The Anglican Papalist: a personal portrait of
Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton
by A.T. John Salter ; available from and
published by the Anglo-Catholic
History SocietyISBN 978-0-9560565-2-8
£20.00
Pbk; 194pages.
Fr John Salter’s book delivers precisely what
it claims to provide; a personal account of the priest who was for half a
century the dominant figure in the Papalist movement within Anglicanism, and
Founder of the Catholic League. It is not a work merely of scholarship ... not a
half-baked spin-off from a DPhil thesis; you will search in vain for the
detailed footnotes of a youthful scholar covering his back. Far more - for, in compensation, you
will find yourself personally immersed in a period and in a person both known
intimately to the author.
Anglican Papalists are often written up very
engagingly and with due tribute to their eccentricities – as a body of people
who appeared to pretend that they were Roman Catholics and whose deep sense of
obedience to authority led them to disobey every maxim of the ecclesial body
which paid them (perhaps unjustly, I have felt that this is the picture which
emerges from the writings of Michael Yelton). Salter does not make this mistake.
He perceives the deeply doctrinal
significance of Fynes-Clinton’s life, and brings out what is creatively unusual
in his witness. FC, for example, believed strongly that the See of Rome is the
divinely appointed centre of unity; and that the decrees of the [first] Vatican
Council are normative. But this in no way diminished his affection for the
Orthodox East. Commonly, anti-papal Anglicans use Orthodoxy as a convenient
weapon with which to attack the Papacy, while ultramontanes regard Orthodox as
schismatics or worse. FC admired the Orthodox and secured their affection (and
honours) by his unceasing hard work, especially for the troubled Serbian Church.
But his ‘Romanism’ brought him into conflict with Canon J.A. Douglas and Mr
Athelstan Riley and led to his removal from leadership in an Anglican-Orthodox
society of which he had himself been one of the founders. FC instinctively
realised the truth later to be expressed in the CDF document Communionis notio (1993): that, although
‘wounded’ by their separation from Rome, the Eastern Churches are true
‘particular churches’. He even planned for Hagia Sophia to be recovered from the
Turks and handed over to the Orthodox rather than to Eastern Christians in
communion with Rome! The little Orthodox chapel in the Anglican Shrine at
Walsingham is an initiative of FC, just a few feet from the foundation stone of
the Holy House, with its ‘papalist’ inscription (full text in Salter) which so
infuriated the Bishop of Norwich. FC’s balanced stance, so obviously right to
our way of thinking, represented in the inter-war years a rare
combination.
Of very considerable importance – and
relevance to our own times – is a document which Salter prints in full. Towards
the end of 1932, in anticipation of the anniversary of the Catholic Revival, FC
and Fr Robert Corbould composed a manifesto to which hundreds of papalist clergy
subscribed. “In the modern Anglo-catholic movement much of the enthusiasm over
the observance of the centenary cloaks a marked departure from the original
Oxford principles ...” The authors describe the creeping influence of Modernism
in matters Christological; the growth of Relativism (“mutual toleration of
opposed teaching”).They disclaim the popular misconception that Catholic
identity is assured “by revival of ceremony”. Firmly, they “reprobate the
toleration and even positive support by certain Anglo-Catholics of the immoral
sanction of artificial contraception given by many bishops at Lambeth”. Here are
the authentic tones of S Pius X (Pascendi
Dominici gregis) and the affirmation of Christian sexual mores by Pius XI
(Casti conubii) and Paul VI (Humanae vitae). This manifesto anticipates by
sixty years the current distinction between real Catholicism, resolutely
counter-cultural, and the flaccid conformities of ‘Affirming Catholicism’.
Inevitably, it concludes that “the real and essential goal is reunion with the
Apostolic See of Rome ... the existence of the Church of England as a body
separate de facto from the rest of the Catholic
Church is only tolerable when it is regarded as a temporary evil”.
Salter’s book is to be unambiguously
commended. By its pages you will live through the days when exiled East European
royalty enlivened the social life of London, and you will be reminded by the
heroic figure of St Elizabeth of the New Martyrs of the Communist Yoke of
Russia, alias Her Imperial Highness
Grand Princess Elizaveta, that Ruritania was not entirely a land of fopperies.
You will meet the mysterious, little-known figure of the Jesuit bishop Michel
d’Herbigny, who flutters through the period sabotaging ecumenism, playing off
Greeks against Rumanians and Serbs against Russians and Catholics against
Orthodox; who attempted unsuccessfully to infiltrate and sabotage the Malines
Conversations. You may get some surprises: did you know that the Holy See was
lobbying the British Government to stop Russia liberating Constantinople from
the Turk and handing over Anatolia to Orthodox Hellenes? You will be shocked, I
suspect, to know that Paul VI returned to the Turkish government the Ottoman
flag captured at Lepanto. As our own day watches the Christian populations of
Iraq and Syria being killed or driven into exile by a Western-encouraged ‘Arab
Spring’, you may feel some sympathy with FC’s rhetoric about “the black trail of
the Turk ... so hateful to the Englishman sickened with the massacres of
Christians in these last years”. We who have been told so little about the
realities of the ‘Kosovo’ problem, or the ‘enormity’ (FC’s word) of the Zionist
appropriation of Palestine, may gain a more rounded understanding of how so many
current problems arise from this little known yet comparatively recent period of
history.
Should mainstream schools give up their
endless courses about Nazi Germany and adopt Salter as the text-book for a new
course enabling the kiddies to understand the world they are actually living in?
No ... it would be too topical and too raw ... ‘Hitler’ is as safely irrelevant
a syllabus as the Wars of the Roses.
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