Catholic Anglicans - what next?

 Catholic Anglicans – what next?

 

In the July 2021 edition of the ‘Forward in Faith’ magazine New Directions, my colleague Fr David Craven has a piece entitled ‘Ordination Training Fit for Purpose’. Fr Craven’s concern is with vocations to the priesthood and how those coming forward might be formed and trained.  In particular, his focus is on Ladyewell House in Preston.

As Fr Craven makes clear, significant changes are already underway with regard to preparation for ordination.  The emphasis is changing from residential theological colleges to courses and ‘contextual’ training.  The Ladyewell House project will work in collaboration with the new Emmanuel Theological College in the North West.  It would seem that candidates for all the various traditions represented in the Church of England will train together, in the spirit of the notion of ‘mutual flourishing’ and the Five Guiding Principles.  Ladyewell House will operate within this polity and provide a single-gender setting in the context of urban placements.

Those seeking to establish such provision should, I think, be commended for their vision to provide the best preparation possible for ordained ministry in these times of straitened finances, although I am troubled by some of the language used by Fr Craven in his article.  It reveals starkly the extent to which the Catholic movement in the Church of England has become captive to an alien and novel ecclesiology.

Fr Craven writes of a ‘new generation of priests formed within the Catholic stream of the Church of England’ (my italics).  He tells us that the ‘early pioneers of the Anglo-Catholic cause had a zeal and passion for preaching, teaching and establishing new worshipping congregations’.  He emphasises ‘what we have to offer as a constituency’,  and refers to the ‘whole spectrum of the Church of England where mutual flourishing is encouraged as part of the 5 Guiding Principles’.  He wishes to ‘promote a vibrant and flourishing Catholic strand within the Church of the future’ (my italics).

 

The problem that faces Catholics in the Church of England now arises from what Fr Craven calls the ‘settled agreement over the issue of Women Bishops’.  This agreement has placed traditional Catholics into a niche – into a space defined by others, and of which tolerance is the hallmark; indeed, it can well be argued that traditional Catholics are in something of a bind.  The Oxford Fathers are often cited by today’s ‘Anglo-Catholics’ as a primary source of inspiration; and yet the Oxford Fathers’ vision was to raise the consciousness of Church of England people generally as to the inherent Catholic nature of the whole Church of England.  It was certainly not to occupy a niche alongside other traditions; and whilst it can be argued that many of the second generation after Keble and the others abandoned the original vision in favour of ‘tolerance and forbearance for themselves’[1], there were always those who were able to retain hold of a bigger picture in which the whole Church of England was but a (small) part of something far greater than itself, namely the Catholic Church as a whole, East and West.  The situation today in which Anglican Catholics find themselves is a very long way indeed from the motivating vison of Keble, Newman, Pusey and the others.  The truth of this can be clearly seen in Fr Craven’s reference to a ‘Catholic stream’ and a ‘Catholic strand’.

 

The language of stream and strand reveals that the Five Guiding Principles encapsulate an ecclesiology in which traditional Catholics, or ‘Anglo-Catholics’, are simply invited and expected to make a contribution to an Anglican smorgasbord of what the Church of England ‘offers’.  There is a Catholic strand, a conservative evangelical strand, a liberal strand, and so on – and all these, taken together, make up the rich tapestry of the Church of England.  The implication is that the Church of England itself is somehow greater than ‘catholicity’, for catholicity appears to be seen as but one strand (or stream) of something greater, fuller and richer. This is quite unacceptable to anyone with a truly Catholic self-understanding, since it is founded upon ‘the liberal principle, as one party in the Church’[2], among others.  In addition, it ignores the etymology and meaning of the word ‘Catholic’ as denoting universality and, more particularly, wholeness.  Catholicity has been relativized.

The idea that ‘Catholic’ can be understood as relating to a ‘part’ of something or, indeed, a ‘party’ within a greater whole, is novel indeed:

 

Jesus did not found a Catholic party in a cosmopolitan debating society, but a Catholic Church to which he promised the fullness of truth…A body which reduces its Catholics to a party within a religious parliament can hardly deserve to be called a branch of the Catholic Church, but a national religion, dominated by and structured on the principle of liberal tolerance, in which the authority of revelation is subordinate to democracy and public opinion[3] (my italics).

 

This principle was enunciated by Newman, as early as 1843:

 

I fear that I must confess, that, in proportion as I think the English Church is showing herself intrinsically and radically alien from Catholic principles, so do I feel the difficulties of defending her claims to be a branch of the Catholic Church.  It seems a dream to call a communion Catholic, when one can neither appeal to any clear statement of Catholic doctrine in its formularies, nor interpret ambiguous formularies by the received and living Catholic sense, whether past or present.  Men of Catholic views are too truly but a party in our Church…[4]

 

The so-called Five Guiding Principles, with their liberal ecclesiology of tolerance, cannot sustain Catholic mission in the Church of England.  ‘Anglo-Catholics’ are forced into a niche (a bind) which is controlled by others; and inhabiting that niche makes the current vision radically different from the vision which motivated the Oxford Fathers almost two hundred years ago.  The point has been reached at which the only hope for Catholics within the Church of England is to try to develop a vision much greater and more ambitious to win the Church of England as a whole to its position, rather than simply to be content to co-exist with groups (strands and streams) whose differing visions are completely antithetical to its own.  The bind is precisely the ‘settlement’ to which Fr Craven refers.  It is designed to render such a vision unattainable.

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[1] John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Vanderbilt, 1996)

[2] Sheridan Gilley, Newman and his Age (DLT 1990 & 2003)

[3] Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics (Ignatius Press, 2008)

[4] John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Longmans, Green, and Co. 1890)

 

Trinity Sunday (Year B) 

Happily, most well-balanced individuals are attracted to good qualities in other people.  Examples of good qualities include holiness, goodness, truth, beauty, honesty and a sense of justice.  The ancient Greek philosopher Plato believed that these good qualities exist in perfect Forms, which lie beyond what we can perceive fully; but that we can participate in them – we share in them to a certain degree through our senses and what we can perceive with our minds.  So, for example, when we love, our love cannot be absolutely perfect, but it is a genuine sharing in the perfection of love which lies beyond.  What we experience of justice, truth, goodness and so on, are not their absolute perfections but a genuine sharing nonetheless.

The idea of participation (from the Greek methexis) became important in the thinking of Christian theologians even before the Middle Ages; and in the thirteenth century, St Thomas Aquinas used the language of participation to indicate the dependent status of human beings in relation to God.  We share in His life, and not the other way round.  So, the fullness of love, justice, truth, goodness and beauty were understood to be in God; and we share in them through his grace, and to some degree.  What we experience of these qualities by sharing are perfections in God.  So, this means that, although God is qualitatively different from us, he nevertheless shares his life with us here and now.  Through grace, we can grow so as to share these qualities more and more.

Holy Scripture is insistent that God wills to share his life with us, and all three of today’s readings bear this out.  Israel is spoken of in the first reading as the Chosen people of God, taken to Himself; St Paul speaks of the baptised as coheirs with Christ and as children of God.  In the gospel reading, St Matthew speaks of the commission to share the Good News with ‘all the nations’.  God, we can be sure, wants all people to share his life.

Today, we celebrate God as Holy Trinity.  Of course, Christians celebrate God as Trinity all the time, as we are reminded right at the start of every Mass; but today’s feast invites us to consider the nature of God as the mystery of three distinct Persons within one godhead.  It makes no sense mathematically, of course – three cannot be one in that scheme of things.  But the language of love, truth, goodness, beauty and the like gives us a way into the mystery.  Some theologians have said that the language of love - as well as that of truth, goodness and so on – provides us with profound insight into the nature of God.  The love which binds the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is of such sheer perfection that they cannot be other than One.  The loving relationships that we know or have known are sharings in, and reflections of, that perfect love which characterises the life within the godhead – and are thus intimately related to it.  This enables us to see why the marriage liturgy speaks of two becoming one – in the sacrament of marriage, the spouses remain distinct, but the love between them has an unlimited potential to grow towards the perfect simplicity of oneness.

What all this means is that, even now, we share in the life of God.  The sacramental life of the Church is entirely to do with this theme of sharing God’s life.  When we come to celebrate the Eucharist, we are not simply gathering for a time of fellowship, as important as that aspect is.  More fundamentally, we are gathering to make an offering of ourselves to God and to receive in return what we might describe as an infusion of His risen life in Holy Communion; and this is why it’s so important to prepare carefully.

The sacraments build us up in the life of God.  The whole Christian life is a life which is oriented towards the justice, holiness, goodness, truth and beauty of God.  Salvation means sharing in God’s own life, being drawn ever more deeply into the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and seeing as God sees.  Each of us is called by Him to participate in the eternity which is God’s own life.  What we do here Sunday by Sunday and day by day is as important as that.

 

 Online worship and livestreaming

Whilst I am disquieted about the uncritical embrace among so many in the churches of the normativity of livestreaming and recording worship to be viewed online, I can see that such initiatives have been valuable to many during the time of lockdown and relative social isolation.  It has provided a way for people to continue to engage at some level with corporate and liturgical worship.

My concern is with the acceptance of online worship as normative.  The present Archbishop of York has been speaking recently of the Church of England as a 'mixed ecology' church. This rather odd-sounding phrase appears to mean that online worship is here to stay as part of the mainstream of the Church of England's liturgical worship, to be engaged in alongside and equally normatively with traditional in-person, or embodied, worship.  Indeed, the communications team of the Church of England now quite naturally speaks of worship being 'online or onsite', and in that order.

There is, in my view, a significant downside to and a danger in this mentality.  I was speaking with a colleague recently who told me that one of her parishioners told her that she preferred Zoom worship to having to go to the church because she could watch it on the settee in her pjyamas with a cup of coffee.  My colleague was perfectly relaxed about this, whilst I will admit to being horrified.  It seems that there is a very real danger of reducing worship and sacred acts to something more akin to entertainment, and turning participants into spectators - which is ironic, given that so much emphasis has been placed for decades (rightly) on encouraging greater lay-participation in the liturgy and other aspects of ecclesial life.

This would appear to me to be part of a wider and by now, well-established cultural trend.  It is a trend especially noticeable in the field of sport.  There are more people than ever with subscriptions to Sky Sports and BT Sport and yet fewer people than ever actually participating in sport.  My own main sport is cricket and I can think of several clubs which no longer exist, several clubs with fewer teams than in the past and other clubs fearful for the future, often citing a lack of interest among the young.  My local rugby union club, which fifteen years ago fielded three teams every Saturday, folded altogether a couple of years or so ago because it could no longer find enough players even for one team.  When did anyone last see a group of children or teenagers having an impromptu (as opposed to official) game of football or cricket on a school field, in a park or in the street? Yet, prior to the pandemic, many pubs were thronging with people clustered around a big TV screen watching several Premier League football games every weekend.

The language used by those in the churches providing online worship shows the extent to which they have travelled down this road already, and is troubling.  My own diocese provides online worship at least every Sunday (and on other occasions), and tells us that we can 'watch it later if you prefer'; as we might say when commending a TV programme to someone before mentioning I-Player.  I have flagged this up politely on several occasions but I can never elicit a response.

For me, what emerges from all this is a theological issue which needs serious reflection.  It is to do with the orientation of worship.  A traditional understanding would be that worship is something offered by people, by the Church and by individuals, to God.  Much of the language we now hear suggests that worship is offered by the person or group of people people 'putting it on' for other people; instead of defining the activity of worship 'vertically', we are now defining it 'horizontally'.  I am not saying that an online act of worship cannot be oriented in a godly way; rather, that the language used usually suggests otherwise, and that this cannot but affect the way in which people conceive of worship.  It is similar to the impression given on some church noticeboards when, after listing all the various acts and times of worship, it says 'something for everyone' - which I have seen more than once.  We are commodifying worship, and no-one seems to be taking any notice of what is going on.  I have to say that if the churches think they can compete realistically in an entertainment market-place, they are going to have a rude shock, sooner rather than later.

When Archbishop Sentamu was enthroned in York Minster at the beginning of his archiepiscopal ministry in 2005, he drew a distinction between what he called 'consumers of religion' and 'disciples of Christ'.  Those in authority in the churches may like to consider that many (most?) of these consumers/watchers of the product on offer, and who are usually referred to, patronisingly, as a 'new fringe' will not be contributing to the coffers.

One final point: it is unarguable that one of the clearest trends of the last couple of decades is the increasing isolation of many people, and a similar trend towards individualism.  The churches have been a key antidote to these trends for some, especially older, people.  Encouraging more people to spend more time in front of computer and other screens is likely to exacerbate any feelings of isolation.  It is time for the leadership of the churches to actively encourage people back to corporate worship as a shared enterprise, along with other aspects of church life which help to build up our local communities and afford many opportunities to share quality time with those we may otherwise never even meet.

Parish Priest’s Letter for May 2020

Dear Parishioners

We are approaching the Sixth Sunday of Easter and the final part of the long season of Eastertide.  Jesus promises his followers the gift of the Holy Spirit, through whom he would be with them (us) forever.  On Thursday, we celebrate Ascension Day (the fortieth of the fifty days of Easter) and ten days later the Feast of Pentecost and the conclusion of this season.  No-one would ever have believed that we would celebrate the whole of this season physically separated from each other.  As you know, I am continuing to celebrate Morning Prayer and Mass in the church building every day on your behalf, and I shall continue to do so in this way until we can be together again.

In the light of the government’s latest utterances, we shall need to begin thinking and planning about how the church building can be made accessible again.  This is unlikely to be before 4^th July and even then unlikely to be for corporate public worship.  The likelihood is that church building may be made accessible for personal/private prayer initially, and even this is conditional upon infection rates being kept under control.  It is possible that public worship will be possible in the foreseeable future but careful planning will be needed in order to address issues of physical distancing and the cleansing of surfaces.  At present, we do not know how things will progress in the short and medium term, but I will keep you informed of any significant developments as they begin to become clearer.

Many people have told me that they appreciate the weekly communication I provide on a Friday (to those who have access to the internet which, happily, is most people) and Saturday (for those who do not).  If you are able to access the internet, you may like to use the parish Facebook page (Christ Church Carnforth) where there are photographs and occasional prayers and other bits of material.  I am unable to livestream Masses (which is why I provide a couple of links for this on my Friday emails) because we do not have an internet connection in the church at the moment.  I’m not keen to do it anyway, since I would have to set everything up myself and then I would be too conscious of all that stuff instead of being centred on what I’m actually doing!

Next Thursday, we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord.  We’re told in the Acts of the Apostles that, having promised the apostles the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus ‘was lifted up while they looked on, and a cloud took him from their sight’ (first reading for the feast).  We can easily be pre-occupied with the image of the apostles ‘staring into the sky’; or even of that dreadful image of Jesus’s feet sticking through the chapel ceiling at Walsingham!  Theologically, though, the significant thing is that our human nature has been taken into the godhead, so that we have a home in heaven.  Jesus had promised the apostles that, through the Spirit, he would be with them ‘to the end of time’; his presence with us on earth is abiding, since we have all received the Spirit when were we baptised.  Now he is telling them that the Spirit will draw them to their eternal destiny and that their rightful inheritance is to share Christ’s risen life for ever.  When we partake of the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist, we receive a foretaste and a pledge of this promise; and this is why it is so difficult to be deprived of the sacraments – although we are assured of the same grace when we make a spiritual communion in these exceptional circumstances.

We shall be back together again, to be gathered at the altar of God, doing what Jesus told his followers to do in his memory.  Until then, keep praying for an end to this wretched pandemic, keep using the scripture readings for each day which are on the bulletin or may be found in a missal, if you have one, or at www.universalis.com ; and keep using the act of spiritual communion.  Do contact me if you wish to talk – I can meet you individually for a physically-distanced chat now, too, if you like – or if you need anything from me or if I can help in any way.  Donate to local foodbanks, if you can, and please keep your giving to the parish up-to-date if you’re able – I know that more people are now giving by standing order, which is great; and you can deliver envelopes to my door or ask me to collect them from you, and I will hand them in for processing in the usual way.

For now, I shall leave you with a selection of prayers for use at this strange and difficult time.

Loving God, we come to you full of anxiety about what may happen in the coming days and weeks. Shower us with the peace Jesus promised to his disciples, and make us into steady pillars for those around us. In this time of uncertainty and pandemic, wake us up to the reminder that we are not alone.

Even as we are asked to keep our distance from others, help us to find ways to reach out to those who need our support. We pray especially for those whose incomes and livelihoods are threatened. For the children who will miss meals due to school closures. For those already isolated, lonely and scared. Loving God, give them your peace, and through our hands ensure they have what they need. 

Sustain, strengthen and protect all caregivers. Bless them as they offer compassionate care and show selfless courage in the face of risk.  

Remind us, each time we wash our hands, that in our baptism you call us to let go of our fears and live in joy, peace, and hope. Amen.

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy; hail, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy towards us; and after this our exile, show to us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary. (The ancient Salve Regina )

All shall be well,

and all shall be well,

and all manner of things shall be well.

(Julian of Norwich)

This comes with my good wishes and prayers for you and yours

Fr Stephen

Integration, not compartmentalisation, is the key to Christian life.

A common feature of modern western Christianity, or English Christianity at least, is the tendency for Christian people to compartmentalise their faith.  What do I mean?  I mean the boxing off of that faith into an hour on Sunday mornings, into a slot which may or may not be inextricably related to the rest of life.

You may wonder what’s wrong with that.  Isn’t it better than not bothering at all?  Well, of course it is; and yet it’s a severe impoverishment of how the faith should be lived.

The Christian faith is unique is that it is an ‘incarnational’ faith.  What is meant by that is that, in the person of Christ, God entered this world, his created order, as one of us.  Our veneration of Our Lady reminds us of this truth.  God deigned to be born of a woman and live a proper human life; he was brought up in a human family and, in his human nature, endured a fully human death.  In the Incarnation, God identified with us; he didn’t simply look like us or appear to be like us; rather, he shared our life in all its facets, except our sinfulness whose hold over us he came to break. 

When we think of this, it seems strange that people should think it reasonable to box things off as we tend to do.  The challenge for us is to allow our faith conviction to permeate and affect every aspect of our life and being, precisely because God is there, everywhere, and in every situation of our lives through the mystery of the Incarnation.

In this part of the world, it’s common for Christian people to absent themselves from the altar at significant moments in their lives.  If I had a quid for every time someone told me that they won’t be at Mass (on a Sunday or weekday) because (for example) it’s their birthday (or someone else’s), a wedding anniversary, some other celebration, or because someone has died or it’s the anniversary of a death, I could book a very nice weekend away somewhere.  If we took the Incarnation seriously, and didn’t compartmentalise our faith, each of these instances would provide an extra motivation for being at the altar.  Whether it is ‘good news’ life events or times of upset and difficulty, God is there with us in Christ and we witness to this truth best by immersing ourselves in the practice of our faith.  If our faith isn’t a way of life, then it is nothing.

Another example of where many people could revise their approach to the practice of the faith is when family or friends visit.  Again, I have lost count of the times people have said, over the years, that they cannot be in church because they have visitors and there is too much to do.  I can never understand why visitors cannot be told that they are very welcome, but that we have a duty on Sunday to worship.  That’s what I have to say to visitors (yes, I have family and friends, too – people often speak to me as if I don’t!).  What a wonderful way to witness to the faith; and what an opportunity is lost when we yield to the easy option.  Then people wonder why the practice of the faith is on the wane and numbers of people in the churches are down.  It is so easy for us to undermine our own faith whilst at the same time regretting why more people don’t ‘come to church’.

Ours is the faith of the Incarnation, and there is not a single aspect of life where we cannot witness to it, quietly and effectively.

Leisure and Work

So, we again enter the month of August, that pleasant summer lull we all look forward to since it provides a real sense of natural rhythm in the course of the year.  The schools are off and many families find the time to go away on holiday.  The roads are quieter, at least in the mornings and late afternoons.  There is a sense in us that we actually need this period of comparative down-time; it seems right and natural.

There is a natural rhythm built into every week.  We have the five working days and then the weekend; and for those who have to work at weekends, there are days off elsewhere. We know we can’t and mustn’t work every single day.  As Christians, we acknowledge Sunday as a particular day of rest, instituted by our Creator and insisted upon by Holy Mother Church.  We are called to dedicate Sunday not to work (if we’re able) but to the worship of God and our own spiritual, mental and physical renewal.  It is to be a day, literally, of re-creation for ourselves.  We must not neglect it.  On top of all this, every twenty-four hour period has its own rhythm, when we must be both active and find restful sleep.

The problem is that, in our culture, we have forgotten to honour the principle of leisure for its own sake.  We justify leisure in terms of work.  So, we speak of going on holiday in order to ‘re-charge our batteries’, with the implication that we shall then return better able to work efficiently and well.  Holidays should, of course, enable us to work better; but surely leisure has more to it than that?

The question raised is this: do we live to work, or work to live?  I remember an article written by the Bristol University academic, Fernando Cervantes, back in 2002 (I can’t find it now), in which he argued that ‘the best ideas are in the bath’; he said that we have ‘lost the art’ of leisure.  His argument was that leisure time is more than simply a break from work, justifiable only by means of giving us the rest we need so that we can come back and work better; he argued that leisure time provides space for true creativity.  Endless frantic work gets certain kinds of jobs done, but stifles creativity because there is no time to think or use our imagination.  So easily, we lapse into a shallow utilitarianism which undervalues anything which is of no apparent and immediate use. 

There are several and various problems with this, once it becomes embedded in a nation’s culture, as it has in ours.  Working people are pressed increasingly hard by employers concerned only with the bottom line; it’s certainly arguable that our employment practices are going backwards in such a way that more and more people appear to be oppressed in their workplaces by rapacious employers.  The so-called humanities subjects (such as history and geography) and the arts (music, art and drama) are squeezed in school timetables and in our universities (where many theology, philosophy, music and classics departments have been closed down), in favour of more ‘useful’ subjects, (such as maths, information technology, science and, of course business studies and ‘management’).  This is having a de-humanising effect upon our society already, as our cultural life becomes more impoverished.  There is also an increasing sense that people do not know how to be quiet, or to behave appropriately in different contexts.  People often feel guilty about ‘doing nothing’ and about being still even when they are tired out.

In his article, Cervantes argues that leisure, far from being justified by reference to work, is actually our natural state.  He says that most of the really valuable things in life come to us without any effort on our part: our very existence and life, the love of other people and of God himself.  Yes, certain kinds of work can help us to flourish, but much of the work that people have to do has a negative effect on their flourishing.  This suggests that, as a matter of principle, we do not live in order to work; we work in order to live.

Our sacred rest, whether we are talking of Sunday or our annual period of holiday, is justified, therefore, without reference to work.  It is justified in itself.  It is important for our spiritual, physical and mental well-being.  It is the state of being which is our God-given default.  It is summed up by our Lord himself in the Gospel:

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of Man is master even of the Sabbath (Mark 2: 27-28)

Why are priests called 'Father'?

I was in a local pub recently – yes, really – and someone asked me why some parishes call their priests ‘Father’ whereas it’s not the custom everywhere.  I explained it to him and he was very happy with the explanation.  The conversation, like other conversations I’ve had with people outside the worshipping community about other things, made me wonder about the extent to which people within the worshipping community know about our practices and customs.

One might trace the origins of this particular custom right back to the holy scriptures.  In his First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 4: 14-17), St Paul refers to himself as the ‘father’ of the believers; but, being too distant both in time and context, this can’t really be used as a basis for contemporary usage.  Prior to the Reformation, it was customary to call priests ‘Sir’ (meaning ‘senior’ or ‘elder’) followed by the priest’s Christian name (see, for example, The Voices of Morebath by Eamon Duffy, 2001, a book which traces the history of the church in one English parish through the turbulent events of the sixteenth century).  In some countries, notably Italy, the common title was ‘Dom’, from the Latin Dominus or ‘Master’; those who like champagne are probably familiar with ‘Dom Perignon’, bearing as it does the name of bubbly’s Benedictine inventor!

Prior to the 1800s, the title ‘Father’ was largely reserved to priests who belonged to religious orders, where it was sometimes rendered in its French form Pere or Italian Padre, the latter in general use in the British armed forces today.  It was only during the nineteenth century that the Roman Catholic Church in England adopted ‘Father’ as its preferred form of address for priests generally; and then it became gradually adopted by some parishes and institutions within the Church of England, too, as we see from accounts of church life in the decades following the beginning of the Oxford Movement in 1833.

The title ‘Father’ can, of course, be used in conjunction with the priest’s Christian name or surname.  The latter is more formal and it was the custom in the parish in which I served after my ordination in Birmingham.  It’s probably more common nowadays used in conjunction with the priest’s Christian name, which I personally prefer, at least among people who are familiar to me.

But to return to the question posed by my hostelry inquisitor: why do we have this custom?  There are two quite valuable factors in its favour.  Firstly, it is a title which can and should be used by everyone – young and old.  It has an objectivity about it which ensures that there is no ‘pecking order’ in a parish community based on age, social class or any other kind of status among the laity.  Secondly, it reminds the priest of his responsibilities in a way that is analogous to the father of a family; just as a father has no favourites among his children (or shouldn’t have), so the bit of distance that the title allows the priest to have from any and every individual ensures that he is not more distant from anyone, and that he can have an equal relationship with all his parishioners.  In parishes where the priest is not called ‘Father’, it’s common for different people to have a different kind of access to their priest – so, you’ll often find that the children address the priest differently from the way in which the adults do; which is undesirable in a parish community as it introduces distinctions based on status, thus undermining the common baptismal status which makes Christian people equals.

The title ‘Father’ has never conveyed to me a sense of superiority, as some people might argue that it does.  It reminds me of my responsibilities, not of my rights.  It helps me to bring to mind some words of St Peter, addressed to the elders of the fledgling Church: ‘Be the shepherds of the flock of God that is entrusted to you; watch over it…Never be a dictator over any group that is put in your charge, but be an example that the whole flock can follow (1 Peter 5: 1b-3).