The tendency within the leadership of post-conciliar English Catholicism has been to treat the commitment to ecumenism with Canterbury, not as some provisional and debatable ecclesial policy, but as if it were some direct mandate of the divine will. To express doubt or scepticism about this commitment is be regarded in some quarters as displaying a quasi-Lefebvrist disregard for the teaching of the magisterium – to prove oneself no better than a Hans Kung, but of the right.
And in the meantime almost every element that has historically separated English Catholics from the bulk of Anglicans, in school catechesis and doctrinal instruction, in liturgy and in spiritual devotions, has been systematically weakened and undermined from within. A grand process of de-Catholicization has been attempted – to make it come to be true, as it clearly was not true before, that there really is a substantial unity of belief and practice between Catholic and Anglican. In very many parishes the sacrament of penance has been downplayed, the status and dignity of the priesthood diminished, liturgy in its style and outward form substantially Protestantized, the reality of Purgatory ignored, the cult of Mary and the saints reduced and sidelined, the plain teaching of the natural law unasserted.
Seminarians training for the priesthood were carefully educated into the ”˜new ways of the Council’, as interpreted in England. Any interest in Catholic tradition deemed ”˜excessive’ – and it would not take much to count as ”˜excessive’ – and the seminarian would be dismissed as unsuitable. Meanwhile their ecclesiastical superiors lamented the supposed cost to vocations of Rome’s insistence on celibacy and some, even from among the bishops, called openly for married priests (’like our Anglican brothers and sisters’). The obsession with building ecumenical bridges with Anglicanism and adopting Anglican ecclesial models – what we might call Roman Anglicanism – has gone right to the top of English Catholicism, and was by no means ended by the Church of England’s ordination of women. It has not been unknown for a Catholic bishop to tolerate his local Anglican ”˜brother’ being prayed for as a bishop along with the Pope and his own self in the Eucharistic Prayer. (It is not hard to guess at the implications of all this for the real beliefs of some senior English Catholics on questions to do with Anglican and with female orders.) When Dominus Iesus was issued, dislike of the declaration was evident at high levels within the bishops’ conference.
What has been the ecumenical outcome? Still no closer to actual reunion – but instead the greatest meltdown in Catholic membership and practice in England since the Reformation….
Fascinating. Even more interesting than the article is the thread of comments. Obvious parallels with Anglicanism are given. But recognize the parallels and also the substance of the article itself, and the worry (in one comment) over the effect of religious “balkanization” arises with even greater weight: as conservative Christians, in their various groups, clean up their houses, they deal with the destructive dynamics of reforming “rage”, and then discover, if it is ever resolved, that they exist on the finally well-kempt islands of their respective domains. And the process starts over again. Or that is one possibility. There are others!
As an Anglican who has worshiped in High, Middle, and Low Churches I can say to lose any aspect is to lose Anglicanism. My only regret was that Rome despoiled the Celtic Church of Britain which was far closer to the Eastern Orthodox than Rome.