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)