Second Centenary Lecture: Judge Michael Yelton - The Quest for Unity: 100 Years of the Catholic League

The Quest for Unity: 100 Years of the Catholic League

Judge Michael Yelton, 6th July 2013. St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge

May I first of all say how honoured I am to have been asked to deliver this short address to mark the Centenary of the Catholic League, which was for many years the most important group within the Church of England supporting the cause of reunion with Rome and in later years has transformed itself into an ecumenical grouping, albeit one with the same aims. Regrettably I am neither a Doctor nor a QC, as the initial flier would have you believe, nor indeed the President of the Anglo-Catholic History Society, but I do know, I hope, a considerable amount about ecclesiastical thought in the period we are dealing with.

I well recall some 40 years ago attending a Catholic League mass in St. Mary Elms, Ipswich, at which Leslie Gray Fisher, the long time secretary and one of those responsible for the survival of the Society through difficult times, proclaimed the well worn words: “Rome is the rock from which we were hewn and the Mother to whom we will return” which is and was an appropriate slogan for the League.

It is important however since we are today marking the Centenary to look back at the beginnings of the Society. I shall concentrate on the early years as they may be less familiar to those listening, and also because I have no wish to enter into controversies involving those still with us. The First 50 Years were chronicled in a pamphlet of the same name by Brian Doolan, which was produced by the Crux Press, run by Father Clive Beresford, the then Priest Director, from his somewhat decrepit vicarage in Newborough. It did not appear until 1966 because Father Beresford intended to write it himself but then found he did not have the time to do so. The 75^th Anniversary was marked by a rewriting of that history by Father Robert Farmer, whose account is shorter but still includes some additional information. Both have been very helpful to me.  

We can date with some precision the commencement of what came to be known as Anglican Papalism, a movement which was embodied in the Catholic League. In 1900 a series of addresses was delivered under the auspices of the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, which had begun as a meeting place for Anglicans and Romans but from which Romans had been barred by order of Cardinal Manning. On the Feast of St. Peter at St. Matthew, Westminster, Father Spencer Jones, a country clergyman and relative of Keble, delivered one such address in which he strongly advocated reunion with Rome. Among the congregation was Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, then still a layman, who was both impressed and affected by what he heard. Following the delivery of the address both he and Lord Halifax, who had also been present, urged the speaker to publish it. In 1902 a rewritten and extended version of Father Jones’ address appeared as England and the Holy See. This formed one of the basic documents on which the later leaders of the Catholic League relied. A new body, the Western Church Association, usually known as the Association of St. Thomas of Canterbury, was formed, which was to have annual lectures delivered alternately by an Anglican and a Roman. 

In November 1907 Father Jones, in correspondence with an Episcopalian priest in the United States, Father Paul James Wattson, suggested the celebration of an Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, running from the Feast of St. Peter’s Chair in Rome (18 January ) to the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (25). This began in 1908 and was another important backdrop to the Catholic League.

Father Fynes-Clinton was ordained priest in 1902 and in 1906 moved to be curate of St. Stephen, Lewisham. He was an inveterate founder of organisations, some of which had a short life, others much longer: he found it much easier to be involved with societies he ran than with those run by others. Both he and the Revd R.L. Langford-James, then vicar of St. Mark, Bush Hill Park, were members of the Guild of the Love of God, one of many Anglo-Catholic  groups then in existence and after attempting to urge that a more definite line being taken by the Guild in relation to reunion, they led a secession. The two of them, with others, set up the proposed constitution of the Catholic League, and invited Father Arnold Biddulph-Pinchard, a well known priest then in Birmingham, to become the Superior General. In the event he turned down the request. Father Langford-James was then elected as Superior General and Father Fynes-Clinton as his Assistant.  

A meeting was then held at the Holborn Restaurant on Wednesday 2 July 1913 at which the League came formally into existence.  This was a huge establishment on the corner of High Holborn and what is now Kingsway.

On Saturday 5 July 1913 the League was ceremonially inaugurated at the church of St. Mary, Corringham, Essex: it seems unlikely that this venue was chosen at that late stage and much more probable that it had been suggested in advance: this is reinforced by the attendance of John Kensit junior, the well known Protestant ranter. The location was at the instigation of a founder member, A. Clifton Kelway, who was a well known writer and was a lay reader at Corringham. He wrote a book describing the work of the Society of the Divine Compassion, which had a house in nearby Stanford-le-Hope. 

Thus it was that a substantial group met for an early mass at St. Margaret Lothbury and then travelled, presumably by train to Corringham, where they joined the patronal festivities presided over by the rector, Father John Greatheed: Corringham was a family living.

There was a procession in which the participants sang the Litany of Our Lady and the Salve Regina, in Latin, and then at the high altar in the small church the League was dedicated and the Foundation Deed was signed by Fathers Langford-James and Fynes-Clinton and 95 others. The League was placed under the patronage of Our Lady of Victory, of St. Joseph and of St. Nicholas of Myra. The Deed hung in Father Beresford’s study in later years and I saw it about 1972, but regrettably did not photocopy it: it has since been lost. Later Solemn Vespers of Our Lady were sung before the pilgrims returned to London. 

At that time, Essex was in the Diocese of St. Albans. The Bishop, Edgar Jacob, came to hear of what had happened and inhibited the Superior and his Assistant from officiating in his Diocese. He then threatened disciplinary action against Father Langford-James unless he resigned his office and indeed his membership, which he did. Father Fynes-Clinton was certainly forced to step down, although whether he was made to resign his membership is not clear and if he did it was only temporarily. Clifton Kelway’s licence was withdrawn.

In place of those forced to resign, the League elected as its Superior General Father Edward Secker Maltby, who had with his own resources erected his church of St. Mary, Bermondsey, now covered by the Millwall football ground.

On 25 October 1913 the League’s first annual festa was held at the long-since disappeared church of St. Michael, Bingfield Street, Islington at which the preacher was the brilliant Father Ronald Knox, soon to leave on the Rome Express. The parish priest of St. Michael, Father J.H. Boudier, was a member of the League and in later years he had an audience with the Pope in which he seems to have given the impression that the entire Church of England was ready and willing to accede to the Vatican’s control. Would that it had been so.

It was one of Father Fynes-Clinton’s characteristics that he not only founded many organisations, but founded them as offshoots of others. Thus with the Catholic League. On 17 February 1914 he and Father Maltby set up the Sodality of the Precious Blood, under the patronage of St Charles Borromeo. Membership was restricted to celibate priests without connection to freemasonry and who were prepared to say the Latin Breviary daily. These requirements excluded many prominent Papalists who were married and some, such as Father Hope Patten, who had no command of Latin, probably because he was dyslexic.

The Sodality reflected Fynes-Clinton’s essential view, which was also reflected in the League. He believed that the Church of England was truly part of the Catholic Church, and that reunion should be corporate and should be effected by an internal revolution within the Anglican Communion, so that all its priests subscribed to Roman doctrinal and liturgical ideas. In her penetrating book on the Benedictines of Nashdom, Dr. Peta Dunstan remarks that Abbot Martin Collett's insistence never to deviate from the Roman way of doing things was "a profound sharing- not, as his critics would have it, a slavish mimicry. It was an ecumenical deed more powerful than pages of words".

Father Maltby did not have the time available to run the League and soon resigned, to be replaced by the then retired Father W.J. Scott, who had set up the first Back to Baroque altar in his church at Sunbury Common and was an authority on railways. Father Maltby remained Director of the Solidarity and Father Fynes-Clinton was secretary.

No member of the League had ever been consecrated to the episcopate, although in 1914 Father G. Bown, the Principal of St. Stephen’s House, was appointed as Bishop of Nassau. However he died before being consecrated.

In 1913 a monthly magazine known as “The Catholic” began: this ceased at the outbreak of the War but from 1915 the “Messenger” took its place.

In late 1914 Father Fynes-Clinton moved to be curate of St. Michael, Shoreditch. He regarded the move as releasing him from the earlier inhibition and was reappointed as Assistant Superior. He almost immediately set up a new community for women, which was also integrated with the work of the League. This was the Community of Our Lady of Victory. This was not to prove his most successful venture, and, after a period of wandering, in 1928 the two sisters who persisted had a bungalow built in the grounds of the convent of St. Mary of Nazareth at Edgware. It ceased to exist with the death of the original sister, Mother Mary St. John Watson, in 1961.

The COLV was responsible for the Apostleship of Prayer, which involved daily decades of the Rosary known as the Living Crown of Our Lady of Victory. It also organised the Tabernacle Treasury to raise funds for the provision of monstrances for poor churches.

Father Scott resigned in 1916 and was replaced by an anonymous group, from which Father Fynes shortly emerged as sole Priest Director. The League was thereafter run for many years essentially in accordance with his views.

In addition to the groups already mentioned, the structure of the League was complicated by a number of sub-groups, the product of Fynes-Clinton’s fertile brain. There was a Spiritual Treasury, the Women’s and Men’s respective Retreat Organisations, the Guard of Honour of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Chantry Fund, and probably others. Some were short lived, whereas others, such as the Tabernacle Treasury, lasted for many years.

In 1920 the League for the first time held its festa at the Convent of the Paraclete at Woodside, Croydon, which had been founded by the imprisoned ritualist, Father Tooth, who after his release was unable to find a living.  During the day, Father Fynes-Clinton received the profession of a brother of the Society of St. Augustine (later the Servitors of St. Mary and St. Austin), a Community founded by him in 1911, which rather like that of the exotic Father Nugée in the Nineteenth Century, took in men who worked in the world but transformed themselves into monks when they left the office each night. It had a priory in Walthamstow for some years, but failed to prosper. In 1925 the annual function moved to Otford School, which was also a foundation associated with Father Tooth, and continued there for many years.

On 23 October 1920 yet another sub-group of the League was founded, when at Holy Trinity, Hoxton, the Rosary Confraternity was dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary: the sisters of the Community of Our Lady of Victory were living in the parish at that time.

Two other significant developments in the progress of the Catholic League took place in the same year. The first was the adoption by it of the Profession of Faith of the Council of Trent. In its explanatory booklet the League said:

“Our present circumstances, then, in these two provinces of Canterbury and York, are very similar to those of the Western Church as a whole before the Council of Trent, only that it is with a very much more advanced and virulent form of the disease that we are beset...So the Catholic League adopts as its profession of faith THE CREED OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.”

The second such development was the formation of the Church Unity Octave Committee, which was at that stage another sub-committee of the League. From 1918 onwards the Church Unity Octave had been supported and here we see early moves by the League towards unity: it was the first organisation in the Church of England to promote the Octave. The Committee was chaired by Fynes-Clinton It then absorbed the pioneering Association for the Promotion of the Reunion of Christendom, which was apparently wound up by Athelstan Riley at a meeting on 27 January 1921, on the grounds of the absence of Roman Catholic involvement, but without, apparently, any consultation with the wider membership.

As these developments were occurring, Fynes-Clinton finally acquired a living of his own, and after his institution in 1921 St. Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, where we are today, became the centre of the League’s spiritual activities: from 1923 until the Second World War it also had an administrative centre in Finsbury from which correspondence came. In 1924 Leslie Fisher, already mentioned, became general secretary, a post he held for many decades. He was efficient and well organised although the subject of some mirth because he travelled in ladies’ underwear- as an occupation not a fetish. In 100 years, the League has only had four General Secretaries.

In 1922 Fynes-Clinton revived the Fraternity of Our Lady de Salve Regina, which dated originally from 1343, and which held devotions at midday every day, and in 1924 he aggregated it to the League, thus providing yet another associated and interlocked group.

In 1926 pilgrimages to Walsingham began and were held annually.

On All Saints’ Day 1926 a completely new body, the Confraternity of Unity, was founded by four priests at St. Mary the Virgin, New York. Its aims were similar to the Catholic League, although the emphasis was almost exclusively on reunion.

On 5 November 1928 Father T. Bowyer Campbell, one of the four, who was later to become Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, addressed the Sodality of the Precious Blood at St. Magnus, and it was agreed that a secretariat should be opened in England to promote the Confraternity. On 3 February 1929 this opened at the presbytery of the church of St. Saviour, Hoxton, with Father Basil Joblin, then a curate at the church, as its representative in this country. The Confraternity was correlated with the Catholic League.

Fynes-Clinton joined the new body, but was never very enthusiastic about organisations which he was not himself running. On the feast of St. Matthew, 1925, the Council for Observance of the Church Unity Octave was formed, with Spencer Jones as its President, and on 14 June 1926 this seems to have become transformed into the Executive Committee of the Church Unity Octave. In order to bring together the various groups, in 1930 Father Fynes-Clinton formed the Council for Promoting Catholic Unity, on which were represented the Catholic League, the Sodality of the Precious Blood, the Confraternity of Unity, the Association of St. Thomas of Canterbury and the Catholic Propaganda Society, which had been run by Father Alban Baverstock.

Father Fynes was also less than enthusiastic about some of those responsible for the 1933 Oxford Movement Centenary- he regarded many of them as being the contemporary equivalent of Affirming Catholicism, or in other words not being sufficiently committed to the true principles of the Catholic Revival and to reunion in particular. It was to counter what were seen as these liberal tendencies within the wider Anglo-Catholic movement that the leaders of the Papalist Movement issued their Centenary Manifesto (dated 1 October 1932) and then the League arranged for the publication of a series of Oxford Movement Centenary Tractates, entitled The Church of England and the Holy See.

The eighth was the work of Father Fynes-Clinton (Part I) and Father W.R. Corbould, vicar of Carshalton, (Part II). Entitled What are we to say? it gave an unequivocal answer, namely that the Church of England should accept the claims of Rome and move towards union as soon as possible. Father Fynes-Clinton declared confidently:

“We have to insist, against all the insular prejudices carefully fostered by an interested officialdom, that the Church of England has no legitimate existence except as part of the Catholic world and therefore dependant on the Holy See.”

The main activity of the League in 1933 was the organisation of a pilgrimage to Rome to celebrate the Holy Year. The pilgrims first went to Turin, where they attended the Solemn Exposition of the Holy Shroud, and then went on to Rome where they followed the prescribed course of visiting the four major basilicas: they then had a special audience with Pope Pius XI during which they presented him with a copy of the Tractates, elaborately bound. On 22 January 1934 there was a meeting at the Caxton Hall under the slogan: “Modernism the Enemy: Rome the Remedy.”

In 1934 Father Maltby died and was replaced as Director of the Sodality by Father Wilmot Phillips, rector of Plaxtol, but he died a year later and was replaced by Father Fynes himself.

1935 was also notable for the publication, albeit not under the auspices of the League but of yet another group, the Society for Catholic Reunion, of Catholic Reunion: an Anglican Plea for a Uniate Patriarchate and for an Anglican Ultramontanism, written by Father Clement (J.T. Plowden-Wardlaw). He argued for the recognition by Rome of an English Uniate Patriarchate, probably with a celibate priesthood, and probably also leaving behind “modernists, irreconcilable protestants, and those obsessed by the state connection.” The book is interesting in that the author, who was a prolific pamphleteer and vicar of St. Clement, Cambridge (calling his letters Clementine Tracts), envisaged that reunion with Rome might envisage a split in the Church of England, a prospect many did not feel able to contemplate. Do we see in that the beginnings of an idea which has led in more recent times to the establishment of the Ordinariate?  

In 1936 there was a further reorganisation among the reunion Societies. The Council for Promoting Catholic Unity set up the Society for Promoting Catholic Unity which thereafter published The Pilot. The SPCU was responsible also for the Council of the Church Unity Octave, which was particularly appropriate since the new Society had been set up during the Octave of 1936. Father Corbould became the President of the SPCU, the many-hatted (perhaps many-birettad?) Fynes-Clinton the Treasurer.

Although the leaders of the Catholic League had taken no direct part in the Malines Conversations in the mid 1930s the leaders of the Papalist party began to correspond with Abbé Paul Couturier in France: he was in touch with Father Jones, Father Fynes-Clinton, and Abbot Martin Collett of Nashdom. In 1936 Dom Benedict Ley, the novice master of Nashdom, visited the Abbé in Lyons and then went to Ars and to Paray-le-Mondial, the scene of the apparitions to St. Margaret Marie Alacoque; four months later Fynes-Clinton himself went over to France together with Dom Gregory Dix of Nashdom, and they were able to speak in French at various meetings they attended. The following year Couturier returned the visit, and was met in London by Fynes-Clinton, who acted as his host throughout. Fynes-Clinton asked the elderly and infirm Father Spencer Jones to lunch at St. Ermin’s, Westminster, where he lived in a service flat, and the Abbé was delighted to meet him. Couturier came again to England in 1938, and on this occasion broadened his contacts into those who were not wholly committed to the Roman cause.

These contacts appear retrospectively to be rather unimportant in the life both of the Church of England of the Roman Catholic Church but their significance is that they happened.

In 1937 the Shrine Church at Walsingham was extended. The League was short of money, as it had been throughout is existence, until left a generous legacy shortly after the War by a founder member, Miss Evelyn Few (known as “The Faithful Few”). Father Fynes-Clinton therefore suggested that the chantry chapel he was endowing should also be the chapel of the League and in turn it was decided that a statue of Our Lady of Victory, patroness of the League, be erected in it: however this did not take effect until 1949.

Bombing in the war destroyed a number of League centres and St. Magnus itself was badly damaged. However the witness of the League continued much as before, and finances were much eased by Miss Few’s legacy.

In 1950 the Holy Year was celebrated with a pilgrimage to Rome by Fathers Fynes-Clinton and Ivan Young, accompanied by Mr. Fisher. The two priests were received in private audience by Pope Pius XII, who blessed the work of the Council for the Church Unity Octave. It is not clear how influential visits such as this were in Rome: it is however apparent that in that year there were very few other contacts with the Church of England.

It now seems clear that there was a lack of impetus behind the movement for union under the Pope in the years following 1950, and before the mood in Rome began to change. After the South India controversy, which took up a great deal of time to little avail, Anglo-Catholicism was on the back foot, responding to initiatives from others with which its adherents disagreed, but not setting forward a positive programme which would attract new support.

Father Fynes-Clinton was getting older. He resigned as director of the Sodality in 1953 in favour of Father Joblin, as director of the Apostleship of Prayer in 1955 in favour of Father Peter Sanderson of Poundstock, Cornwall, and as chairman of the Church Unity Octave Council in January 1958 in favour of Father Mervyn Pendleton of Wollaston, Northamptonshire. Then on 4 December 1959 he died: an era had ended.

Although an age had come to an end, there was an unpleasant episode shortly before that, following the death of Father Corbould and then a spat between Bishop Mervyn Stockwood of Southwark and one of the League’s longest serving members, Father Rice Alforth Evelyn Harris, whose views were such that he had never held a living in the Church of England. This embittered many.  

Father Fynes-Clinton was replaced by Father Clive Beresford, a man for whom the word eccentric seems an understatement. I am indebted to one of his successors, Father Philip Gray, for telling how when processing on a very hot day, the glue with which he had attached various decorations to his cope began to lose its hold and the ornamentation began to curl. He did however devote a great deal of time to the League (to the detriment of his parish) and in particular raised its profile outside London. He also used his printing press to great effect, starting a strongly worded newsletter entitled Crux.

By this time the Church Unity Octave, with its uncompromisingly Papalist position, was being overtaken by the much more widely-based Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which had been backed by Abbé Couturier and more surprisingly by Gregory Dix. The annual Call to Prayer for Unity, which was issued to coincide with the Octave, was made for the last time in 1964.

It is ironic however that in 1960, the year after Fynes-Clinton’s death, Pope John and Archbishop Fisher finally met face to face. The propaganda of the Catholic League had almost certainly had more effect on the former than the latter, as it was reported that the Holy Father knew all about the revival of the Walsingham pilgrimage, an interest which Fisher did not share.

In 1962 Father Beresford and 11 other priests of the League and Sodality met Pope John in private audience in 1962 then Fisher’s more sympathetic successor Michael Ramsey met the Pope in 1966, and was received warmly. In 1970 Pope Paul VI said at the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales: “There will be no seeking to lessen the legitimate prestige and usage proper to the Anglican church when the Roman church...is able to embrace firmly her ever-loved sister in the authentic communion of the family of Christ.” Then in 1982 Pope John Paul II came to England and was received by Archbishop Runcie at Canterbury.

Those events would have seemed inconceivable to Father Fynes and those who with him had laboured so long and with so few tangible results for reunion between Rome and Canterbury. The two churches have never appeared closer than at the time of the Papal visit in 1982, but this proved to be a missed opportunity. The Anglican episcopate had a lack of vision and no willingness to take bold steps: rather their reaction was constantly to retreat into the suffocating committee structure of the Church of England.

The reform of the liturgy by Rome also left many Anglicans, including initially perhaps the League, lacking direction. In due course however the tradition of following precedents set down by the Pope prevailed in the Catholic League and the new forms were adopted after an initiative by Father Raymond Avent, who became priest director in 1974 and was one of a new generation.

I have deliberately not dealt with some of the more recent developments within the League but the most far reaching has been the transformation of the Society from an Anglican Papalist pressure group into an ecumenical group.

 

The League was one of many organisations which offered strong resistance to the deeply flawed proposals for union between the Anglican and Methodist churches. However once that dragon had been slain, far more worrying proposals began to be aired. The ordination of women, which was irregular by standards of orthodoxy, meant that in the foreseeable future corporate reunion of the Church of England with Rome became impossible. While the Catholic League’s witness remains, it is now only possible to do that which Father Plowden-Wardlaw suggested so many years ago: in other words to persuade only those who have continued to hold, in the face of great pressure, the historic discipline of Christianity, that the Unity of all Christians is an important, indeed vital, objective.

 

Centenary of Foundation: Homily by Dr Robin Ward

At the Parish Church of St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge

July 6th, 2013

I am sure that I am not the only one in this church to have been charmed and engaged by Father John Salter’s biography of the former rector of this church and co-founder of the Catholic League, Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton.  Partly I think because Fynes-Clinton’s rather mannered eccentricity in old age was so amusingly captured by Colin Stephenson in his facetious accounts of the Anglo-Catholic Movement in its most tinselly days of glory, he has been remembered as a sort of odd totem or fetish of Papalism in the Church of England, an ecclesiastical coelacanth inhabiting a Tridentine zareba by the unpropitious Thames. 

 

But how fascinating to read about him as a young man: tutor in an Old Believer family in Moscow, consulted by the Archbishop of Canterbury while still a curate about relations with the Eastern Churches, instrumental in bringing to study in Oxford at St Stephen’s House students from the Serbian Orthodox Church, among who was St Justin Popovich.  Both then and now people found it difficult to reconcile his evident sympathy with the Orthodox churches and intimate knowledge of their culture and rites with his overt and systematic theological Papalism.  Fantasy about the character of belief and practice in the Orthodox churches as a sort of oriental Anglicanism is at least as old as Bishop Compton’s abortive relations with the church in what is still called Greek Street, established in 1677, from which he requested the removal of all the icons.  Fynes-Clinton particularly suffered in his work from this sort of political ecumenism, which assumed that my enemy’s enemy must be my friend, and that because the enemy was and always would be the Pope, the difference between the religion of George V and Nicholas II was simply one of detail and culture.

 

The degree to which this myth was and is a theological and spiritual dead end has become ever more apparent as scholarship, common sense and ease of travel demolish its tenets one after the other.  Only this year the Cambridge theologian Marcus Plested has published a work of outstanding originality and insight, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, in which he demonstrates with real learning how important Thomas Aquinas was in the Greek theological tradition, not simply to those who wanted reunion with Rome or who opposed the doctrine of S. Gregory Palamas, but also to divines such as George Scholarios who became the first Patriarch of Constantinople after the Ottoman conquest, and Peter of Mogila, whose Kievan scholasticism was by no means the alien growth subsequent patristic fundamentalism has sought to portray.  And this should come as no surprise really: any reader of the Summa Theologiae soon encounters lavish quotation from the Greek fathers, and the Angelic Doctor’s regard for S. John Damascene as the crowning doctor and synthesizer of the Greek tradition is obvious. 

 

Among Plested’s most engaging discoveries is a liturgical canon in honour of S. Thomas Aquinas written by Bishop Joseph of Methone: As a star out of the West he has illumined/ the Church of Christ/ the musical swan and subtle teacher/ Thomas the all-blessed,/ Aquinas by name,/ to whom we gathered together cry:/ Hail, universal teacher!

 

This intellectual catharsis of the tradition we have received is particularly important as we seek to make such sense as we can of the current doctrinal and cultural decadence so characteristic of the contemporary theological scene in Anglicanism.  For we can see that in both Anglicanism and Orthodoxy the vitality of the nineteenth century revival became strangely distorted by an insularity and a nationalism that sought to exclude from the tradition influences perceived to be in some way undesirably foreign, an impulse at best wedded to myth and at worst to overt racism.

 

And here the root of the problem goes back inexorably to the reception in England and in Russia of the philosophy of Hegel: Hegel taught by Jowett and Green at Balliol to Charles Gore and his friends; Hegel as he inspired the principal architects of Slav orthodox particularism from Dostoievsky to Bulgakov.  As that perceptive cultural critic and old member of St Stephen’s House A N Wilson points out in his astute work on the intellectual history of this period in England, God’s Funeral, given the choice between Hegel and the Thirty-Nine Articles it is not surprising what the intelligent young found most inspiring, but the consequences for theology have been curious and unsatisfying. 

 

For the Russians, Slavophil insularity and a rejection of scholastic method has led some of their most original minds into the speculative obscurities of sophiology and the erection of doctrinal differences on issues like the Filioque and the Immaculate Conception into epochal fissures.  For the Anglicans, what looked to be the key of release from obscurantism and anti-intellectualism turned out to be in fact the liberty to pursue theology in characteristic splendid isolation, the long Hegelian summer that begins with Lux Mundi and ends with Christus Veritas.

 

It is worth looking at this a little more closely.  The first generation of Tractarians were badly educated in philosophy but were by no means insular in their theological culture, albeit within the bounds of a tradition that was somewhat inadequately resourced to counter the virulence of contemporary critiques of Christianity.  The second generation thought they had found the answer to the problems posed by biblical criticism and scientific evolutionism in the Idealist philosophy handed down from Hegel, in a way that also enabled them to assert their pristine Catholicity without having to worry too much about the unpromising hinterland the Church of England provided for this endeavor. 

 

If Darwin and the Germans were demolishing English Biblicism, then a free and frank acceptance of the higher criticism was a good way to make Anglican Catholicism both intellectually chic and doctrinally distinctive; if a Christology of kenosis meant that Jesus didn’t really know who he was during his earthly ministry, then neither should we be surprised if the Church which is his body on earth appears not to have a definitive sense of her own mission and teaching either.  With Gore and his disciples this is a sophisticated and brave attempt to make durable bricks with not much straw; with their less able successors, we arrive at the abject embarrassment of N P Williams’ Northern Catholicism, a characteristic product of the sinister 1930s in which we are asked to believe in the essential religious genius of the Northern peoples … of a mystical and soaring quality, appropriate to dwellers amidst the less genial aspects of Nature and beneath ‘grey and weeping skies’. 

 

Truthfulness about all this is fundamentally important when we come to think about what Anglican patrimony is.  True ecumenism cannot be built on crypto-racist assumptions that God in some way reveals himself more aptly to favoured nations because of the sort of weather they have or soil they till.  George Weigel in his recent Evangelical Catholicism has identified the key moment for modern Catholicism to be the agenda set by Pope Leo XIII in reviving the Thomist synthesis.  The most perceptive Anglican theologians in the Catholic tradition in the last century – Dix, Mascall, Farrer - all understood this, just as Plested’s work is beginning to unearth the same for the Orthodox. We need to have the humility to realize that fantasies of Anglican doctrinal particularity have cut us off from the much-needed irrigation this revival brings in doctrine, in apologetic and in social thought.

 

Henry Fynes-Clinton warned his contemporaries about this in his Oxford Movement Centenary Manifesto of 1933: On such supreme and vital matters as: the person of Our Lord, the union of the two natures in Him, the interpretation of Holy Scripture, the authority and infallibility of the Church, and the moral standards of historic Christianity, much of the teaching openly propagated within the modern Movement is in sad contrast with the orthodoxy of the original Oxford Fathers, and with the Catholic standards to which ex professo the Anglo-Catholic Movement makes appeal.  Our patrimony in liturgy and theology is only worth having and nurturing insofar as it is faithful to this deposit of faith.  The Catholic League since its foundation one hundred years ago – in Corringham where I learned the faith - has been unremittingly faithful to a two-fold loyalty: loyalty to the Oxford Revival as authentically Catholic in its content and orientation; loyalty to an ecclesial vision that has refused to embrace myth and fantasy about Anglicanism as a special dispensation of revelation.  This ascesis is all the more necessary in our current strife.  May the universal doctor and teacher pray for us, that the Church of Christ may be united in one faith and one sheepfold.

 

The Revd Canon Dr Robin Ward

Principal, St Stephen's House, Oxford

 

 

First Centenary Lecture: Fr John Hunwicke - DOM GREGORY DIX, THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE, AND THE NECESSITY OF THE PAPACY

Fr John Hunwick: At the Catholic Church of the Assumption and St Gregory on the occasion of the Centenary of the Foundation of the Catholic League, 2 July 2013

 

DOM GREGORY DIX, THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE, AND THE NECESSITY OF THE PAPACY

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an Englishman – or at least a proper Englishman – dislikes ‘bells and smells’ in his churches.. And it is equally well-known by proper Englishmen that ‘High Churchmen’ are obsessed with those bells and those smells. What the Englishmen of my childhood – I’m looking back to the forties and fifties – were less clear about was that those High Churchmen fell into at least two distinct groups. There were those who thought that the Church of England was pretty well the best Church on earth; it just needed a few more bells and rather more pervasive smells in order to achieve total perfection. But in the other corner of the ring, wearing the red shorts, were the Papalists: men whose evil went far beyond even the most exotic smells; men, traitors to the Church of England, who actually believed in the Pope; fifth columnists of the enemy; Quislings. Such was the Henry Joy Fynes Clinton who, a hundred years ago – a hundred years ago to this very day, the feast of our Blessed Lady’s Visitation to S Elizabeth – founded the Catholic League; and, for a hundred years, its members have remained fifth columnists. I well remember the day when, a little fellow in my mid-teens, barely out of short trousers, I signed solemnly an impressive document committing myself to acceptance of the decrees of the Council of Trent and of the Vatican; including the provisions with regard to papal primacy and infallibility. By these means I became a member of the Catholic League – God’s best Fifth Column. I remember instantly feeling safe!

 

You always knew where there was a ‘safe’ – that is to say, papalist – church. It was not, as the Anglican on the top of a Clapham omnibus assumed, a question of incense and little tinkling hand-bells. What a proper ‘papalist’ church advertised was: ‘Full Catholic Privileges’ and ‘Western Rite’. ‘Western Rite’ was code for what Catholic canonists and liturgists now call the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. An Altar Book called the English Missal provided for its use, God’s own Latin being accompanied by some English and some assimilation of Cranmerian formulae; its first printed edition had emerged, incidentally, just one year before the foundation of the League. Papalism was in the air. That ‘Tridentine’ Mass fed the spirituality of Fynes Clinton and his fellow papalists, clerical and lay, for more than half a century. One such papalist, the celebrated Benedictine scholar Dom Gregory Dix, wrote, at the climax of his revolutionary book The Shape of the Liturgy, “of a certain timelessness about the Eucharistic action and an independence of its setting, in keeping with the stability in an ever-changing world of the forms of the liturgy themselves ... This very morning I did this with a set of texts which has not changed by more than a few syllables since Augustine used those very words at Canterbury on the third Sunday after Easter in the summer after he landed. Yet this can still take hold of a man’s life and work with it.” For myself, I never feel closer to Fynes Clinton and Dix ... and to S Augustine and S Gregory and Blessed John Henry Newman ... than when I stand at an altar to say their Mass, the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. But it is not about Dix and Liturgy that I want to speak today. Six years before he signed off The Shape of the Liturgy... which rests upon the bookshelves of all of you, well thumbed and worn with use ... he wrote an extraordinary series of articles in the Nashdom periodical Laudate; which, unlike the Shape, have long been out of print. They are about the Papacy. I feel that they are due for resurrection. I feel that their time has come.

 

 The occasion of these articles was the publication in 1936 of a book called The Roman Primacy to A.D.461 by Dr B J Kidd, Warden of Keble College, Dix’s own college; a Patristics scholar then at the height of his reputation. Kidd had concluded that the early Roman Primacy “was a primacy of leadership: more than a primacy of honour, though less than a primacy of jurisdiction”. I ask you to remember that these were the days before men spoke about ‘the Petrine ministry’; a common phrase then was ‘the Papal claims’: what a typically Anglican expression; how effortlessly superior ... you can just imagine the supercilious toss of the head, the disdainful sniff ... some Italian bishop, eh, claiming too much for himself. So Kidd’s conclusion was very welcome to many high church Anglicans. Thank God: we have an alibi; we can wait until Rome modifies her ‘claims’ before taking seriously the need for unity with her. Leadership ... not too much harm in that ... but not the jurisdiction claimed in Vatican I: “A primacy of jurisdiction, ordinary, immediate, and Episcopal”. Sighs of relief emerged from the lips of men who felt that they had been let off an uncomfortable hook. Dix, rather acidly pointed out that it was “hard to understand the cheerfulness” of the reactions “in certain quarters” since it implied acceptance of the permanence of disunity. I am not sure how truthful Dix is being when he calls it “hard to understand”; I suspect he understood well enough the visceral anti-Romanism of the English psyche; a gut prejudice still with us today.

 

Dix’s response to Kidd’s thesis has a characteristically feline quality to it. He has a talent for luring the reader into a sense of security, and then springing a deft ambush. He criticises Kidd’s Roman Catholic reviewers for exaggerating disputable factual points; he writes: “In point after point, as one turns from the documents to Dr Kidd’s summary, one cannot but envy the compression and justice with which he presents the events”. Full marks, you might think, for Kidd. So what is there left for Dix to do? “[W]hat I shall try to give is something more elusive than a sequence of events – a study of institutions in their theory and functioning”. How donnish; indeed, how ... er .... yawn-making. Surely, all a chap needs to know is whether he needs to resign his benefice, become a papist, and tell his wife (I think Eric Mascall’s verses on ‘the Ultra-Catholic’ conclude: “I would have gone last Thursday week Had not my wife objected”). Kidd has already Done the Business. Praise be to Kidd. But, after Dix has finished deploying “certain considerations which, I hope, illuminate and ‘situate’ Dr Kidd’s conclusions”, the reader will discover that the trap has been sprung and that, for those who have been led stage by stage along the path Dix has mapped, acceptance of the entire papal dogma, as defined in the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus of Vatican I is totally unavoidable.

 

Dix begins by arguing that the word and concept of ‘jurisdiction’ are anachronistic in the period before Nicaea. The ‘Early Church’ did not think in such terms. And, at this point, it is a good idea to remember three things about Dix. First: his training, and his first job as a don at Keble, were as a historian; second: his admiration for bishops – not least Anglican bishops – was ... not unqualified (this was the Dix for whom the symbol of a Bishop was a Crook; of an Archbishop, a Double Cross); third: that he had a weakness for the ad hominem argument. He loved dilemmas especially if they had really big and sharp horns. Putting it crudely, he liked seeing people wriggle. And all the more so if they wore gaiters. (Zucchetti had not at that point become fashionable among Anglican bishops.) So, when Dom Gregory questions the applicability in the first Christian centuries of the entire concept of ‘Jurisdiction’, we sense that he is moving in for a rather amusing kill. If the Early Church is to be followed in all things, then we cannot talk about papal jurisdiction. But: we cannot talk about Episcopal jurisdiction either. And Anglican bishops in those 1930s were terribly enthusiastic about their jurisdiction. Parliament had stymied their attempt in 1927/8 to discipline the Anglo-Catholic clergy by imposing a new Book of Common Prayer; and there was talk (derided by Dix in the Shape) about a bishop’s jus liturgicum (amusing, is it not, that so many folk regard the coining of a phrase in Latin or Greek as the best way of getting away with something dodgy). Episcopal authority was invoked to persecute Extreme Men; and the papalists, Fynes Clinton and his associates in the Catholic League, certainly counted as Extreme Men (you remember that when bishop Pollock objected to having his name linked with that of pope Pius XI on the foundation stone of the Holy House in Walsingham, it was the Bishop’s name which the Fynes Clinton and Hope Patten carefully obscured). Bishops did not merely dislike the Pope; they had a particular, and particularly intense, dislike of the Pope’s liturgy, the ‘Western Rite’, the Tridentine Liturgy which Dix and his fellow monks at Nashdom, together with the other papalists, used every morning. (When in 2007 Benedict XVI liberated the Extraordinary Form and his episcopal critics inside the Catholic Church started fuming and ranting, I as an elderly Anglican had a curious sense of déjà vu ... been here before, heard all this.) So when Dix argued that, not earlier than round about A.D. 390-410, Christian leaders became rulers with jurisdiction, he was in effect saying to Anglicans, ad hominem, “If you believe that bishops have jurisdiction, you can’t really make a fuss about popes having it as well. And if you dislike popes having jurisdiction, then you’ve also sawn through the branch that the Anglican bishops are sitting on.” Or, as he puts it himself, “Coming to Dr Kidd’s book fresh from a collection of early material on the episcopate ... I am a little surprised to find that his definition of the early papal primacy in the Universal Church corresponds very exactly with the estimate formed quite independently in my own notes of the local bishop’s primacy in the local church during the pre-Nicene period.” Sniggering, I am sure, up the sleeve of his monastic habit, he adds “If the comparison holds good, there is matter for serious consideration here” (this was the Dix who took the religious name Gregory in memory of Gregory VII, Hildebrand, “who deposed more bishops than any other man in history”).

 

The acute reader, however, might ask whether Christians should in any case be obliged de fide to accept – as Vatican I requires – a formulation of the Petrine ministry in terminology and in categories which, as Dix has freely admitted, were known little or not at all in the first three centuries. Here again, his answer has an ad hominem flavour to it. Anglicans – particularly Anglicans with patristic instincts – have always had a great regard for the first four Ecumenical Councils, and especially for that of Nicaea, at which the foundations were laid of the Creed which Latins, Byzantines, and Anglicans have all traditionally used at Sunday Mass. But “the Council of Nicaea ... define[d] the Godhead of the Son in terms of Greek metaphysics ... and the New Testament was not written by metaphysicians”. So, if you take your Christology decked out in a metaphysical cope by Nicaea, you can hardly complain about taking your Papal primacy arrayed in the underpants of Canon Law by Vatican I. “They were in both cases the only terms practically available ... it at least arguable that in both cases the Council succeeded in preserving the whole of the original truth, while putting it into a quite different dress from that in which it was originally presented. No one would deny that there has been development in both cases. But it is a true development, as I see it, bringing out only what was implicit and in germ in the original conception, and guarding it from misunderstanding and error.”

 

Dix’s most spectacular tour de force comes when he discusses the pope’s ‘primacy of jurisdiction, “ordinary, immediate, and Episcopal”’ in every diocese in Christendom. He entices us to toy with dissent: “It is so unlike the powers we Anglicans concede to a primacy!” However, you know your Dix by now; he is clearly preparing to pounce.

He goes on: “But is it?”. He tells the story of “a bishop in the Province of Canterbury [who] refused to institute a priest to a benefice, for reasons which were found upon question to be illegal ... The priest was ultimately instituted by the Archbishop as Primate. That was an act of jurisdiction in another man’s diocese. It was an act of ‘ordinary’ jurisdiction, since the Archbishop had an indisputable right, in the circumstances, to do it. It was an act of ‘immediate’ jurisdiction, since he did not act as the bishop’s delegate, but against his protests. It was an act of ‘episcopal’ jurisdiction, since it conveyed cure of souls”. Dix may be referring to a fairly recent case involving Archbishop Lang and the extreme modernist Bishop Barnes of Birmingham, but I prefer to think that he has in mind a cause celebre of the Victorian period. In 1847, the High Church Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, refused to institute an Evangelical clergyman , the Revd G C Gorham, to a benefice in his jurisdiction, because Gorham did not believe in the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration expressed in the formularies of the Church of England. Upon appeal, the Privy Council found for Gorham, and Archbishop Sumner instituted him, over the head of Phillpott’s protests (and even his threat to excommunicate anyone who should institute Gorham). Notice the exquisite ironies here. Dix is deftly reminding us that it was an Evangelical who caused an Evangelical (and indeed anti-Catholic) Archbishop of Canterbury to exercise the “ordinary, immediate, and episcopal” jurisdiction which Vatican I attributed to the Roman Pontiff. (It was this scandal, incidentally, which caused the future cardinal Henry Manning to become a Catholic.) But Dix also has the ‘non-Papal Catholics’ in his sights. These people held what has sometimes been called a ‘Cyprianic’ view of the episcopate: namely, that each bishop is supreme in his diocese and not subject to interference from any bishop whomsoever wherever else. Dix is saying: “If you can’t accept the decrees of Vatican I which give the Pope ordinary immediate and episcopal jurisdiction in another man’s diocese, how can you accept the polity of the Church of England – which gives precisely the same to the Archbishop of Canterbury?” He concludes: “In other words, the whole Vatican definition of a primacy is latent in the harmless Anglican conception, for use when needed. It is the minimum definition, in juridical terms, of a power of effectually representing the mind of the whole towards a part. Less than that could hardly be predicated of the admitted ‘norm’ of Christian belief, once juridical conceptions of Christian authority had been admitted”.

 

There is one difference of emphasis between Gregory Dix and Henry Fynes Clinton which has always intrigued me. Clinton, despite his robust and unbending papalism, had a very soft spot for the Byzantine Orthodox. I have not seen any evidence of how he reconciled in his own mind his own ecclesiology with the anti-Romanism of quite a few of his Orthodox friends. But Dix, although fond of Orthodox and respectful of their witness to Christian truth, did not share the romantic attachment to the East felt by many Anglicans (particularly by those who found the ‘non-Papal Catholicism’ of the Orthodox a useful stick with which to beat Rome). He certainly had no sympathy with sentimental Westerners who believed that the Orthodox Liturgy was somehow more ancient and venerable than that of the Roman Rite. He had little inclination to make a fetish of an Epiclesis of the Spirit in the Eucharistic Prayer. He once wrote about the Traditional Roman Rite which he passionately loved as “so venerable, and so poetic yet so usable” ; about the preservation in the Roman liturgical books of “an incomparably larger body of genuinely primitive – and by this I mean not merely pre-Nicene but second and even first century – Christian liturgical material ... than any

other extant liturgical documents”. He also had little time for the commonplaces of Orthodox anti-Roman polemic. He disposes of the claim that the Roman Primacy had anything to do with the status of Rome as the imperial Capital, and points out that this theory is not found before the foundation of New Rome at Constantinople made it convenient(“the pedigree of [Constantinople’s] bishops from St Andrew .... had not yet been forged. [It] owed its position solely to the Caesars ...”). Among Orthodox, Anglicans, and ‘liberal’ Catholics, Conciliarism is sometimes offered as an alternative to Papalism; Dix’s account of Nicaea begins with the statement that it “came before the Christian world of its own day with no background of theory concerning the infallibility of ‘General Councils’” and ends thus: “[T]he whole superstructure of theory concerning ‘General Councils’ and their place and authority in the government of the Church, which was afterwards built up by the Eastern Church and by the Conciliar movement in the West, was simply non-existent in A.D. 325”. (I wonder what Dix would have made of the view of Paul VI that Vatican II was “more important than Nicaea”.) It is the premise of his Laudate articles that the Papacy was there, and active, and delivering great services to Christendom, long before the bogeys of Caesaropapism and Conciliarism enter Church History. (A modern parallel occurs to me: while the second Vatican Council was rearranging the deck-furniture on the barque of S Peter, and sending out to the ‘World’ messages of cheerful optimism, it was left to the Papacy, in Humanae vitae, to spot the iceberg and issue a defence of Christian sexual ethics.)

 

In 1993, a great Pontiff Benedict XVI, at that time Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, sent to the Catholic Bishops a document called Communionis notio, in which he wrote: “[C]ommunion with the universal Church, represented by Peter’s successor, is not an external complement to the particular [local] Church, but one of its internal constituents ...” The Communio Petri is not something which merely binds the individual Churches together as a federation and operates on each one from outside, but a factor which belongs to the inherent internal structure of each Church. Dix expressed this idea in a paper, unpublished and undated, in the following words: “No one, I think, will deny that the papacy, by whatever title, has consistently exercised a great external directive influence upon the actual course of Christian history, greater than that of any other single Christian force. But it has also exercised a more subtle though no less powerful influence upon the internal life of the Church, comparable with that of a gland in the life of a body.” Glands, of course, were a more fashionable talking point among Thirties intellectuals than they are nowadays. But it is clear what Dix – and Ratzinger – mean. Just as every part of our bodily constitution is affected by our kidneys, our livers, our pancreas, so the papacy has a direct effect upon every member of Christ’s Mystical Body. To Fr Maurice Bevenot SJ, Dix explained : “[W]hat I am trying to get at is the fact that the Papacy is organic to the Church”. I feel that this is an important perception. One might link it with Dix’s fascinating demonstration, in the same paper, that so many of the epithets which S Ignatius of Antioch attributes to a Bishop in the local Church, are assigned to the Roman Church in the context of the Universal Church. What the diocesan Bishop is to his own Church, the Roman Church is to the Oikoumene.

 

One might ask why, when so much ink has been spent for so many centuries discussing, on all sides, the ‘Papal claims’, we should take much notice of the writings of one Anglican theologian and a comparatively small group of Anglican Papalists. I can think of two answers. Firstly, in the case of Dix, his perceptions seem to me often brilliant, often to suggest approaches which have not occurred to anybody else before or since. My second response would be this. Until the age of Hans Kueng, it was expected that Roman Catholic writers would defend the papal doctrines; that non-Catholics would attack them. If you told me that a Catholic theologian had defended the Papacy, my reply might have been rather like that of Miss Mandy Rice-Davies during the Profumo scandal – when told in court that Lord Astor had denied her allegations – “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”. Similarly, that non-Catholics should deny the claims of the Roman See and should dispute the evidence for its primacy in the first centuries would hardly seem shatteringly strange. But that Anglicans – or some of them – should come to an acceptance of the whole Papal package, as defined in 1870 under Blessed Pius IX by the First Vatican Council, must, surely, be noticeable. A Roman Catholic theologian (at least before the age of Hans Kueng) might be thought to have advanced his reputation or even his career by a particularly adept defence of the prerogatives of the Roman See. But the Anglican Papalists, by their witness to the Petrine Ministry, rendered themselves unpopular; and by their adherence to the liturgical rites of the Roman Church, they invited – and received – episcopal persecution and detestation. Their witness was strengthened by the fact that they had nothing to gain – and a great deal to lose – by adopting it. I suggest that this is still as true. I think many of us were moved when his Grace Archbishop Mennini spoke, after our last Chrism Mass, about the sacrifices many priests and laypeople made in order to achieve the ultimate aim of the Catholic Revival, Unity with the See of S Peter, in the Ordinariate.

 

I hope you will forgive me for suggesting that the Papalist movement which led to the foundation of the Catholic League by Fr Fynes Clinton one hundred years ago today, was not the first such movement in the Church of England. The records of the two or three decades leading up to the Canterbury Convocation of February 1559, three months into the deplorable reign of Elizabeth Tudor, (‘Bloody Bess’, as I think of her) afford remarkable parallels to events in the Church of England since 1992. Perhaps I could remind you of the situation. Convocation was meeting in S Paul’s Cathedral, under the presidency of Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London (the See of Canterbury being vacant). A few miles up the Thames, Parliament was dealing with a government agenda which involved dismantling the entire reconstruction of the English Church left in place by Reginald Pole, Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Good Queen Mary. Presumably, the Bishops commuted by barge up and down the river between the City and Westminster. Rarely can the stakes have been as high; rarely can English Churchmen have been faced by such uncomfortable dilemmas. And rarely have English Bishops and Clergy conducted themselves with as much courage and principle as did the bishops in the Upper House, and the Proctors of the Lower House, on this occasion. I think it is worth remembering why.

 

Bonner had been a crony of Henry VIII; one of those clerics who supported him in his matrimonial enterprises and helped to provide backing for his breach with Rome. Elizabeth Tudor, indeed, angrily asked him why he could not be as helpful to her as he had been to her father. Bonner and the accommodating clergy of Henry’s reign did not have the advantage of hindsight. English kings had tangled with popes before. English kings had cast covetous eyes upon the Church’s estates before. It was not the end of the world. And, at first, things moved gradually. There was, arguably, never  one exact moment at which it was clear that men of principle could no longer tolerate the government’s policies. Even S Thomas More, it appears, had to spend quite some time buried in his books before he felt completely confident in his mind that the Petrine Ministry was a matter of principle, a matter of divine institution. But in the reign of Henry’s successor Edward VI, things moved faster. In came the 1549 Prayer Book; Bonner had had enough and left Fulham Palace for the Marshalsea prison. But another ‘Catholic’ bishop, Stephen Gardiner, struggled on, claiming that ‘1549’ adequately expressed the Catholic Faith. So ‘1549’ was replaced by ‘1552’ and its more explicit blasphemies. What the ‘Henrician Catholic’ bishops thus learned – and learned the hard way – was that one thing leads to another; that deserting the Bishop of Rome is not some little thing that does not really make much difference to ordinary parish and diocesan life. The legislation of 1533 led inexorably to the stripping – and, indeed, the dismantling – of the altars.

 

Upstream in Westminster, the surviving Primate, Archbishop Hethe of York, defended in Parliament the Primacy and authority of the Roman See. In doing so, he admitted that that the current Pontiff Paul IV, Giovanni Pietro Carafa, was a very unpleasant person; indeed, Carafa had hindered, one might almost say sabotaged, the Marian restoration of Catholicism in this country. Cardinal Pole had died stripped of his Legatine Commission and summoned to Rome on a suspicion of heresy by a Pope who described Pole’s associates as an ‘apostate household’ little better than Luther; Queen Mary had died at war with the Papal States. Yet Archbishop Hethe manfully upheld the doctrinal and religious necessity of Communion with the Holy See. He, and his fellow bishops, so supine under Henry VIII, had learned from their experiences and, we might say, had acquired backbones. So, on Saturday February 25 1559, the very day when the House of Commons sent up to the House of Lords a Bill designed to enact both the Royal Supremacy and the restoration of a Prayer Book, the Canterbury Convocation enacted its own legislation: what we might call the Five Articles of the Church of England. The first three Articles unambiguously asserted the doctrines of Transubstantiation and of the Sacrifice of the Mass; the Fourth Article declared that “to Peter the Apostle and to his legitimate successors in the Apostolic See, as to Christ’s Vicars, has been given the supreme power of feeding and ruling Christ’s Militant Church, and confirming his brethren”. And Article Five? It engaged explicitly with Parliament and declared that “The authority of dealing with and defining about those things which concern the Faith, the Sacraments, and the Discipline of the Church has hitherto always belonged and ought to belong only to the pastors of the Church, whom the Holy Spirit has placed in God’s Church for this purpose, and not to laypeople”. The Anglican Papalist Convocation of 1559 deserves to be better remembered for its heroic martyrion to the Truth; never in English history has a Convocation so fearlessly stood up to a government.

 

I want to suggest to you that there are uncanny parallels between these events and the happenings in the Church of England since the early 1990s. Again, error and apostasy have won the day by the gradualism with which they have advanced. It has seemed difficult to pinpoint the exact moment at which it becomes impossible for men and women of principle to stay where they are. In 1992, General Synod legislated for Women Priests; some distinguished figures left (including the prophetic figure of Bishop Graham Leonard), but most of us stayed and waited to see “what the leaders of the Catholic Movement will do”. Only gradually did it become clear that those ‘leaders’ had no rabbit and, to be quite frank, not even a hat to hide one in. So the women were canonically ordained to sacerdotal ministries; and we made do with PEVs, with assurances, and with the ‘principle’ of ‘discernment’. Gradually, it became clear that the assurances, although given in good faith, could not withstand the pressure which was building up against them. And the gradualist movement towards the admission of women to the Anglican episcopate became more and more determined. Moreover, within our ‘constituency’, a gradual change was taking place. Clergy and laypeople who were not particularly well-known for their adherence to the full red-blooded Papalist agenda as mapped out by Fr Fynes Clinton and maintained by the Catholic League, began to understand, from their experience of General Synod Religion, that we need what Blessed John Henry Newman called the remora of Rome; Rome as a breakwater against the incursion of error; Rome as a protection against disordered innovation. Some quite surprisingly ‘moderate’ High Churchmen seemed to grow quiet and thoughtful ... and murmured in your ear that they “had submitted their dossiers to Rome”. They had learned the same lesson that Bishop Bonner had learned between 1533 and 1559. Then came our ‘February 1559’ moment, when Bishop Andrew Burnham, a member of the Catholic League, called upon the Holy Father Pope Benedict for help; and help was indeed not denied. Pope Benedict had witnessed the events of the 1990s when our hopes and labours for a ‘corporate solution’ were unfulfilled because of influences nearer home less sympathetic than his. Benedict had learned the lesson of the 1990s; now he kept his own counsel while he worked quietly and with determination until his solution was ready. Then, as Universal Pastor, he gave it to us and to the Universal Church; and waited for the commotion to begin.

 

In 1559, the English diocesan bishops and most of the senior clergy declined to conform to the Elizabethan establishment (it was to be a little like that in 1689). Exile and prison became their only options. But many of the lower clergy stayed on. They had seen successive governments making changes in the national religion which sometimes only lasted months, and they lacked the hindsight, which we enjoy, of knowing that this change was permanent. They stayed on, and they grumbled on. It is not fair to call them Vicars of Bray or to regard them as unprincipled; but those of you who have read Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath will be familiar with the figure of the good Parish Priest who bunkers down and waits for better days, serving his people as faithfully as he can under an alien regime, hoping against hope that Henry’s bastard daughter will either die young or marry a Catholic Prince or change her views. And the process and problems of Gradualism are still at work in the Church of England today. Will the point of principle for Catholic Anglicans be reached when General Synod has legislated for Women Bishops? Or when the first women are consecrated? Or when the first women diocesans are appointed? Or when my own diocesan is a woman? Or when some set of ‘Assurances’ is modified? Or when some Code of Conduct is abolished? Or when ordinands are turned away unless they undertake to collaborate ‘collegially’ with women pastors? Gradualism carries many people along in modest comfort and ensures that their journey is never that little bit too bumpy; and thus the kairos for decision and departure seems never to present itself quite explicitly enough.

 

We naturally remember our fathers – and mothers – in Faith who have faced dilemmas before; in 1559, perhaps, or after the Dutch Invasion, or because of the Jerusalem Bishopric, or the Gorham Judgement, or the Church of South India question which so preoccupied Fr Fynes Clinton and Dom Gregory. In a sense, those crises prefigured the problems of the 1990s. The difference, of course, is that those periodical crises did not as radically disorder the claim of the Church of England to possess the Catholic Ministry (and thus to be an association of true ‘particular churches’) as does the integration of women into the three ranks of the Sacrament of Order; which must inevitably be as irreversible as the processes involved in constructing an omelette. So, here we are in the Ordinariate; and, from our new vantage-point, surely we are free to see the Carolines and the Non-jurors as beloved parts of our Anglo-Papalist, our Ordinariate Patrimony whom we take with us; and the Tractarians; and that great Separated Doctor of the Catholic Church Edward Bouverie Pusey; and the ‘slum priests’ who went and built the churches and the congregations in the squalor of the Victorian slums. Today we particularly celebrate the devoted witness of the priests and people of the Catholic League, who maintained ‘Full Catholic Privileges’ and the ‘Western Rite’ from 1913 onwards. We owe them the most immense debt of gratitude for their work and their sufferings. One thinks of figures like Fr Bernard Walke, at S Hilary in Cornwall, standing in front of his tabernacle as a Protestant mob menaced it and him with pickaxes; and Fr Sandys Wason finding the decaying corpse of a donkey dumped on his doorstep. More recently, we recall the labours by which Bishop John Broadhurst, and my own friend the late Bishop John Richards, in a time of desolation built up a people for the Lord. We thank God that Admiral Ratzinger appointed one Keith Newton to be Captain of the good ship Ordinariate ... a pocket battleship? An Aircraft Carrier?

 

And – I have tried to suggest to you – we have what Colin Buchanan called the “mischievous, maverick, learned perversity” of Dom Gregory Dix. Dix has bequeathed to us his distinctive, and distinctively Anglican, account of why the Petrine Ministry is an essential and central part of what it means to be a Catholic Christian. I believe that this account is his and our gift to the ecumenical process.