…the decision of the Church of England to proceed to the ordination of women bishops without providing adequately for traditionalists renders the claims of the Church of England to be part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church shaky or simply untenable.
Codes of practice are shifting sands. The sacramental life of the Church must be built on rock.
How could we trust a code of practice to deliver a workable ecclesiology if every suggestion we have made for our inclusion has been turned down flat?
How could we trust a code of practice when those who are offering it include those who have done most to undermine and seek to revoke the code of practice in force for these last 14 years?
The synodical process for traditional Anglo-Catholics is over. Some will try to draw new lines in the sand. But what the General Synod of the Church of England demonstrated on 7/7 (2008) is that, as on 11/11 (1992), it has decided that it is unilaterally competent to alter Holy Order. At one stage in the late 1990s it even had a go at changing the Creed. Here at work is a democratic Magisterium which at York this week showed that it values the advice of archbishops and bishops’ prolocutors less than it does the outcome of a show of hands.
[i]You don’t become a Catholic, for instance, because of what is wrong with another denomination or faith. You become a Catholic because you accept that the Catholic Church is what she says she is and the Catholic faith is what it says it is.[/i]
William Witt made a similar observation some years ago. It seems to me fundamental to any decision to swim the Tiber, especially for clergy. Sometimes, when one reads contributions to the NEW OXFORD REVIEW, for example, you get the sense that there are those under Rome who have yet to get Anglicanism fully out of their system. One can be grateful for what one gained as an Anglican but one shouldn’t constantly be looking back.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]
If +Burnham is now ready to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, then it must be the case that he has now fully accepted all RC teaching – including that his Anglican orders are “absolutely null and utterly void”; in other words he is a layman. If such is the case he should immediately cease acting as a bishop and celebrating mass. Unless of course, he is holding back from accepting that teaching until he’s safely over the Tiber?
The good bishop needs to take stock of new realities in global Anglicanism. Faithful Anglo-Catholics have another option he doesn’t mention, it’s called GAFCON/FCA! His horizons are too narrowly focused on Britain, and he needs to see things in a more global context. He’s already been in a hopeless ghetto for over a decade, he needs to wake up to new realities and smell the coffee (or tea). It’s a new day for global Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholics are and have a very important role to play in that future. It’s not yet time to take out the swimming trunks Bishop Burnham!
I cannot see Anglo-Catholics having any real influence in a FCA that has the Abp. of Sydney as its leading force. While they may be tolerated as fellow travellers for a while, AC’s will inevitably be second-class citizens in such a body and, probably, eventually purged. Remember, Sydney is the Diocese in which one has to sign a declaration never to wear a chasuble–even while most clergy seem to officiate in street clothes. Where the altar in the Cathedral was torn out and replaced by a bible. There are reports that the Diocese of Sydney is having families host Catholic young people coming for World Youth Day in the hopes of converting them from Catholicism to Christianity. No. It’s time to admit that the curious amalgam of Anglicanism has run its course and for the streams to go their different ways.
At such a point as this, John Henry Newman’s Anglican Difficulties is necessary reading, and re-reading, for Anglo-Catholics. Even if you read it, say, four years ago and found it unpersuasive, you should re-read it and attend anew to his arguments. Newman saw more deeply into these matters than just about anyone and foresaw Anglicanism’s eventual capitulation to both essential Protestantism and secularism. He knew that Anglicanism would always, must always, reject the fundamental convictions of Anglo-Catholicism.
This story gets played out every time a new crisis comes upon Anglicanism. At such a time, Anglo-Catholics raise the question, Can we continue as Anglicans? Some decide they cannot and depart; some decide they can and remain, making whatever accomodations and compromises necessary. Those who remain then wait for the next crisis.
In Newman’s day the great crisis was the Gorham decision. Anglo-Catholics of the day saw the judgment of the Privy Council that the denial of baptismal regeneration was compatible with Anglican formularies signified separation from the Church catholic (see especially the resolutions drawn up at Mr. J. R. Hope’ s house in Curzon Street). Some Anglo-Catholics left the C of E, others remained. And so it has gone for the past 150 years.
Newman’s words are prophetic:
“If, my brethren, your reason, your faith, your affections, are indissolubly bound up with the holy principles which you have been taught, if you know they are true, if you know their life and their power, if you know that nothing else is true; surely you have no portion or sympathy with systems which reject them. Seek those principles in their true home. If your Church rejects your principles, it rejects you;—nor dream of indoctrinating it with them by remaining; everything has its own nature, and in that nature is its identity. You cannot change your Establishment into a Church without a miracle. It is what it is, and you have no means of acting upon it; you have not what Archimedes looked for, when he would move the world,—the fulcrum of his lever,—while you are one with it. It acts on you, while you act on it; you cannot employ it against itself. If you would make England Catholic, you must go forth on your mission from the Catholic Church. You have duties towards the Establishment; it is the duty, not of owning its rule, but of converting its members. Oh, my brethren! life is short, waste it not in vanities; dream not; halt not between two opinions; wake from a dream, in which you are not profiting your neighbour, but imperilling your own souls.”
“You ask me whether you cannot now continue what you were. No, my brethren, it is impossible, you cannot recall the past; you cannot surround yourselves with circumstances which have simply ceased to be. In the beginning of the movement you disowned private judgment, but now, if you would remain a party, you must, with whatever inconsistency, profess it;—then you were a party only externally, that is, not in your wishes and feelings, but merely because you were seen to differ from others in matter of fact, when the world looked at you, whether you would or no; but now you will be a party knowingly and on principle, intrinsically, and will be erected on a party basis. You cannot be what you were. You will no longer be Anglo-Catholic, but Patristico-Protestants. You will be obliged to frame a religion for yourselves, and then to maintain that it is that very truth, pure and celestial, which the Apostles promulgated. You will be induced of necessity to put together some speculation of your own, and then to fancy it of importance enough to din it into the ears of your neighbours, to plague the world with it, and, if you have success, to convulse your own Communion with the imperious inculcation of doctrines which you can never engraft upon it.”
Chris Taylor wrote: “The good bishop needs to take stock of new realities in global Anglicanism. Faithful Anglo-Catholics have another option he doesn’t mention, it’s called GAFCON/FCA!”
If you can get hold of a copy, or access it online, Chris, I urge you to have a look at the current issue of the UK FiF magazine, “New Directions”. I cite from memory, but in the reviews section (in the review of Arthur Middleton’s book IIRC) someone writes to the efect that if the majority of Orthodox Catholic Anglicans in the C of E were asked if they wanted to ally with American liberalism or Nigerian fundamentalism, they would answer “neither of the above”. Austin touches on the most obvious difficulty.
In Britain, there has been no great enthusiasm for the alphabet soup of “continuers”nor for “Anglican rite” Roman Catholicism. (I await with lively anticipation the reaction of most priests of my acquaintance if told that their first act of obedience to the magisterium was to be the abandonment of their Missal in favour of some product of a sixteenth century heresiarch!)
Fr. Kimel, Cardnal Newman was a long time ago and I find him LESS persuasive today than I did four years ago. Since Newman there have always been Anglo-Catholics, such as yourself, eager to swim the Tiber. I, among many others, cannot join you. There were fundamental issues that prevented Anglo-Catholics from leaving for Rome at the the time of the Reformation, and those reasons persist. New global realities in Anglicanism make me more, not less hopeful than I was four years ago. I understand and respect your decision to swim, but many of us cannot join you. Anglo-Catholics have always been a minority within Anglicanism, and there’s nothing to suggest that will change. However, influence is not always a function of numbers. Of the three dioceses which have already left TEC, or are likely to leave TEC in the next 6 months, 2 of them are Anglo-Catholic. And they’re not leaving for Rome! I still submit that at the heart of Anglicanism lies an unresolved tension between Reformed and Catholic Christianity. Resolve that tension, and you no longer have Anglicanism — you’ve got either Geneva or Rome. It’s never been easy to embrace or live with that tension, but a willingness to live with it is ultimately what defines us as Anglican. I certainly understand the frustrations of living with this tension, but for myself living without it is a far worse prospect! Ever since Newman Anglo-Catholics have been told “NOW you MUST decide!” Bishop Burham is simply the latest to utter these words. Just last month Rome sent us the same message! The problem is that we have already decided! That’s why we’re Anglo-Catholics! What we’ve decided is that a greater share of Truth is to be found neither in Rome nor in Geneva, but in the via media! It’s not that we can live with the tension while others cannot, it’s more that we cannot live WITHOUT the tension!
Re #8
Your comment brought a smile to my face, Chris. I was not an eager convert to Catholicism. Quite the contrary. I was brought kicking and screaming to Rome. On Sundays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays I still wish I could have become Orthodox. For anyone whose faith has been so deeply formed by liturgy and the beauty of holiness, it is not easy being a Catholic in 21st century America. But, alas, I could not and can not get around the rock of Peter.
But I have no regrets about leaving Anglicanism. I long spoke of the tensions of Anglicanism. Eventually, however, I simply had to acknowledge them not as tensions but as contradictions. I simply could no longer say to myself or declare to my parishioners that the “greater share of Truth is to be found neither in Rome nor in Geneva, but in the via media,” which, with all respect, now sounds to me as the height of presumption and arrogance. Please understand, I speak not of you personally–I speak, rather, of the Anglo-Catholic claim underlying such sentiments, as if the purity of the faith is to be found neither in the 2,000 year old Roman tradition nor the 2,000 year old Eastern tradition but in that strange, incoherent, and novel religious amalgam created by the necessities of 16th and 17th century English politics.
You write: “Ever since Newman Anglo-Catholics have been told ‘NOW you MUST decide!’ Bishop Burham is simply the latest to utter these words. Just last month Rome sent us the same message! The problem is that we have already decided! That’s why we’re Anglo-Catholics!”
But of course, Anglo-Catholics have not decided, not really–which is precisely why, of all Christians, Anglo-Catholics are most susceptible to Roman and Byzantine fever. Bishop Burnham is simply acknowledging the reality: authentic Anglo-Catholicism has no real home within Anglicanism. If it did, Anglo-Catholics would not still be living, as they have for the past 150 years, from crisis to crisis.
Nos. 4 and 9 are right. The joining of Catholic and Reformed theologies, ecclesiologies, etc. within Anglicanism are a contradiction, not a tension ( which perhaps from time to time was productive). It also is not true that taking the “Reformed” out of Anglicanism would mean simply “Rome”. Perhaps it would be something more like the Old Catholics on the Continent.
I am anxious to read Cardinal Kasper’s address to the Lambeth Conference.