Catholic League History: Lecture by Dr Michael Walsh

January 29th 2018 - 7pm

The Catholic League and the Second Vatican Council

Dr Michael Walsh

St Clement Danes Church Crypt, The Strand, WC2R 1DH

All welcome: register with the Secretary of the Anglo-Catholic History Society - Mr Brent Skelly, skelly785@btinternet.com

www.achs.org.uk

Annual General Meeting 2016 - Priest Director's Address and Report, 6th July 2017

Report on Activities and Future Plans

During the course of 2015 and 2016 so far, we have continued to promote the principles of the League:in short, the unity of all Christians with the Apostolic See of Rome - especially Anglicans and Catholics - and also the promotion of the Catholic Faith and its spiritual life.

From within the perspective of English Anglicanism, to which many of our members belong, Papalism has never been a mainstream cause, and the wariness with which it was viewed made it a badge of pride, an unmistakable mark of a strong identity. What frequently gets missed, however, is that this was not another Anglican identity over and against that of the Church of England. For the cause was that of a dual ecumenism – the first within the Anglican world, in which Catholic faith and spirituality was shared, and drew in other Anglicans to enrich and inspire them; the second an ecumenism with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox worlds. Thus, even in pre-ecumenical times, it was a drive to reunion, a movement to find how the provinces of the Church of England as it had developed, but in faithfulness to its truer Catholic identity, and how the Catholic Church, as it too had developed, could recover their old union within the re-composition of the wholeness of the Church of Christ’s inherent communion.

Today, Papalism is an unpopular cause for other reasons. A small but significant body of our members has entered into union with the Apostolic See of Rome through a new ecclesial body, specifically created so as to receive and promote the historic Anglican religious patrimony in a renewed mode, where it is to express the Catholic faith no longer in separation but in fullness of communion. Some therefore now think that the cause of Papalism within Anglicanism has reached its ultimate realisation – nothing more can be added to what the Petrine See has already discerned and provided.

Interestingly, the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham is very different from the caricature sometimes found in press and online comment. It is not a monochrome club for ultramontanist Anglo-Catholics; for here we find Prayer Book Catholics, Vatican II pastoral-renewal liturgists, William Temple’s Central Churchmanship, exuberant admirers of the Baroque, reserved middle of the roaders, and those who have made their journey from Evangelical Protestant to Evangelical Catholic. It is a young manifestation of the Church, as well as of the very late-in-the-day inculturation of Catholic faith and worship in the register of Anglophone post-Reformation religious culture, with its distinctive tones in preaching, music & hymnody, pastoral mission, liturgical texts and corporate life and governance. The way it lives with its patrimony, as a means for conveying the Catholic faith to our society and new generations, lies towards the future, not the past. So in some ways it can be a seedbank microcosm of the vanishing world of classic Anglicanism, but in other ways this is so that it can function as an experiment in the New Evangelisation. We, as the Catholic League, remain wholly committed to this work of divine Providence in the Church of this land. Currently, I write a monthly column in The Portal magazine, to promote the Ordinariate’s importance and potential as none other than God’s gift, comparing it with the other manifestations of Catholic Christianity in the Eastern Churches. I wish to thank my fellow members of the executive, David Chapman as general secretary and Cyril Wood as treasurer, who also support The Portal and the Ordinariate in numerous practical ways. The Portal has a considerable international readership – it not only commends the value of the three Ordinariates, it projects around the Catholic Church the immense riches that belong to Anglicanism, and specifically to the Anglo-Catholic movement in faith and practice, that have now become spiritually available in full communion with Peter to the wider Catholic Church beyond the bounds imposed by division.

Yet there are still others, including members of the League among them, who believe in conscience that their vocation is to remain in the Church of England, where they were set from their baptism, and to continue in faithfulness with their witness to the faith of the undivided Church that it once received and that they were raised in, whatever changes have arisen since in the polity and thus the teaching of most Anglican churches and their leaders. One cannot, after all, fail to notice the continuing gift of the Holy Spirit of ordinations to the Sacred Ministry, and vocations to the religious life. Thus, during the year, the League has been of help to two Anglican bishops in their work that perseveres with promoting the reunion of all Christians with the Apostolic See of Rome in the fullness of Catholic faith and communion. First, Bishop John Hind sought our help for a keynote speech at an international conference for Catholic Anglicans, in which he wished to set out how Anglican Papalism, far from being a marginal pursuit, had been an insistent influence leading up to the establishment of modern-day Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenical dialogue and relations. After all, it was Papalists who brought about the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity; it was a Papalist who re-established the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham to serve as the heart of Anglo-Catholicism ever after; it was Papalists who kept up regular contacts between Anglicanism and continental Roman Catholicism when no one else did in the first half of the 20^th century for the two Churches to build on in the second half; and thus it was an Anglican Papalist, Bishop John Moorman of RIpon, who represented the Church of England at the Second Vatican Council, leading to the founding of the Anglican Centre in Rome and the permanent establishment of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. Yet within a few years, Papalists were sidelined as these institutions became mainstream. It was Bishop Hind’s point that they thus lost their edge and impetus towards Catholic union. Thus the much expected progress towards reunion, almost in reach in the early 1980s, slipped from the grasp of us all.

We have also maintained a conversation to help another bishop who, in the light of this, wishes to consolidate a distinct set of relationships with Rome from among classic Anglicans within the juridical framework of the Church of England. These are those who are not seeking to join the Ordinariate, yet who wish to increase spiritual unity with the Catholic Church and – somehow – to seek closer communion. How this can be achieved is perhaps unimaginable as things stand; but we believe that good will be served through encouraging honest conversations and friendly, spiritual contacts. No good can come of anti-Catholicism, or taking refuge in baseless anti-Roman resentment to corroborate an alternative position, the mark of the old High Church approach that has no place in the times since the Decree on Ecumenism and the establishment of ARCIC. The anti-Catholic Anglo-Catholic remains a paradox for both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches in their common ecumenical quest towards fullness in communion in life, faith and sacrament. Clearly, then, there is work for us still to be done in strengthening the resilience of the classical Anglican Catholics who continue, as always in the past, to hope and work for the unity of their Church with the Rock whence it was hewn, in completeness of Catholic faith. It will take a miracle to bring about such a unity, but that is for God. For us it lies to dismantle what divisions we can, rather than stand around pointing at the insurmountable barricades, regardless of who put them up and when.

In 2015, we were able at last to publish as a Special Edition of our now occasional Messenger, containing all the papers and addresses from our 2013 Centenary. I repeat our thanks to the remarkable contributions from Fr John Hunwicke, Judge Michael Yelton, Father Michael Rear, Canon Robin Ward, and Bishop Norman Banks. Closely connected with this publication and the celebrations that preceded it is the project to produce a thorough and honest history of the Catholic League and Papalism in the 20^th century. This has been entrusted to the hands of the eminent Catholic papal historian, Dr Michael Walsh, to whom I am indebted for his keen interest and dedication to getting at the true purpose of this movement’s objectives, people, and influences. Also now in hand is an intention to collect the oral history of the League’s leading lights and personalities.

During the year, we published two editions of our Newsletter. I am grateful to Fr Chris Stephenson, membership secretary, for assuming as well the responsibility of Director of the Apostleship of Prayer, which he has taken to his heart. Not only does this commend to the members our regular prayers for unity. It also serves to unite the members with the intentions of the Holy Father, so that those in all the Churches, regardless of earthly divisions, may be of one heart and one mind, indeed one Body at prayer.

It is our intention that in the forthcoming year there will be two more editions of the occasional Messenger, completing long-term projects. The first will commend the healing of memories in our respective martyr traditions, a cause now dear to Pope Francis because of his vigorous ecumenical engagement. The second  will examine the progress of the implementation of Anglicanorum Coetibus six years on and after five years of the Ordinariates’ life. Much has been written and considered; the League remains in a unique position to record and assess this as a service more widely.

Earlier in 2015, the League was a co-sponsor of perhaps the most significant regular event towards unity in Catholic life, and the development of the spiritual life. This is the biennial Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage to Walsingham, for which Cyril Wood, our Treasurer, and I both serve as trustees. Walsingham is closely associated with the purpose and history of the League; and the recent inspirational developments in the renewal of the Catholic Shrine, complementing those at the Anglican Shrine in the past, are something we have wanted to encourage strongly. I am glad to say that the General Secretary, David Chapman, and the Treasurer, serve as a trustee of the Walsingham Association at the Roman Catholic shrine, which continues to invigorate our constant links and involvement with England’s Nazareth, with its central purpose in pursuit of Christian Unity.

My predecessor, Fr Philip Gray did much to promote the role of reconciliation that can be played at Walsingham. Thus the League helped to furnish the Martyrs’ Chapel at the old Sue Ryder Home, where Fr Nicholas Mileham, sub prior at the monastery that tended the shrine, was held before his martyrdom for holding to the Catholic faith in the honour and powerful intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The League’s members provided the altar, newly designed in memory of our much loved general secretary, the late Geoffrey Wright. The Home has now been acquired for pilgrimage groups by the Roman Catholic Shrine, and the chapel will be reinstated as a place of joint honour of the martyrs and of reconciliation for the Christians of today. I am again grateful for Fr Chris for faithfully maintaining the altar in his own guardianship, enabling it thus to be restored this year. The League is also paying for vestments to be used in this chapel.

Another work of the League in the past year has been the annual pilgrimage for unity to the Holy Blood in Brugge and to Our Lady of the Vine at the Beguinage. We are a regular group of about 20 – and the addresses of the speakers each year, together with the experience of time together, worshipping, enjoying good food and Belgian beer, as well as our deep friendship with the sisters, is – I am convinced – a powerful aid to the work of our respective Churches in maintaining contacts and friendships, and in making such steps as we can towards unity, even if for the moment it is so hidden from us. This last year, the speaker was Brother Theodore de Poel from the Monastery of Chevetogne in Belgium. It was good to be able to see Mgr Leo Declerck, rector of the Beguinage Church, and a friend of the group’s for 20 years, for the last time before his retirement. The sisters are now down to seven in number with three more in retirement at a nursing home in eastern Belgium. It is a privilege to accompany this community reaching the end of its faithful life and distinguished history – we pray for its future, and the future of the Beguinage as a place of spirituality for 800 years. After all, the community of Beguines almost died out 100 years ago, until the last Beguine became the mother foundress of the new Benedictine priory. We and they share confidence in God that, whatever happens in the world, in the Kingdom God is always bringing his new creation to perfection.

I should mention two other grants we have offered during the year. One is to the French Catholic TV network, KTOTV, which is to adapt into English a beautiful film on the life and work of the Monastery of Chevetogne in Eastern Belgium. It has strong links with the Church of England and indeed from its foundation it has sought to promote unity between Catholics and Anglicans, through a deep appreciation of the Anglican liturgical and theological and spiritual patrimonies. I am an oblate of this monastery and was asked to contribute to the documentary when it was filmed last year. We aim to make copies widely available on disc and online, so as to keep at the forefront of the Churches’ attention the importance of prayer, religious life, and a shared engagement in the beauty of life in Christ, since this is at the heart of our firm confidence that the unity for which Christ prayer as essential to his disciples will come to pass as he promised.

Secondly we have made a grant to the Anglican Centre in Rome for bursaries for students, especially from poor parts of the world, to be able to come to Rome to study and learn more about the Catholic faith, the Catholic Church and the importance of unity with Peter in full communion.

Finally, I thank Mrs Mary Bacon as a fellow trustee and executive member for her help and encouragement during the year. I also with to thank Fr Graeme Rowlands, as always, for his deeply appreciated friendship and the encouragement that he unfailingly gives to the search for Christian Unity and the solidarity and spiritual unity of dear and good friends. As Priest Director of the Sodality of the Precious Blood he is a member of the League’s executive and so his beautiful Church here at St Silas’ Kentish Town has long been a spiritual home to us – it is not only a sacred place, but also a delight to come here to enter a part of heaven on earth. Thank you so much.

Priest Director’s Notes and Address

I would like to close with some observations on the constitutional crisis in which the United Kingdom is now embroiled following the referendum in which a majority of those voting approved by a narrow margin withdrawal from the European Union.

It surprised me that in the weeks and months before this fateful vote, there was no guidance from the Catholic Bishops on the issues at stake in terms of Catholic social teaching or indeed the interests of the Holy See and the Catholic Church in this country. After the result was known, Cardinal Nichols called for calm and mutual respect, but there has been little setting of this decision and its aftermath in the context of Christian faith and discipleship. Since the League is devoted to the communion of all with the Apostolic See of Rome, the promotion of Catholic faith and the Spiritual Life, it is important that we look forward to the next year with its undoubted upheavals ahead with our eyes fixed firmly on Jesus Christ our pioneer and the perfecter of our faith and the life we pass through in this world.

Today, I have heard of a French bistro in south London with its windows smashed; a charity considering a new office in Germany to protect its work across European borders; a Belgian employee confronted in public with a threat that her job was shortly to come to an end; and we have all heard of numerous incidents of physical and verbal assault ranging from the xenophobic to the unvarnished racist.

To this I would say that the Kingdoms of the World have become the Kingdom of the Lord and of His Christ, and that the Kingdom of God transcends all our ideas of patriotism, nationality, nationalism, state- interest. Here, says St Paul, we have no abiding city, for our true homeland is in heaven. The Lord Himself says to seek first the Kingdom of God. At Vatican II, the Church taught that the authority of the Church and of civil society are free of each other and operate in their respective spheres. This does not mean that the Gospel and the authority of the Church fail to apply to the world, and that the Church must refrain from interfering in the affairs of society. On the contrary, it is the teaching of the Church that the objective of both Church and State, Religion and Society, is to serve the realisation of God’s Kingdom on earth. It is thus the Church’s prophetic duty to call the world, its leaders, its governments, its cultures, and societies to constant repentance, to return again and again to the principles of the Beatitudes, to strain repeatedly to ‘hear the Angels sing’ of glory to God and peace on earth to those of good will, and thus to direct and orient the entire world to the blessed state that is ours by virtue of creation in the image of God.

Secondly, it is vital to recall that what has now become the European Union, whatever you think of it, was established largely by Catholic Christians intent on this Kingdom of God in the hands of people of good will, transcending states and languages and divisions, so that the resources of the world could never again be used in Europe for making war, or for oppressing the dignity of human beings to live to the full before God, in faith and hope and love. No more Fascism and Nazism; no more atheist materialist communism. Everywhere confidence in truth and justice.

What has emerged in the last few weeks has clearly been lying under the surface for years and now feels unbound and empowered to assert itself. Yet it must be the heartfelt duty of every Christian, who believes above all else the Catholic faith and the Universal Reign of Jesus Christ over all peoples and nations, to withstand all thoughts, words and deeds that contradict His design for humanity’s perfect liberty in Him, and that contradict the dignity of all human beings, regardless of colour, race, religion, age, sex, or language, or outlook. It must be that Christians who seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness declare unrighteous, unChristian, all that stands against Christ’s will for us all to be both one in His own humanity, and to thrive as He has appointed us to be in His single creation with all our differences and backgrounds and origins, seeing that by the Holy Spirit and Providence He has both penetrated our society and societies so that they may become more like His Kingdom, and seeing that He is even now redeeming from all its ills, oppressions, cruelties and acts of spiteful pride and wickedness, by the power of His holy Cross.

I fear that this will require of us great strengths in the time ahead as we make a new history, and that this will involve the further vilification of the Church and of God’s Kingdom, indeed the profound sacrifices for the sake of the truth and for the love of God. But the evil that is now at work will not prevail. It must bow, for the earth is the Lord’s and the Lord alone is King. Him alone do we serve.

Unitas Newsletter, June 2016 - Priest Director's Message

2016 sees two landmarks in the slow history of the Church’s reunion. First is the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Anglican Centre in Rome. It was dedicated by Archbishop Michael Ramsey in 1966, as one of the first concrete ecumenical results from the Second Vatican Council, part of the same hopeful drive towards the reintegration of Church unity  as ARCIC (the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission), for which Father Paul Wattson, Father Spencer Jones and Abbé Paul Couturier in their work to establish what is now the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, then Anglican Papalists in the Catholic League led by Fr Henry Fynes-Clinton and followed by luminaries such as Dom Gregory Dix, and also the members of the Malines Conversations - in which Dom Lambert Beauduin imagine a Latin Catholic Church with an Anglican Church “unie pas absorbée” – had steadily laid foundations in the preceding six decades.

As a student at St Chad’s College, Durham, in the late 1970s, it was remarkable to be befriended by two great figures from this hopeful moment just over a decade earlier for Anglican-Catholic rapprochement. First was Archbishop Ramsey himself, who urged us to have a large vision of the Catholic Church, in which the Anglican tradition was a providential English Christianity, integral to the mission of the Church as a whole in this land, its culture and society. He felt that neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the Anglican Church were ends in themselves – as things stood, their need to be one was mutual. It was not to be exclusive of Orthodox and Evangelical or Reformed Churches (Ramsey’s family background was in the Congregationalist tradition), but a unity in which approaches and understanding could be learned and appropriated by others as appropriate - not for amalgamation or homogenisation, least of all subordination, but so that each in ways that were right for them could be enriched by the other, and thus the Gospel of the Kingdom grow in people’s lives.

This idea of the exchange of spiritual gifts, in which different Christians could outdo one another in a sort of joyous race to grow in holiness as all the runners converged ever nearer upon Christ and union with Him, had been very dear to the heart of Paul Couturier, partly inspired by his contacts with a range of Anglican traditions in the 1930s. Devoted Catholic as he was, he re-cast the old Church Unity Octave  as the Universal Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, hoping exchange in the gifts from God that make us holy would be the means by  which all Christians will find unity in Christ, with Peter and through Peter. This spiritual ecumenism is a theme authoritatively commended in Unitatis Redintegratio, Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism, and elaborated by St John Paul II in his Encyclical on Christian Unity, Ut Unum Sint, in which he speaks not only of mutual exchange of gifts but an exchange of riches, identifying work towards ecumenical reconciliation as a particular duty of the Pope’s leadership of the Catholic Church. In so many places you look in the different churches, you see this has been taken up quite naturally – from the evident acceptance by Protestant traditions of visual imagery and media, including even icons from the Eastern Christian tradition, to a deeper engagement with the Scriptures in Catholic piety, to active collaboration in local communities in serving those at risk and in need, to making vocal common cause on matters of life and death, justice and peace. All this, and much more, was already lying deep and amply within our respective traditions; but ecumenism in the face of a divided and brutally secularised society has renewed its present, active reality and thus brought us spiritually closer than ever before, even if the constitutional and doctrinal divisions seem insuperable. Thus the powerful integrity of Christ’s one Church as His very Body in the world continues to insist we bear Michael Ramsey’s larger vision of Catholic communion, and not to acquiesce in the tale that in our separated bodies we all somehow refract the unity of one People of God, and instead to strive for much more than informal inter-denominational links and schemes of co-operation between separate earthly institutions. We are to be unsatisfied until we manifest on earth the Church as it is in heaven from the perspective point of the Father’s sovereign will, Whose providence of but one Church accords with His Son’s prayer the night before He died.

The second figure was John Moorman, Bishop of Ripon, renowned scholar on St Francis, and Anglican observer at Vatican II. From the ages of 18 to 21, the outlook of several successive cohorts of students was imbued with his love for the Church – a conviction of the heart - the serious need to serve it, the vast cause of recovering our lost Christian Unity, and the scandal of the Churches’ persistence in mutual isolation. It is telling that Moorman, like Ramsey, had come from an Independent background (the Congregationalist tradition). He was thus very sure that the Church of England, of its nature, could not be a Protestant body and that, whatever the influence and history of the Reformation and the Broad and Progressive constituencies within it, it must be reconciled to its truest self as an English Catholic Church as the only, logical consequence. The only option for its future work and identity was to come to terms with working out all the implications of the faith it bore for its own doctrine and life, and with the wider Catholic Church, “united not absorbed”, and this included reconciliation with the “other” English Catholic Church, that other remnant of the one Church in England from before the break with Rome in the 16^th century.

In this, he was supremely certain of the catholicity, apostolicity and integrity of the Church of England and its distinctive religious tradition. He was not a Romaniser and was amused by the outward manifestations from ultramontanists who did not really resemble Roman Catholics and thus advance their pro-Roman cause to Anglicans, or represent the catholicity of their own Anglicanism to Roman Catholics. Like many Anglican Papalists of the past, he was against individual “conversions”, even though he respected people’s conscience, because he was holding out for the reunion of the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England “entire”. He was High Church in the sense that in English Christianity he privileged the Church of England over the old Dissent (his own family origin) and Methodism – not out of Establishment superiority, but for the sake of mission and the greater prize of a comprehensive unity that, in the 1960s and even into the 1970s, seemed not unthinkable. He was a Prayer Book Catholic, too, and believed that this tradition, more than any other, spoke to regular people in the towns and dales of his Yorkshire diocese.

He believed that the Catholic Church needed this Anglicanism, both in the form of the Anglican national institution and in its unique set of outlooks and approaches – what we would now call, since Anglicanorum Coetibus, its patrimony - to further the mission of the whole of Christ’s Church. I remember he said of the parish I was first sent to, a busy “English Catholic” parish in Leeds that had once been at the progressive forefront of the Parish Communion movement and of a singular form of parish Eucharistic mission (masses from before dawn to night in people’s homes, workplaces, pubs, schools, shops and, of course, primarily the church), that it had become abnormal as an Anglican parish and it was in danger of serving neither the Church nor the parishioners - “I had to bring it back into the Church of England.” The solid, classical Anglicanism, convinced of its Catholic faith and directly addressed to the need of a rapidly changing contemporary society to be able find a place to stand firm in Christ, resonated with what he found, just the same, in the concerns of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, and was what, likewise renewed, he felt could be offered from the Church of England to a shared new endeavour with the Roman Catholic Church.

Most of all, for all his delight in the splendours of the Church of England and his keen sense of being a diocesan Bishop in it, John Moorman was a Franciscan. He realised that the utterly simple dedication of Francis to living the Gospel of Christ was something not very far removed from the spiritual intuitions of the Reformation traditions. Thus Catholic reconciliation in Evangelical simplicity could be contemplated. He also realised that Roman Catholics in England were mostly not like the Catholic cultures of the continent that had drawn ceremonial emulation across Anglo-Catholicism. He told us that, from the Irish communities in the cities to the Duke of Norfolk, they were “Low Church” people, practising the faith taught in straightforward, clear teaching and nurtured by reliable patterns of private piety and dutiful frequenting of the sacraments, they were matter-of-fact Christians, all with conviction and commitment about the Catholic Church because of a history when this a matter of life and death, conspicuous in society not by exuberance or stridency, but by their unshowy way of quietly but resolutely getting on with who they were and what they stood for. “The Church of England as a national Church feels similar to the position the Catholic Church occupies in France and Italy, which is why we often feel we have more in common with it there than we sometimes do here. But the daily task priest and people in our parishes in faithful worship and pastoral ministration alongside each other suggests we have much more in common than some would have us believe.”

One of the great “what if” moments was at the British Council of Churches’ Nottingham Faith & Order conference in September 1964 which took up the optimistic language of the 1961 New Delhi Assembly of the World Council of Churches in calling for a covenant reconciling divided Churches for united mission and service of “all in each place”, leading to organic unity by Easter 1980. Bishop John Moorman, as the leading Anglican observer at Vatican II, had seen the developing drafts of the Council’s forthcoming Decree on Ecumenism. The earlier working document had been circulated in the press in 1963 and much discussed. Cardinal Heenan of Westminster had welcomed the advent of dialogue to increase mutual understanding and love, but said that the ultimate aim of ecumenism – the visible union of all Christians – was “not within our power”. Of course, under God this is true. But Moorman knew that the vision of the Universal Church (which “subsists in” the Catholic Church) and the consequences for the unity of baptised Christians discussed at the sessions of the Council and in the myriad side-conversations were bolder. What the World Council of Churches had said had been studied, and the conciliar Decree on Ecumenism, taken with the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, due to be released simultaneously that December, would be the Catholic Church’s considered response, as it set out its course for the times ahead. He urged the Nottingham conference to wait until the Decree on Ecumenism and the Constitution on the Church were released, to see what was said, to enter into dialogue with it and then to take new ecumenical steps only in the light of it. Unfortunately, he was not heard. When Unitatis Redintegratio came out, the other Churches in England had already committed to the Covenant, and it was not possible for the Catholic Church to engage with it, or even now to consider joining the British Council of Churches. What if Dr Moorman’s voice had prevailed and the other English Churches had entered upon a process of receiving the Decree and Lumen Gentium in a spirit of dialogue with the Catholic Church?

Nevertheless, the Anglican Centre was established and John Moorman became the first Anglican co-president of ARCIC, the first commission of which envisaged the possibility of “substantial agreement” on the doctrine of the Eucharist, and on priesthood and ministry, which gave many Anglicans high hopes that, after all, reunion could be achieved. In my last conversation with Bishop John before I left Durham, he lamented the new voices and movements emerging in the Church of England to draw it away from what he saw as its truer Catholic identity, away from unity with the Catholic Church, away from its opportunity for mission in the world and the service of Christ’s Kingdom within our society. “What shall we do?” I asked. “I am retired and can do nothing now. It’s over to you boys to carry things on.” I owe to that one comment, which confirmed my resolution to offer myself for the sacred ministry in the Anglican Church, my life’s commitment to live and speak and think for Catholic Christian unity.

Thus I am delighted to say that, at the last meeting of the Executive, the League allocated funding for scholarships so that Anglican students without resources could go to Rome and learn about the Catholic Church at its heart, at the same time as sharing with Catholic Church leaders and students in Rome a better understanding of Anglicans and Anglicanism from around the world.

The second great event in 2016 is the Great and Holy Council of the Orthodox Church, to take place in Crete at Eastern Pentecost this June. When the League was established, it was not intended to be concerned exclusively with English-Anglican and Catholic reunion, but with the re-composition of the wholeness of the entire Church of East and West. Thus Fr Fynes-Clinton designated that with respect to the Latin West our patron under Our Lady of Victories (Mary, Mother of the Church) would be St Joseph, and for the East our patron would be St Nicholas of Myra. So the momentous Council – the first the Orthodox Church has agreed and managed to convene in 1200 years - is of direct importance to our spiritual society of the League, praying and hoping for the unity of all Christians in communion with the apostolic see of Rome, in the way that it existed before the catastrophic breach between Rome and Constantinople in 1054. Never intended to last a thousand years, the schism led to centuries of distrust, strife and resentment, spurred by misdirected military adventures for recapturing the Holy Land from Islam that effectively undermined the Eastern Orthodox Church, until the Byzantine Christian Empire itself was finally defenceless before tis conquest by Ottoman Muslims. Under the weight of this cross to bear, the disagreements over doctrine, ecclesiology and authority sharpened, until in 1965 Pope Paul went to meet Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem, within months of the Decree on Ecumenism, to lift the old anathemas, to express sorrow for the past and to work for unity on what they called a new “Dialogue of Love”.  Thus the best of the working documents of the Council is said to be the draft on relations of the Orthodox Church with other Christians and others in the world (see online at www.orthodoxcouncil.org). It offers a renewed commitment to ecumenical engagement, as well as possibly a unified Orthodox approach to Christian witness in the world alongside other Christians. Unlike Vatican II, there will not be observers from other Churches taking part in the sessions, but there will be important opportunities in the surrounding discussions with theological and other experts for invited representatives from other traditions to convey views, reactions and insights that can aid and illuminate at this turning point in Orthodox history and Church life.

For those of us who desire the unity of the Churches as they are familiar to us in the Latin western tradition, it is important we also pray for the good of another part of the Church, and for its unity too, because our unity is nothing without theirs, nor theirs without ours. We all share a sense of and a belief in the Church as Universal - the mystical Body of Christ in this world as in the next, the one People of God - and the Church where we belong to it as somehow or even fully manifesting that One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Sometimes the way we speak describes our Church to the exclusion of others. It is a temptation to which Anglicans, Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox can all alike succumb. Yet what Michael Ramsey and John Moorman impose on our minds is a larger vision that is not only about the effectiveness and plausibility of our common mission as Christ’s one Church in the world. It is the very vision of the mission of the Creator to His creation, the articulation of the Word made Flesh, which places the entirety of humanity into the path of the Three-in-One, that is to turn none way and must, in Christ lifted up on His Cross, draw all people to Himself (John 12.32), as He thus reconciles all things (Colossian 1.20).

Priest Director's Address and Report to the Annual General Meeting, July 2015

During the course of 2014 and into this year, it has been clear that the Catholic League is still to fulfil a role and a purpose. Our main preoccupation since the 2013 Centenary Celebrations has been to attend to recording and writing the history not only of the League, but the cause it represents – a recomposition of the integral unity of Christ’s Church. The modern Ecumenical Movement dates from 1910, just before the League’s establishment but it has not had quite the same aim and it has thus prevented itself from re-integrating the Church. Its first aim was to ensure concerted efforts among Protestants in mission at home and abroad, and thus undermine the presentation of the Gospel by rivalry. A larger aim was reunion among historic institutional Church denominations through better mutual understanding and going back along our respective paths to our common point of origin, in the hope of retracing steps forward, but this time knowing in advance how not to be estranged as we discipline ourselves to keep together in company and agreement, lest we go our separate ways again and the prospect of communion almost in our grasp slips away once more. But the Ecumenical Movement came to imagine a mechanism for negotiation towards amalgamation, rather than the recomposition of the integral unity of which the Church is already possessed – as the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism put it, the reintegration of its unity, something that is “already”, even if in the world it is prevented or overwhelmed by separation. This is what the Catholic League means by “corporate reunion”- not the reconciliation of the incompatible, but the faithful pursuit of the visible and organic unity of the only Church that Christ founded. Vital, spiritual, practical and theological as the Ecumenical Movement has been – and it has truly made us all much better friends and collaborators than ever before and closer than at any time since our divisions – it seems unable to take us further than the impasse of what many call the Ecumenical Winter, after such high hopes from the 1960s to the early 1980s. This is because the Churches have imagined the Unity of Christians in a similar way to the diplomatic efforts of the United Nations, in the hope that by negotiation and partnerships between institutions you could achieve binding treaties, de-colonisation, streamlining, or even the ‘ever closer union’ that was an aspiration of many Europeans for the old European Economic Community in the aftermath of a two-century long process of European disintegration including two World Wars that undermined the old certainties of a European Christendom.


But it has been the League’s purpose not just to re-Catholicise England towards reunion, but also to hold English Christians, especially in the Anglican world, to that full, visible and organic Church unity which is not a distant object or a painstaking process, but integral to the Church’s very nature as the Body of Christ. In other words, communion with the apostolic see of Rome and the primacy of the successor of Peter as the pastor responsible for “strengthening his brethren” in the episcopate of the whole of Christ’s Church, is essential not only to the Roman Catholic Church but to all the Churches that compose the once visibly unified Universal Church. It may not be convenient because of what we think or believe; but that is our problem. It is the declared will, prayer and command of Christ that His disciples be one and that Peter be the one to feed His sheep. It is the first question to be faced in ecumenism, not the one to be put off to last. One of the fruits of our history project was a paper delivered by Dr Michael Walsh, who has undertaken the task of researching and writing the history, at the Third International Receptive Ecumenism Conference at Fairfield, Connecticut in July 2014. He noted that the Anglican Papalists, while few in number, had been decisive in establishing what would later go on to be the mainstream of ecumenism, from which, ironically, official channels went on to steer them away. His view is that this important historical contribution needs retrieving and reading back into the narrative of what happened and who was involved. The Malines Conversations have become very important in the corporate memory of Anglican-Roman Catholic engagement, but those involved were few in number and without a wider, more long-lasting constituency behind them to develop their ideas for a separate, additional Anglicanism alongside and in communion with Latin Roman Catholicism. The times were not right and there was no momentum until it gathered pace with the establishment of ARCIC and, in a new way, the conception of the Personal Ordinariates for groups of Anglicans with their own distinctive patrimony. But it was the League’s founders who popularised what we now know as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in Britain. It was Father Fynes-Clinton whose links with figures in Rome and in Orthodoxy in the turbulence between the World Wars enabled the Anglican establishment to relate to both. (He seems almost on his own to have saved the Serbian Orthodox Church’s ability to be supplied with new priests.) It was the League’s leaders, with the support of the members, who maintained contact with Rome and friends in the Catholic Church on the continent, most notably Fr Paul Couturier, who re-invigorated the Week of Prayer when no one else would or could. It was the League that led the Anglican Catholic world to converge around the renewed pastoral-liturgical approach of the Second Vatican Council towards a better mission to our times. It was the League that impressed upon Anglican Catholics all the way through the twentieth century the central importance for the Church of England of reconciliation between Rome and Canterbury as essential to both in the enduring mission of Christ and His Church to England. It is so significant that the English Anglican observer at the Second Vatican Council was Bishop John Moorman of Ripon, a convinced Anglican Papalist, whom I had the privilege of knowing when I was an undergraduate at Durham and he was in retirement, urging a new generation to take forward the torch. From this time forward, the pressure within recent Anglican history was not to embark on variations to apostolic faith and order, not merely because they were “not Catholic”, not because they would “harm the chances of reunion between Rome and Canterbury”, but because they were contrary to the essential nature of the One Church in Christ.


So it has been sad to see orthodox, Papalist Anglican Catholics progressively marginalised from the theological and ecumenical leadership in their own Church. Others have noticed this. Not only Dr Walsh in his initial readings of our archives, but also two bishops in England and some leading Catholic ecumenical analysts abroad, have seen that those Anglicans with which the Catholic Church has much in common, pastorally, ecclesiologically and theologically have not been part of the decades long dialogue process and their voice has been missing. The observation of Professor Nicholas Sagovsky, the former Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey and a serving member of ARCIC III, bears repeating: until Anglicanorum Coetibus emerged as an answer to the Anglican constituency actively seeking reunion with Rome, it had not occurred to Anglicanism at ARCIC to identify what its “offer” to a reunified Church might be. What is Anglican patrimony and what would it look like if the Churches could reunite? A theological dialogue that had become grounded in discussing areas of Catholic teaching problematic to post-Reformation Anglicanism in all its forms had lost touch with the classic Anglican orthodox tradition, just as Bishop Graham Leonard had said, after the diagnosis of Fr Aidan Nichols, OP in The Panther & The Hind. One recalls Cardinal Kasper’s hope, when he was President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, for a new Oxford Movement if Anglican-Catholic rapprochement were to find a fresh starting point for a new drive towards unity, communicating on the same wavelength rather than constantly being at cross purposes. The bishops who have conversed with us seek not a “continuing Anglican enclave” but a space within the institutional Church of England that recovers its original “Anglican mind”, a space where Anglican Catholics can speak for themselves in relationship with those in other Churches, especially the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Could this be a spur to unity?


Convinced Anglican members of the League will forgive a Roman Catholic reflecting on these matters, because what has united us in the League is our own version of the “communion of origins” that Blessed Paul VI spoke of at the canonization of the Forty Martyrs – not as signs of division but as symbols of reconciliation. Our communion of origins is Fr Fynes Clinton’s central principle that the Church of Christ is one in its nature and essence and that this must be manifested not only in pursuing a Catholic way of life and faith but in the visible reunion of Churches to manifest the spiritual reality of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, through Christ’s Body before the world. This is why one of the League’s objects remains important – “fellowship among Catholics”. To this end, we are grateful on occasions such as these when we are able to benefit from the hospitality and welcome of the parish of St Silas, Kentish Town, which has become such a spiritual home to the League under Father Graeme Rowlands’ leadership. We are most grateful to him for his support and friendship because here it is easy to see that we not only pray with and for each other with ease, but we also see the bonds of fellowship and spiritual, religious closeness through a shared faith and hope. I venture to say that this was something Cardinal Koch (Cardinal Kasper’s successor) saw for himself on his visit several years ago to see a truer picture of Catholic life and belief in practice among Anglican priests parishes and people working and hoping for Catholic unity. Fr Rowlands is the Priest Director of the Sodality of the Precious Blood, instituted by Fr Fynes Clinton for celibate Anglican clergy bound by the recitation of the Divine Office of the Latin Catholic Church in a pioneering instance of ‘Receptive Ecumenism’, a contemporary ecumenical movement promoting the exchange of riches and gifts belonging to one Church with those of another. The Sodality is constituent body within the League and thus it remains an integral part of our witness and work towards unity. For this, we again thank Fr Rowlands.


Perhaps the most prominent area of the League’s work and purpose each year is our annual Pilgrimage to Bruges, where for five days we, as Anglican and Catholic members of the League and our friends live something of the unity that we aspire to. This pilgrimage was founded by our much loved and missed past General Secretary, Geoffrey Wright. He was a dedicated Anglican Catholic, but in his many and joyful visits to the Church on the Continent of Europe, to monasteries and shrines, and, as Edward Forse’s book title had it, Queer Sights in Foreign Churches, he saw reflected in reality the vision he lived by and hoped to see realised in England through its two main Churches’ reunion. This vision and joy were infectious and we have been faithful to them ever since, as each September we gather to honour Our Lady of the Vineyard at the Beguinage in Bruges, and Our Lord’s Holy Blood at the Basilica nearby, joining in the Gregorian offices of the nuns and attending each other’s Eucharists – as well as enjoying the great delight of being together again in a beautiful city and all its artistic and recreational delights. 2014’s speaker was Ian Knowles, who founded an Icon School in Bethlehem to preserve from destruction and to give a future the Holy Land’s only tradition of icon painting, which perhaps predates all others. We were most moved to hear Ian’s reflections on relations and tensions between Jews and Arabs, between Jews, Muslims and Christians, the emergence of Islamism, and the hope that can be borne in and of the beleaguered local Christian Church, continuous from the time of Our Lord Himself, especially through the love, protection and prayer of the Mother of God. What had drawn Ian to Bethlehem was a commission from the Melkite Catholic nuns there to paint an image of the Virgin, a sacred focus of goodness and prayer, on the evil Wall of Separation that divides the city from the rest of the Holy Land and Jerusalem.


While our work on our own is limited nowadays because of the change to the pursuit of ecumenism and reunion in the Anglican world, we nonetheless see in our relations and collaborations with other societies that our objects can be realised. Foremost among these is our support for the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust, whose biennial pilgrimage to the Shrine and centres at Walsingham sees 80-90 people from so many and varied traditions in English Christianity coming together to experience one another’s worship and to hear reflections, talks and artistic presentations from fascinating speakers and experts. We are also linked with the Society of St John Chrysostom, dedicated to the unity of Eastern and Western Christianity, another founding objective of the League’s through Fr Fynes Clinton’s work with the Orthodox Church. Our occasional links with the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham and the Holy House, the renewal project for the Catholic Shrine and with the important work of the Anglican Centre in Rome remain. Mention should also be made of our occasional link with the Society for Ecumenical Studies, which we substantially supported to hold a conference to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Decree on Ecumenism in autumn 2014, the only observance in the capital of its kind. In early 2016, we hope to bring you the addresses from Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Reformed and Liberal Protestant speakers. As you would expect, there were the highest ideals and principles that we would recognise; but there was also the persistent frustration that seems to me to be the choice between unity in faith and order on the one hand and on the other the system of ecumenism that can be geared to preserving differences at the cost of unity. One example: a speaker from the floor promoted his book, Reforming Rome, which is a paean to recasting the Catholic Church on classic Protestant lines, such as the Reformed Church observers at Vatican II detected in the new emphasis on Scripture and collegiality. Yet, as Pope Benedict reminded us, the Vatican II reforms were not a new reformation but a renewal in continuity coming out of the old tradition, never a rupture from it. And the speaker from the floor had no conception that, meanwhile, all the post-Reformation Churches are hardly "classic Protestant" any more: by embracing relativism and the idea that faith, order and Christian discipleship can and should change to correspond to circumstances, they have utterly recast themselves - more re-formed than reformed. As Pope St John Paul once famously said to a visiting group of modern Lutheran theologians, “If you had been truly Lutheran, we would have been one by now.” Similar observations by both Anglicans and Catholics have been made on English Christianity and its reunion. Nevertheless, the conversations and ecumenical engagements – conferences, dialogues, pilgrimages, partnerships and friendships - illustrate how vital concerted efforts and warm personal contacts are to re-establishing understanding among us and furthering the objects we each hold dear: catholic unity is not a fringe interest but essential to the Church whose belief we confess in the Nicene Creed; it is essential to our lives as Christians. To this we bear witness.


For the future, once again, I have to say that, with regret, new issues of The Messenger have been delayed for a mixture of technical reasons, lack of time, and the slow development of completed articles and papers. The publication of the Centenary Messenger is imminent and this should be followed in the later part of the year by two more delayed special editions. One of these, seeing the renewed stress Pope Francis has given to St John Paul’s teaching on the healing of memories and the reparation and reconciliation surrounding our respective martyr traditions, will pick up on his theme in the present crisis of persecution of all kinds of Christians in the Middle East on “the ecumenism of blood”. The plight of our fellow Christians under persecution will be our special intention as we prepare to make our 2015 Pilgrimage to Bruges to venerate once more the Holy Blood, Bruges’ spiritual glory.

 

Priest Director's Newsletter - May 2015

When Father Henry Joy Fynes Clinton brought about the foundation of the Catholic League in 1913, it was not solely an Anglican-Roman Catholic concern. In Father John Salter’s biography, The Anglican Papalist, we were given the picture of a man focussing on a host of different things at the same time, each within the context of the others. Thus, while the League with our companions in the Sodality of the Precious Blood may be the last Papalist body for Anglican-Catholic corporate reunion standing from the time before the modern ecumenical movement, and while friendly relations and collaboration (if not the passion for reunion) between the members of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion show that our original aims have become the ecumenical mainstream, Fynes Clinton envisaged the re-integration of the Latin Catholic West to rest upon the reintegration of the whole Church, not just parts and pieces of it. He therefore appointed as the League’s patrons beside Our Lady of Victories, recalling the concerted effort of western Christendom that turned back the Ottoman Empire and its fleet at Lepanto in 1571, whom we venerate as Mother of the Church, and St Joseph, patron of the Universal Church from the Latin West’s point of view - but also St Nicholas of Myra, the holy protecting bishop beloved of the Orthodox East.


Fynes Clinton’s concern for the Christian East was realised in aid and activity in parallel with his promotion of Anglican reunion in the West. Fr Salter credits him with doing perhaps more than anyone else to achieve the stability of the Serbian Orthodox Church in its time of trial, by ensuring a desperately needed new generation of priests was trained in England. In this he assisted the Archbishop of Canterbury and thus cemented a bond between the Church of England and the Serbian Church to this day. Fr Fynes even saw a chance in the collapsing years of the Ottoman Empire for the Aya Sofya mosque in Istanbul mourned by Christians as the lost Hagia Sophia, the Great Church, to be restored by British power to the Patriarch of Constantinople. This cause may appear quixotic with hindsight; in any case he abandoned it, as it became clear that shadowy interests in the Roman curia did not wish to assist the recovery of the suffering and persevering Orthodox Church of the Eastern Roman Empire (which in Christian charity would have been the right thing to do), but hoped instead that in the power vacuum the Papacy could insert itself, install a Catholic patriarch at Hagia Sophia, and drive East-West reunion the vantage point while all else was in disarray; they certainly did not want an Anglican brokering arrangements with the Orthodox that would get in the way. While this was no less Quixotic than Fynes Clinton’s flight of imagination, it was much less innocent. The patriarchate did not forget the Anglican kindness borne of a desire for the Church to manifest its intrinsic unity: the foundation of the Nikaean Club and the Fellowship of St Alban & St Sergius, to foster Anglican-Orthodox mutual affection and solidarity belong to this era, as does the 1922 recognition of Anglican priestly orders. The particular bond between the Church of England, with the Archbishop  of Canterbury taking a leading role, and the Orthodox Churches of the Christian East has persisted to this day. It is important to keep in mind how important the involvement of Anglican Papalists in official ecumenism was in its formative stages, and this was because of their principle that reunion is not about piecemeal amalgamations or bilateral arrangements, but the intrinsic unity of the Church in the fullness of communion that must involve all Christians in each of the Churches, especially led by the apostolic Churches. This necessarily involves the ministry and proper authority of the Pope, the Bishop of the First See and successor of St Peter, as integral to the ecumenical objective from the outset, not a role to be added on when desirable and acceptable as some last piece of the jigsaw.


It is a cause of dismay that this principle is so lost even among the best people involved in contemporary ecumenical activity. It is a regular criticism of Anglican ecumenical policy that it fields different people taking different tones when talking to Catholics from those it fields when talking to the Orthodox, or Evangelicals, or Lutherans, or Reformed Churches. To an extent, the specialisms and interests of experts in each Church make this inevitable. We all warm to aspects of other Churches that we find resonate with us or stimulate fresh insights for our life in our own Church. This reflects how the Church is the Universal Church that manifests itself in the life of each Church with its gifts and graces, the holiness of the people and the faith that belongs to us as one. The Catholic Church understands that this Universal Church fully “subsists in” it, although according to Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism, because of the barriers separating Christians that yet they share in common, it is difficult for her “to express in actual life her full Catholicity in all her bearings”. In other words, we need each other in order to be the Church on earth in full; we need each other in order to manifest ourselves in the world as the Spotless Bride of Christ with which Christ the Bridegroom unites Himself across both heaven and earth in His own divine life, never to part. Who shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus? (Romans 8.35) Much, it seems.


The present state of the world and the Church shows that Christian Unity is no mere aspiration, “if only”; it is a matter of life and death. At Pope Francis’ moving visit to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in November 2014, both spoke of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches united in the loss and thus the honour of our present day martyrs – Nigeria, India, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Libya. In February this year, Pope Francis declared St Gregory of Narek (951-1003), the great Armenian mystical poet and philosopher theologian coming from the Oriental Orthodox tradition which has not been in communion with the See of Peter since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, as a Doctor of the Catholic Church. The infamous Ottoman Empire’s genocide of the Armenians in 1915 cost the lives and dispossession not just of Armenian Orthodox, but also Armenian Catholics, Syrian Orthodox and Catholics, and Greek Orthodox in Turkey too. Recently, the Catholicos of All the Armenians, Karekin II, canonised all the 1.5 million Armenian martyrs, who died on account of their profession of the Name of Christ, in the first such ceremony in 500 years. Present in solidarity were envoys from the Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches, whose faithful suffered not in separation but in the deepest union between Christ and his faithful at the taking up of His Cross. And when the 21 Coptic Christians were murdered by the ISIS blood cult on the Mediterranean shore in Libya with the Name of Yeshua on their lips, Pope Francis phoned the Coptic Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria, Pope Tawadros II, saying that they were not just martyrs of the Coptic Church, but of the Catholic Church too. In a country like Britain which views its history in terms of progress, and its economic and social wellbeing in terms of growth, it is a stark challenge to see the Christianity which shaped our civilisation disregarded here and forced to its knees in the lands of its birth and the regions evangelised by the Apostles themselves.


A decade ago, thanks to our past Priest Directors Father Philip Gray and Father Brooke Lunn, as the Catholic League we paid close attention to the much needed power of mutual reparation in our dealings in England between our Churches and our different takes on a history that we share. Father Philip dwelt on how England is scarred with the ruins of the destroyed monasteries and the disfigured churches that stand as monuments to Christian dissension and mutual recrimination that has not even now been fully come to terms with. Later we had a memorable pilgrimage to Walsingham at which the vicar, now Bishop Norman Banks, took us on a tour of the local churches and landmarks, describing them as other marks of Christ’s Passion in His people: by His wounds you have been healed (I Peter 2.24). On the same occasion, we blessed a new altar in memory of our much loved and long serving General Secretary, Geoffrey Wright, for the Martyr’s Cell where Father Nicholas Mileham is believed to have been held on the night before he died as a witness to our concern for the healing of memories. Father Brooke Lunn was instrumental in ensuring that an annual commemoration of the Carthusian martyrs at which Anglican and Catholic leaders could participate in common to honour them, a few hundred yards moreover from where many Protestant martyrs also died at Smithfield, as part of the story of our Churches that Christ designed to be one on earth as it is in Heaven. There followed observances at the Tower of London to honour the reformer Bishop Nicholas Ridley and Saint John Fisher alongside each other, and at Tyburn Convent to honour not only the Catholic martyrs but also the Anglicans, Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians and others who lost their life for seeking to be faithful to the Truth about Christ and following Him perfectly to the end, the same name, Yeshua, Jesus, on their lips as this year on the Copts’ in Libya.


Pope Francis has frequently reflected on the ecumenism of blood and we will be revisiting our earlier work on the healing of memories, to use Pope St John Paul’s memorable phrase, to add our spiritual support as concerned ecumenists, Anglicans and Catholics together, who recognise that while Christian unity may look impossible from so many angles, it is not only an aspiration, or even an urgent task for which Christ prayed. It is vital as the lifeblood of the crucified Church in the historic Christian East, from which our faith and Church in England originated. And it is no less vital if the words on our lips in England, as Pope Benedict told us on his visit, are to give a convincing account of the Risen Christ and the hope that lies within us.


Our Lady of Victories, pray for our unity. Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, pray for its reconciliation. Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, pray for its restoration. All holy martyrs for Christ’s Church and His Gospel, pray for the victory of His Kingdom over death, hell and destruction. Christ, Who is risen from the dead, trampling death by death and to those in the tomb giving life: have mercy on us.

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.