear that the 39 Articles were a useless tool to uphold Calvinist orthodoxy and silence dissenters, a number of English Calvinist divines conferred together privately in London in 1595, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift (1530-1604; archbishop in 1583) among them, to create the “Lambeth Articles.” These nine articles asserted (1) double predestination, (2) election owing to God’s inscrutable good pleasure and not from His foreknowledge of faith and good works, (3) the fixed number of the elect, (4) the necessary damnation of the reprobate, (5) the perseverance of the saints (i.e., the elect can never fall “finally” or “totally”), (6) the “full assurance of salvation” of the elect, (7) saving grace is not offered to all men, (8) no one can come to the Son unless the Father draws him, but not all are so drawn by the Father, and (9) it is not in everyone’s power to be saved.

The purpose intended by the framers of the Lambeth Articles is mysterious, especially as the meetings which produced them were conducted clandestinely. All those involved in their framing were aware that the queen would be unalterably opposed to them, and even more to the fact that those involved in the business had proceeded on their own initiative without her knowledge and consent, and yet a number of high government officials were aware of the meetings and discreetly encouraged them. More mysteriously still, when news of the sudden death at the age of 48 of the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, William Whitaker (1547-1595), the driving force behind the Lambeth Articles, reached London, Whitaker’s patron, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer, a man who had been fully aware of the discussions, promptly informed the queen about them, evoking an outburst of fury on her part, and a hasty end to the project. I wrote an article on this affair some years ago, and came to the conclusion that its obscure essence was largely political in nature. By 1598 it was becoming clear that the queen’s likely successor — she refused to name an heir or to allow any discussion of the succession throughout her reign — would be her cousin, King James VI of Scotland, and if that wily monarch were to prove himself to be both a Calvinist in his theological outlook and one who regarded the Church of England as an institution in need of “reform” on the Scottish semi-Presbyterian and ultra-Calvinist model (no one in 1598 could know that James would find the “model” of the Church of England much more to his satisfaction after he inherited the English throne in 1603 than that of his native Scotland, especially as he had spent much of the 1590s professing the contrary in an attempt to divide radical Calvinist “presbyterianizers” from ordinary “loyal” Calvinists who would leave the shape of the Scottish Church to the king if he, in turn, would uphold Calvinist theological orthodoxy), the English religious and secular establishment, or at least the most influential elements and personalities in it, would be able to brandish the Lambeth Articles as proof that they had agreed with James’s views all along.

However — and this is the relevance of the abortive Lambeth Articles to the larger story with which this essay is concerned — although the Lambeth Articles never achieved any official status in the Church of England, they did, for a time, in the Church of Ireland. Ireland had for centuries been a “lordship” dependent on the English Crown, until in 1540 Henry VIII promoted himself to be King of Ireland as well as King of England. The Church of Ireland, like the Church of England, returned to the communion of the Catholic Church in the reign of Mary Tudor, and in 1560 the Irish Parliament, like the English Parliament a year earlier, enacted laws repudiating papal jurisdiction and replacing the Latin rites with a Book of Common Prayer in every respect identical with that adopted in England in 1559. For whatever reason, though, whether through policy or negligence, the Church of Ireland never adopted the 39 Articles at any point in Elizabeth’s reign, and by the end of her reign, once any possibility of retaining more than a small fraction of the native Irish people or the old Anglo-Norman aristocracy in what they came to term “the Queen’s religion” (as opposed to “the Pope’s religion”) had passed and the Church of Ireland had become the church of the English governing elite and colonial settlers, its clergy and hierarchy had become in practice as thoroughly Calvinist in their theological outlook as those of Scotland (but without the presbyterianism). In 1615, when James allowed the bishops and clergy of the Church of Ireland to assemble in Convocation and adopt a Confession of Faith, instead of adopting the 39 Articles they drew up and promulgated the “Irish Articles of Religion,” an elaborate and systematic document of 104 articles, thoroughly Calvinist in character and drawing upon the language of both the 39 Articles and the Lambeth Articles. It remained in force only until 1634, when at the behest of Charles I and over the strong objections of many of the Irish clergy and bishops it was withdrawn and replaced by the unmodified 39 Articles.

By 1630 the English ecclesiastical scene had changed dramatically from what it had been a mere ten years earlier. From the 1590s onward there emerged a group of clerical theologians who were increasingly open in their rejection of aspects of what may well be termed the “Calvinist consensus” of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England. Many of these men continued to embrace a theological outlook that was more Reformed than not, even while rejecting other aspects of Calvinist or even Reformed theology — Richard Hooker is a good example of this, embracing as he did an attitude towards the role of reason and the purpose of worship that differed strikingly from that of most Reformed theologians while retaining a Reformed view of the Eucharist (while Lancelot Andrewes, by contrast, seems in many respects not to be a theological Protestant at all) — and in later years this group attracted the label “Arminian” because of the rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination that it shared with the Dutch followers of Jacob Arminius (d. 1609), although in most other theological respects the Dutch Arminians and their English counterparts were worlds apart. James VI and I, although he disappointed the hopes of those who looked to him to “reform” the Church of England, was far more Calvinist in his theological outlook than Elizabeth I had been (although in the last five years of his life his views may have begun to alter). Nevertheless, it was he who appointed Andrewes and other like-minded men to high office in the Church of England, it would seem more out of appreciation for their high views of monarchical authority and their opposition to “puritans” (whom James regarded as kindred spirits to the aggressive presbyterianizing clergy whom he had come to detest in his youth in Scotland, as much for their minimizing notions about monarchical authority as for their ideas on church polity) than for their theological views — and to provide a counterweight to the still preponderantly Calvinist clergy and bishops. By the early 1620s, however, a number of circumstances, including James’s desire to avoid involvement in the Thirty Years War (in opposition to the strong desire on the part of many English Protestants, lay and clerical alike, for England to assume the leadership of “the Protestant cause”) and to arrange a marriage to a Catholic princess for his heir, his son Charles (a desire opposed just as strongly by the same people who supported English involvement in the war), as well as, perhaps, his own shifting theological views, caused James to appoint an increasing number of anti-Calvinist clergy to high church positions. More significant than this, though, was the fact that during the last years of his father’s life Prince Charles became a firm and total supporter of the anti-Calvinist party in the Church of England: to Charles the kind of anti-Calvinist theological outlook embodied by Andrewes and his disciples and followers such as William Laud was simply “orthodox” while all Calvinists were by definition “puritans,” even if they had no designs to alter the polity or the liturgy of the Church of England. Shortly before Charles succeeded his father in 1625, Andrewes and a number of his like-minded colleagues met privately with one of the Prince’s chaplains to ascertain his master’s sentiments, as well as how church affairs were likely to fare in a new reign, and at it they learned that Charles would support their views to the uttermost when he became king. And so it proved: from the beginning of the reign Charles’s Episcopal appointments tilted heavily from what was popularly termed the “Arminian” party, so much so that the quip was soon in circulation that when one man asked another “what do the Arminians hold?,” the reply was “all the best bishoprics and deaneries in England.”

In 1630 Charles I ordered the republication of the 39 Articles, to which was prefixed “His Majesty’s Declaration” and to this day it remains in that position in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England (1662). The Declaration was explicitly intended to put an end to theological controversy over the meaning of the Articles, and its most significant section ended with the king’s commandment “that no man shall hereafter print or preach to draw the Articles aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof: and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense.” This seems an unexceptionable and perhaps even commendable, if futile, gesture, but its purpose, and immediate effect, was to “deprivilege” and hence undermine the Reformed and Calvinist reading of the Articles that had been “traditional” for the previous sixty-five years. Within a short time of the Declaration’s issuance, an increasing number of “Caroline divines” began to interpret the Articles, or some of them, in ways explicitly repudiated Reformed readings, and to align then as closely to what they saw as the views of the “Catholic bishops and fathers” which had in some general sense been presented as exemplary back in 1571, and at the same time the publications of Calvinist divines began to encounter censorship or outright suppression, as contravening the Royal Declaration and contradicting the views of those “Catholic bishops and fathers” mentioned earlier. In 1634 the English Franciscan friar Franciscus de Sancta Clara (Christopher Davenport, brother of the Puritan first minister of the New Haven colony, John Davenport), published his monumental Deus, Natura, Gratia …, an appendix to which sought to demonstrate the Articles’ compatibility with the dogmatic decrees of the Council of Trent in order to promote a future reconciliation between the Church of England and the Catholic Church; and although Davenport admitted that there were some few respects in which they appeared to be at variance with one another, his work aroused a good deal of interest at the time, especially among the “Caroline divines” and even from the king himself (who seemed to think the theological differences between the two churches “trifles,” as opposed to the political claims of the papacy over kings and princes). All of these hopes and aspirations came to nothing as Crown and Church went to a common ruin in the 1640s; and after the Restoration of both institutions in 1660 a broad range of latitude interpreting the Articles became the norm in the Church of England and in its later offshoots, as the pendulum of influence swung, usually under the impetus of political forces, between the various “parties” that were entrenched in the Church of England thereafter. When the “Catholic Revival” of the Oxford Movement and Tractarianism arose in the 1830s after a long period in which the Evangelical or “low-church” party and the Latitudinarian or “broad-church” party had been the predominant groups in the Church of England, and even the “high-church” party had stressed its “Protestant character,” the future Cardinal Newman’s Tract 90 (1841) set out “to show that, while our Prayer Book is acknowledged on all hands to be of Catholic origin, our Articles also, the offspring of an uncatholic age, are, through God’s good providence, to say the least, not uncatholic, and may be subscribed by those who aim at being catholic in heart and doctrine.” He went on to justify this using arguments that included those excerpted below:

1. In the first place, it is a duty which we owe both to the Catholic Church and to our own, to take our reformed confessions in the most Catholic sense they will admit; we have no duties towards their framers. Nor do we receive the Articles from their original framers, but from several successive Convocations after their time; in the last instance, from that of 1662 …

3. Whatever be the authority of the Declaration prefixed to the Articles, so far as it has any weight at all, it sanctions the mode of interpreting them above given. For its enjoining the "literal and grammatical sense," relieves us from the necessity of making the known opinions of their framers, a comment upon their text; and its forbidding any person to "affix any new sense to any Article," was promulgated at a time when the leading men of our Church were especially noted for those Catholic views which have been here advocated …

7. Lastly, their framers constructed them in such a way as best to comprehend those who did not go so far in Protestantism as themselves. Anglo-Catholics then are but the successors and representatives of those moderate reformers; and their case has been directly anticipated in the wording of the Articles. It follows that they are not perverting, they are using them for an express purpose for which among others their authors framed them. The interpretation Anglo-Catholics take was intended to be admissible; though not that which those authors took themselves. Had it not been provided for, possibly the Articles never would have been accepted by our Church at all. If, then, their framers have gained their side of the compact in effecting the reception of the Articles, let Catholics have theirs too in retaining their own Catholic interpretation of them.

The Protestant Confession was drawn up with the purpose of including Catholics; and Catholics now will not be excluded. What was an economy in the Reformers, is a protection to us. What would have been a perplexity to us then, is a perplexity to Protestants now. We could not then have found fault with their words; they cannot now repudiate our meaning.

Newman’s arguments met with a generally outraged response, and were repudiated by the bishops of the Church of England. However, not only were his arguments not without precedent, but the tendency of this essay is to demonstrate the substantial accuracy of those three points of Newman’s argument that have been excerpted above, however one evaluates his overall argument. Attempts of a similar sort continue to be made in order to assert the “Catholic essence” of Anglicanism, one of the most scholarly and comprehensive being The Council of Trent and Anglican Formularies by H. Edward Symonds (Oxford, 1932); and it seems to me that if the overall account of the Articles that I have given be accepted as accurate, then any and every attempt to wrest the Articles’ sense into a Catholic, Evangelical or liberal/modernist sense can only be judged by their fidelity to their “literal and grammatical sense” and perhaps also the congruence of the results with the teachings of the “Catholic bishops and fathers” of the Early Church. Depending on whether one seeks conformity with the first of these two criteria, or with both of them, the scope for allowable interpretation will be remarkably different.

To return at length to the question that gives a title to the essay, the answer that emerges from it is a decided negative: the Articles are perfectly useless as a Confession of Faith for contemporary Anglicans, just as they have been of fairly limited usefulness virtually since they received their final form early in the reign of Elizabeth I. They are frequently vague concerning what they mandate and what they repudiate, and it seems that this was a feature of their design rather than a flaw; they have no authoritative interpretation and no one tradition of interpretation so dominant as to compel assent; they do not compel any particular deference to the views of their framers and so cannot yield to an “original intent” hermeneutic, and hence there is no compelling argument to favor Jewel’s theological framework as authoritative rather than Andrewes’, Hooker’s rather than Pusey’s, E. L. Mascall’s rather than J. I. M. Packer’s or (for that matter) Jack Iker’s rather than Jack Spong’s or Fitz Allison’s — no more than there is to prefer the “Anglicanism” (if one can call it that) of Elizabeth I’s reign to that of Charles I‘s, or that of the Tractarians to that of the members of Integrity . As a sympathetic but far from uncritical Catholic onlooker, I have strong affinities and antipathies towards the individuals and “tendencies” paired above, but they all serve to illuminate, as does the question with which this essay has attempted to deal, the real underlying problem: the question of authority, or rather the fact that there is effectively no “authority” in Anglican churches, save the authority of governing structures — whether these are envisaged as synodal structures whose purported “conciliar” or “democratic” nature somehow ensures them “the continuing guidance of the Holy Spirit” or else as resting with Anglican bishops and their purported “apostolic authority.” But to whichever alternative one inclines, it appears that both of them are mystifications meant to conceal the true essence of Anglicanism as an institutional phenomenon, and as a religious ideology, and that is its bedrock Erastianism. For the purposes of this essay contemporary “Erastianism” can be summed up in the phrase (which I remember reading with disgust years ago, although I have forgotten its source) “the World sets the agenda, the Church responds to it” — or, more succinctly, “go with the flow.” Historically, Anglican Erastianism took the form of, in England, the authority over the church of the Crown-in-Parliament and, more recently, by the Church of England’s slavish obsequiousness to bien-pensant public opinion, and, in America, the “social Erastianism” of deference to elite secular opinion and social consensus, spiced up at times by romantic Anglophilia and medievalism; and as elite opinion has moved away from Christian moral and social teaching in both countries (if at different speeds and in different ways), so Anglican bishops and clergy have found ways to “sanctify” its every stage and advance in a facilis descensus Averni that has led from the approval of contraception to that of routine remarriage after divorce and from priestesses to the sanctification of sodomy. A sad confirmation of the analysis of this essay can be found in the utter inability over the past three decades of “Continuing Anglican” bodies to arrive at a coherent and prescriptive consensus about what constitutes the “Anglican orthodoxy” that they profess, for the most part, to preserve — save by their clear if (for the most part) tacit repudiation of the distinctive views of the English Reformers and striving instead to embody a purported non-papal Western Catholicism, and one in which the 39 Articles seem more an embarrassment than an asset.