Priest Director's Address to the Annual General Meeting, July 2014

Let me begin by thanking Fr Graeme Rowlands for his hospitality at St Silas’, Kentish Town. It truly is a spiritual home for us in the Catholic League not only because of a constantly warm welcome here, but also because of the unshakable faith we share: whatever the obstacles and separation between the Church of England and the rock from which it was hewn, the Latin Catholic Church in communion with the Successor of Peter in his See of Rome, Christ founded only one Church, that it has no other creed but the Catholic faith, and that union is necessary because it is not in the nature of the Body of Christ to be divided and because He willed it on the night before He died.


On a number of recent home visits to North-west England, I could not help but concluding that the once confident Christianity as part of the fabric of society that I knew - Catholic, Anglican and “chapel” - had considerably collapsed in attendance, presence and confidence there. When I was growing up, Lancashire was a bastion of old recusant Catholic England still alive in the people, but it is difficult to trace its large significance in the region now in the same way it was once so obvious.  Other churches have suffered in like degree. I suspect the reason is that the churches have lost touch with the identity of whole constituencies of people, and the everyday lives of ordinary folk, especially the poor and working class. St Silas, a Catholic Anglican parish that had once been marked for closure, however tells the story of how such need not be so. The beautiful celebration of the liturgical and sacramental life, solid Catholic faith put into practice, and assiduous pastoral care by connecting practice of the faith with the life and experience of people through school, home and community makes for a vibrant worshipping community. And in truth and justice, the pattern is repeated in many places around the country, where the Church and its priests can truly present the image of the People of God as the true human society, a “still more excellent way” and alternative to what the market, the state, and “wider society” have to offer.


Instead of the Church accepting that it must conform to a pluralistic view of society and humanity, living as one choice on offer among many, with one view on morality in conduct both private and public, and giving in to the convention that religion is a private opinion, it is at its best when it presents not an exclusivist society turn in on its own preoccupations, but a reflection of the true order of the universe, and thus human society, in which Christ is king and all is to be seen in relation to that fact of existence, and paying due to Him as subject to His truth as teacher and rule as Master.


Among the objects of the Catholic League are not just concerns that we would describe nowadays as ecumenical, but that go to the heart of what human society is for and what it needs. Thus we are to promote the spread of the Catholic faith and the deepening of the spiritual life. In our day, “spiritual life” is not so much concerned with cultivating a private spirituality, as with keeping open the religious dimension in every aspect of life from which it is being progressively deleted: school, care services, public administration, social and cultural observance and, as Pope Benedict alerted us on his visit in 2010, the dialogue between faith and reason, religion and political or commercial activity without which no one receives a satisfactory answer to the deepest questions that our existence contemplates.


If public Christianity disappears in this land, largely with the accommodating acceptance of the Churches, what is to fill the vacuum? We have seen in a dozen instances in the last century what an un Churched or secular State offers us: World War I, National Socialism, the atheistic humanism of Marxist-Leninism and the resulting starvation of millions of Ukrainians and Russians; the Cultural Revolution of China; the Killing Fields of Cambodia; the emergence of states whose state economies depend on supplying the drugs trade rather than public and business virtue; the implosion of Arab secularism into false Islamism and blood-letting in the Middle East; the collapse of a common Catholic society among Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda because of the coming of greed and corruption after years of Communism. The list goes on. To all of this the only answer is not medieval theocracy, but a society where God is worshipped, His law is kept and His gospel suffuses all our values. For this to be recovered - as recovered it must be if what comes next is not to disintegrate, leaving us nothing, no value, no principle, no truth to go on - it is vital for the Churches to stand out as manifestations of the other way of being human, and of being human society. And, again as Pope Benedict insisted on his visit, we offer no credible account of the hope that lies within us unless we are one. This is why my predecessor, Fr Brooke Lunn, said time and again that English society deserves to be served and led by one Church, the Church that unites and integrates, the Church that presents the faith that is Catholic.

But this is not only an English or European concern. Fr Fynes-Clinton, the Catholic League’s principal founder, looked to the reunion of all Christians when he placed the League under the joint patronage of St Joseph (for the West) and St Nicholas (for the East). Now, Christians in the East are under severe threat, and their very continued existence is under direct and violent attack. In June this year, no Mass has been celebrated in Mosul for the first time in over 1600 years, because murderous armed robbers and abusers of young girls, posing as Islamist jihadis, have driven them out under threat of forced conversion, or death. The founder of Islam, Mohammed, insisted there was to be no compulsion in religion and famously invited the Christians to celebrate the Eucharist in his mosque. But this means nothing to the materialistic terrorists who are destroying the lives, history, culture, property and patrimony of a mature Iraqi Christian-Muslim society, which was borne of the land of Mesopotamia, known as the “cradle of civilisation”. At this time of terrible crisis - and, frankly, our own helplessness in the face of what is going on - we need to learn from the East and to consider what may happen here in the West. How resilient are our protections to liberty, the positive toleration of religion and the recognition of its indispensable value? History reveals many times when the Church has been destroyed or exterminated, only to indicate new growth and renewal elsewhere, or later on. What is our sensation of decline in England in the present age in comparison with what is happening in Syria and Iraq? Will the Church grow in strength and renew itself? Christianity has never been overcome; is it to submit now? If so; what will succeed it for our society and the Church of the future? What we can say is that, the relativisation of the Christian religion and the proclamation of Christ’s Gospel and Kingdom as one option among many in the market will ensure it is left on the shelf. If we do not believe it is the Way and practise it accordingly, who will? It does not matter, then, if we are many or few – it does not depend on our effort, but requires our faithfulness and our witness to the universe as it has been revealed to us: with Christ its King, embodied in one People of God, related to one truth that alone can bind it, and fulfilling its purpose through choosing the only objective that can be arrived at without destroying it in the process - the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

In this task, I would like to thank especially Fr Christopher Stephenson for his work as Priest Director of the Apostolate of Prayer in which he encourages many of these themes to be expressed in intercession and devotion. I also thank my fellow Trustees in the work of the League, especially in the observance of its Centenary 12013-14. The celebrations were beautiful and adorned with fine contributions from Archdeacon Luke Miller, Dr Robin Ward, Father John Hunwicke, our President Fr Michael Rear and Judge Michael Yelton. Fr Miller's addresses on Fr William Congreve SSJE and St Therese of Avila at our centenary Festa in Walsingham led to the publication of a special edition of The Messenger including a moving version of the Stations of the Cross. All this stimulated interest in the League's history and respect for our work.


Furthermore, the distinguished Church historian, Dr Michael Walsh, is considering writing a history of the League that fairly appraises the Anglo-Papalists’ initiative in laying foundations for later Anglican-Catholic dialogue and their long-term contribution to the movement for Christian unity. He and I recently offered a joint session at the Third International Receptive Ecumenism conference in Fairfield, Connecticut, examining this history, the recent development of Ordinariates for those of Anglican tradition in the Catholic Church, the nature of Anglican patrimony and the future of the Anglican-Catholic engagement towards visible, organic unity. As for its prospects, it became apparent to me that North Americans are less concerned with historic European problems, and the Ordinariates viewed as a solution to them or as a possible threat to worldwide ecumenism. Instead, they see the positive potential for the Catholic Church to embed within itself something of Anglican tradition and liturgy, just as Anglicans have taken on other traditions, not least in a structural way in the past. The phenomenon of the Ordinariates they did not see as a further delineation of difference and mutual exclusion, but as a way in which Anglicans and Catholics could understand each other, feel affinity towards each other and be drawn together. For the main purpose to this they saw as to work together on much needed efforts towards common service of the aims of the Kingdom of God in the world, sustained by a faith shared more closely - so that the world might see that unity is possible, however difficult it may seem at present, and so that the world might believe from the concerted effort of the two Churches that it was indeed the Father who sent the Son who is visible in them.

Our Centenary Year has ended with a presentation to the Catholic Church of Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane. Adoration, of a monstrance bearing the League’s emblem and objects. The Church was founded by Cardinal Manning as a place of reparation for the offences and injuries to the Eucharist, the priesthood and the unity of the Body of Christ in England in the past. He had intended for it be the National Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament, where reparation could be made not through recrimination against history and the Protestantism of the English nation and constitution, but through an ever more intensified pouring out of love and devotion, towards healing, salvation and reconciliation in the one Church of Christ. Fr Alan Robinson, the parish priest, an old friend of Fr Rowland’s and mine, has been charged with the restoration of the Church and its work as a National and International shrine to the Blessed Sacrament. It had no monstrance worthy of the task for daily Exposition, Adoration and Benediction, something around which all Christians can be united regardless of the lack of fullness of communion. So the League has presented one, thanks to Fr Rowlands’ efforts, towards the church's restored role. Fr Robinson is to refound the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament, which will be an international fellowship of prayer for reparation, peace and reconciliation, sustained by the daily offering of mass and the Adoration that will be at the heart of the Church’s future work.


Since these objectives are very close to the aims of the Catholic League, and directly reflect work that we have done on ecumenical reparation and reconciliation in the past, following Pope St John Paul II’s encouragement of “the healing of memories” between the separate Church histories that still divide us as potential rivals, and mindful of Pope Francis own description of how Christians are united by martyrdom and suffering in the past through an “ecumenism of blood”, I hope that members of the League, Anglicans and Catholics alike, will be keen to enrol in the Corpus Christi Guild of the Blessed Sacrament and actively involve themselves in its future new work of prayer and reconciliation.

Catholics of the Anglican Patrimony, Aidan Nichols OP - Fr Mark Woodruff responds to Fr Peter Cornwell's Tablet Review

On 17 August 2013, Fr Peter Cornwell, a married Catholic priest and former vicar of the same church as Blessed John Henry Newman, The University Church of St Mary, Oxford, wrote a surprisingly mean review in The Tablet of Catholics of the Anglican Patrimony: The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham by the distinguished theologian, historian and thinker, Fr Aidan Nichols OP (Gracewing, Leominster, 2013). Fr Mark Woodruff's response in The Tablet for 24 August 2013 is below.

The book is an extended essay and arose from a remarkable lecture delivered under the auspices of the Ordinariate, as part of a conference on its place and purpose with the work of New Evangelisation. Fr Nichols revisited a familiar and resonant theme of his, that proclamation and evangelisation do not concern only the personal individual but groups and traditions of people, including entire cultures and histories. This understanding, incidentally, lay within Pope Benedict's presentation of evangelisation on his visit to Great Britain in 2010. Faith alone, he said, answers humanity's profoundest questions and longings; hence the need and benefit for the constant and public dialogue of faith and reason, between the Church of Christ and society, the state, politics, commerce and culture. With this in the background, Fr Nichols observed that Catholic society in England was made of four main components: the English recusants at the core of the history from the 16th century onwards, the influx of a large Irish Catholic population to cities from Victorian era onwards, a small but influential stream of English converts to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism of whom Newman and Manning are the most symbolic but which continues to the present day, and more recently the international diaspora of the last two decades, especially from India, Africa, the Far East and Eastern Europe (including Eastern Catholics) transforming the complexion of parishes especially in the larger population centres. The one culture that seems, however, not to find expression and belonging in the contemporary Catholic Church in England is England's indigenous religious culture for almost the last half-millennium. Thus he makes the argument for embracing the liturgical, pastoral, cultural, spiritual, apologetical, homiletical, operational-organisational and academic-theological traditions and patrimony of Church-of-England Christianity, to equip the Catholic Church in England to address, take seriously, resonate with and converse with English public life and culture, as well as its citizens' religious sensibility, by means of their familiar spiritual language and sensibility.

Where necessary, of course, for reasons of clear exposition of Catholic teaching these Anglican traditions and patrimony need to be duly adapted to meet the fullness of communion within the Catholic Church, but since all internal Anglican traditions, aspects of heritage and customs have been developed and continue in existence within a conversation between the different schools of theological thought and churchmanship, and thus find ways not only to co-exist in Anglicanism's internal ecumenism but also to find clearer expression over against each other, there is something intrinsically Anglican about the adaptation needed when embracing a new setting for being in communion within the Body of Christ. Fr Nichols' 1993 book, which looks at the interplay and relationship between the Catholic and Anglican in English religion, state and culture, The Panther & The Hind: A theological history of Anglicanism remains an essential account of Classic Anglican divinity, and the most sympathetic analysis of the now largely occluded Classic Anglicanism tradition ever made by a Catholic theologian.

It is a pity that Fr Cornwell did not acknowledge this in his endeavour to portray the Ordinariate as a mere refuge for Anglo-Catholics escaping a finally uncongenial Anglicanism. Thus he missed the point that, as the Catholic League can testify, its essential form has been proposed for 100 years at least and that his has influenced Anglican ecumenism for good, spread wide what is now shared by all Christians as "spiritual ecumenism", and placed the cause of Christian Unity, to which communion with the Apostolic See of Rome is integral, at the heart of the Church's purpose in proclaiming the Gospel to the world and its cultures. After all, it is Pope Benedict who organised efforts and structures for a New Evangelisation in the struggle for the soul of Old Europe, including the societies which have in part emerged from it across the world through the 19th and 20th centuries. The Ordinariates established under Anglicanorum Coetibus and Ad Gentes are part of this New Evangelisation and represent the Catholic Church's desire, learned from half a century of direct dialogue and ecumenism, to learn and receive for itself what the providential Anglican tradition and its patrimony has to offer. None of this is for an isolated group that looks in upon its own narrow concerns, any more than Benedictinism, Franciscanism or Jesuitism is - it is something borne by some but for the whole Church - and that includes its efforts to reconciliation and unity.

While some of Fr Cornwell's comments were legitimate debate and criticism in a book review, he made two misrepresentations as to fact, which made it clear that prejudice was the ground upon which he then went on to caricature the persons - the people and priests - of the Ordinariate. It is clear that he can have met few of them. What follows is the letter submitted to the Editor of The Tablet upon submission that Fr Cornwell's affront needed a riposte. it appeared in The Tablet publised on 24 August, 2013. The final paragraph was, however, not included owing to the need to make space for a subsequent letter from Mgr Andrew Burnham of the Ordinariate which addresses the same point more fully and better. (The term "lively conversation" reflects Archbishop Rowan Williams' attempt at a positive description of the adversarial nature of Anglican theological and constitutional decision-making in its Synods, and "treasure to be shared" is a quotation from Pope Benedict's Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus.)

Fr Mark comments, "I do not lightly take issue with a brother priest in public, especially one for whom I have the highest admiration. But, since he first expressed these views in 2009 in my hearing and yet, despite eirenic argument to put his concerns to rest, persisted in disseminating them by way of attack on the true motivation and character of his fellow Catholics in the Ordinariate, it is important to say that the cause of Christian Unity is served by airing disagreement frankly towards better mutual understanding and rapprochement in a spirit of friendship, not by caricaturing people acting in good faith."

To the Editor, The Tablet, 20 August 2013

Fr Peter Cornwell says that Anglican patrimony “in truth has proved to be quite elusive”. Anglicanorum Coetibus III locates it in liturgical books, the Complementary Norms adding the tradition of married presbyters and the pastoral council for consulting the lay faithful formally. Article 10 refers to a larger hinterland of its aspects of particular value. In 2010 I collected a volume of over 30 pieces of comment and analysis, critical and supportive - Anglicans & Catholics in Communion: Patrimony, Unity, Mission. A second volume is in preparation. A Customary containing the Divine Office and Calendar was published in 2012 and permission to celebrate an Order of Mass with elements of the Prayer Book rite was issued this summer. This is hardly elusive. 

Nor is it accurate to say that Anglicanorum Coetibus came “out of the blue”. Such provision was explored by prominent Catholic-Anglicans with designated Roman Catholic figures in England and Rome in the late 1980s. And around 2008, a sizeable group of Catholic-Anglican bishops visiting Rome with concerns about the Lambeth Conference and General Synod, even discussing possible corporate reunion, did not go behind Lambeth’s back. What changed was not a papal assault upon the ARCIC method, but Anglicanism’s decision for a fundamental change within the order of bishop. Nevertheless the additional layer of ecclesial incompatibility provides a re-set ecumenical starting point. In this, some have seen a positive opportunity to think through what Anglicans believe the patrimony they offer to the whole Church’s unity in diversity is, in a manner unaddressed before. 

Fr Aidan Nichols has pointed out that the prevailing religious tradition of England for nearly five centuries is a large gap in our consciousness of being the Catholic Church for this land and culture: internalising Anglican aspects of tradition through the Ordinariate offers one way of beginning to fill it, even if late in the day. At the same time it is far from the whole story of Anglican-Catholic reconciliation: for evangelisation to be convincing, Christian unity remains unfinished business. 

Fr Cornwell’s mocking tale of narrow sectaries escaping to a “granny flat” is an injustice to the real priests and people of the Ordinariate. He will indeed find some former Romanising Anglo-Catholics, but he will also find inner city pastors, middle-of-the-road “Prayer Book Catholics”, scholars, diverse origins and backgrounds, “Vatican II Evangelicals”, country parsons, overseas missionaries – people with an ecumenical instinct who did not live apart but took part in the “lively conversation” of the Church of England, and who are proving no less willing to engage in our diocesan parish life, as much as they want to see the Ordinariate’s “treasure to be shared” make its distinctive contribution. What binds them in the Catholic Church is not shallow preoccupation with liturgical tastes, but the faith that is none other than our own, and acting upon it generously. 

 

Fr Mark Woodruff

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

 

 

Centenary: Anglican Celebration Mass to Mark 100 Years since Inauguration

The League was founded on 2nd July 1913 at St Mark's, Bush Hill Park in Enfield, but it was inaugurated when a large number joined the patronal festival celebrations at the Church of St Mary, Corringham, in Essex, to subscribe on July 5th.

Representatives of the League visited Corringham for more parish celebrations of the historic centenary on July 14th, but in the meantime 40 or so members and friends gathered at St Magnus the Martyr by London Bridge, for decades the parish of which the co-founder had been the highly evangelistic Fr Henry Joy Fynes Clinton had been rector, and for many more years the spiritual home of the Catholic League.

The mass was celebrated by the present rector, Fr Philip Warner. The rite was that known now as the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, in English translation. This is the rite that Fynes Clinton believed was the only legitimate rite canonically approved for Catholics - not because he was imitating the Roman Catholics but because of a deep spirit of ecumenical sharing in the hope of complete and corporate reunion in the Catholic faith. For Fynes Clinton, all other rites were either state imposed or the church sanctioned versions with elements of Latin rite usage bore no legitimacy either under canon law or civil statute. It was slightly ironic to worshippers that it was the Anglican centenary celebration that followed the rite of the Latin Church, while it was the Catholic celebration that followed the rite recently approved by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, incorporating elements of historic Anglican liturgical patrimony. Seemingly, we have got to the point where both are Anglican and both are Catholic.

The preacher was the Revd Canon Dr Robin Ward, Principal of St Stephen's House in Oxford. Fr Ward as a young man had attended St Mary's, Corringham, from his family home not far away in Essex. The text of his homily is in another post.

The mass began at noon by singing the Angelus to the much loved tones familiar to many Anglo-Catholics. The readings for a Votive Mass for the Unity of Christians were Ephesians 4. 1-6 and 13-21, and Jon 17, 1 and 11-23. The Prayer for the Church was offered by Fr Chris Stephenson, Priest Director of the Apostleship of Prayer and Members' Secretary.

The proper and other music were as follows:

• Introit: Deus in loco sancto - God is in his holy habitation
• Mass No. 8 in B flat, by Paolo Giorza - including a Gloria 23 minutes long!
• Gradual: For all they that look for thee
• Alleluia: The Lord hath sent redemption unto his people
• Offertory Hymn: Thy hand, O God, has guided, by Edward Hayes Plumptre, 1821-1891, to the tune, Thornbury, by Basil Harwood
• Communion: Amen dico vobis - Verily I say unto you.
• Communion Motet: Beati quorum via, by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford
• Final Hymn: Firmly, I believe and truly, by Blessed John Henry Newman, to the tune, Shipston, arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams

At the reception lunch that followed, there were present several who had taken part in the 60th and 75th Anniversary Celebration and who had brought souvenirs of those occasions. We hope to post some pictures of them. We were also delighted to welcome Fr David Rollins, rector of Corringham.

After lunch, Judge Michael Yelton delivered the second Centenary Lecture: The Quest for Unity - 100 Years of the Catholic League. The text is given in a separate post.

Centenary of the Catholic League's Foundation: Homily by Fr Michael Rear

When Fr Mark suggested I should preach this evening I realised, rather to my horror, that I’ve been a member of the League for somewhat more than half of its history. There is a temptation for me to go back down Memory Lane, thinking about what the League has meant to me, and recalling the great men who taught me the Catholic Faith in the Church of England. If I yield to the temptation of nostalgia it is to illustrate how different times are now, and what a lot there is to thank God for on our Centenary. To recall that human efforts are futile, and that like Our Lady we must trust God. Fr Frazer, who baptised me in Christ Church, Doncaster, was under the bishop’s ban for 40 years. For those too young to remember such things it meant that the bishop never set foot in the church because it was too catholic. Then there was Fr Roger Pilkington, who prepared me for Confirmation. He had just moved into the vicarage with his elderly mother and had invited the Bishop for Supper on the evening of his Induction. Without warning after coffee the bishop produced a declaration which he forced Fr Pilkington to sign, if he wanted to be inducted. The Declaration was never to give Benediction. Struggles between Anglo-Catholic priests and unsympathetic bishops lent new meaning to the words Church Militant! Yet the persecution was rooted in fear.

 

Fifty years ago the Catholic League was perceived as a deeply suspect and sinister outfit. Jesuits in disguise plotting the overthrow of the country and its Established Church by their allegiance to a foreign power. I didn’t know it was such an exciting organisation when I joined in 1961. Later that same year when I began my studies for the priesthood at Lichfield Theological College, where a few years earlier the Principal, Dr Hann, had gone over to Rome I discovered there had been a Stalinist purge. Students were compelled to resign from the League or face expulsion. I was strongly advised to do the same.

 

What of those holy priests who taught me the Faith? And what of the holy martyrs of Russia who were being sent to Gulags rather than deny their faith, would they have resigned from the League? Neither would this arrogant young would-be martyr. Hurtful as it often was it has to be admitted we did thrive on the thrill of persecution and enjoyed every minute of it. And behind the idealism of those Anglo-Catholic priests there was a spirituality of faithful priestly service, rather than preferment or treading carefully for one’s own advantage. Our crime was to pray and passionately believe in Christian unity, and the necessity for all Churches to be in communion with the Bishop of Rome, the successor of St Peter.

 

One lesson we learn about the working of the Holy Spirit is how quickly and suddenly events can change. From age to age God raises up men and women to be outstanding witnesses of his love and power. Blessed John Paul II shook the rotten tree of communism and it all but collapsed. And in 1962, the year after I went to Lichfield, Blessed John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council. Suddenly, everyone was talking about unity with Rome. League members were no longer third columnists but prophets. Anglican observers rushed to the Council.

 

From Lichfield I went to study in Rome before my ordination and saw Archbishop Ramsey when he visited Pope Paul VI. Who could have predicted, who could have believed, the transformation that was taking place? ‘We have been like two quarrelsome sisters’, Pope Paul VI said. And the ARCIC dialogue began. We were so optimistic that the principal observer at the Vatican Council, Bishop John Moorman, said unity needed just ‘one step more’. We are now rather less sanguine, new obstacles have arisen, but we still believe ‘the Lord founded one church and one church only’[i], and the League will always witness to that. We shall never give up. ‘How is it possible to remain divided, if we have been ‘buried’ through Baptism in the Lord’s death’ appealed Blessed John Paul in an encyclical which took the League’s motto as its title, UT UNUM SINT.

 

There have been disappointments before, human efforts ending in failure. Some of you have seen, in St. Peter’s Rome, Bernini’s spectacular tribute to Pope Alexander VII, near the top of the left aisle? Deep in prayer, the Pope floats on flamboyant drapery of porphyry, while the allegorical figures of Justice, Prudence, Charity and Truth skip around him, as they did during his life. Charity cradles a child, and Truth – if you have seen the monument have you noticed what Truth is doing? – her left foot stands on a globe of the world. She is stamping on England.

 

What crime had England committed to be immortalised in marble? The Church of England had rejected thirty years of dialogue initiated by Archbishop Laud of Canterbury supported by the Bishop of Chichester. The plan was to end the schism between the Catholic Church and the Church of England by a scheme that would have allowed the Church of England to keep an English Liturgy, married priests and other patrimony. Familiar? The seeds of the Ordinariate were sown three centuries ago.

 

When the League was founded in 1913 it was heir to much prayer and belief that God wills all his followers to be united in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, which Jesus built on St Peter. Prayer and belief that intensified during the nineteenth century as an effect of the Oxford Movement. And now, at our Centenary, we can give thanks for the triumph of love over fear, and dwell on that. For, although we are hugely disappointed that ARCIC’s vision of full organic unity has not yet  been fulfilled, the foundation of the Ordinariates, as the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster both acknowledged, would not have been possible without the ARCIC dialogues of the past forty years. It is, as they both declared, a ‘consequence of ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion’[ii].

 

It seemed at first as though the ordination of women had ended the ARCIC dialogue. I suggested to Cardinal Hume when I met him at Walsingham, that Pope John Paul II must have been disappointed when the Church of England’s decided to ordain women. ‘He was angry’, the Cardinal told me. The Catholic Church had invested great hopes and expectations in the Catholic-Anglican dialogue.   Cardinal Kasper famously declared that the ordination of women bishops will lead not only to a short-lived cold, but to a serious and long-lasting chill. But this is proving to be very far from the case. The work of the Holy Spirit goes on. Unity is an imperative part of the prayer of Christ for his people.

 

So, where do we go from here? Can the Catholic League be prophetic again? Vatican II, in the Constitution of the Church, spoke of the Holy Spirit ‘bestowing upon her varied hierarchic and charismatic gifts’.[iii] Many homilies this last weekend have been preached suggesting that Peter, the rock and leader, represents the hierarchic gifts of the Church, and Paul, its outstanding preacher, the charismatic. The ARCIC discussions have dealt almost exclusively with the hierarchic gifts, with doctrine, ministry, sacraments, the Petrine ministry, authority. And remarkable agreement and consensus has been achieved as a permanent legacy. The Catholic League has played her honourable part in promoting and explaining ARCIC’s Agreed Statements.

 

But the Council spoke of ‘charismatic’ gifts as well as ‘hierarchic’. It put new emphasis on the Priesthood of the Faithful. And since the Council we have witnessed the formation and flourishing of new ecclesial movements, over 200 of them in the Catholic Church, and some in the Anglican Church too. Preaching to 280,000 members, gathered in St Peter’s Square on Pentecost 2000, Pope John Paul II said, ‘The movements and new communities, providential expressions of the new springtime brought forth by the Spirit with the Second Vatican Council, announce the power of God’s love which in overcoming divisions and barriers of every kind, renews the face of the earth to build the civilization of love’. They are at the heart of the new evangelisation. I think the future growing into unity between our Churches will increasingly focus on the charismatic gifts, ‘overcoming divisions and barriers of every kind’.

 

Now, following all these new movements we even have an ‘evangelical pope’, a pope who shows that you can be both catholic and evangelical, a good friend of fellow-Argentinian Luis Palau, the successor to Billy Graham, who relates, ‘Whenever we pray together he says “lay your hands on me and pray for me, that God will keep me as servant”… He’s really centred on Jesus and the Gospel, the pure Gospel’. At his Wednesday audience a fortnight ago Francis told the crowd that he had spent 40 minutes that morning praying with an evangelical pastor. Pope Francis has spoken of preaching the Gospel of grace, warning that ‘when we leave grace a little to one side in our proclamation, the Gospel is not effective... Evangelical preaching flows from gratuitousness, from the wonder of the salvation that comes; and that which I have freely received I must freely give’.

 

In recent years Anglican evangelicals have become notably less hostile to the Catholic Church, which once they regarded as the scarlet woman.  Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the Papal preacher, is a welcome preacher at Holy Trinity Brompton, and Cardinal Koch, the new president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, spent time there. Nicky Gumbel went to the Synod of New Evangelisation in Rome last year at which Archbishop Rowan Williams was invited to speak, and Alpha is spreading widely in the Catholic Church. Archbishop Welby and his wife are deeply involved with the new Catholic Movements, and spent a weekend before his enthronement with the Chemin Neuf Community in Switzerland. And when he met the Pope Francis they spent time praying and speaking of what God had done in their lives.

 

This is a new dialogue, a new ecumenical development, typical of the way in which the Holy Spirit surprises us. Pope John Paul II went so far as to say, ‘certain features of the Christian mystery have at times been more effectively emphasized’[iv] by those with whom we are not yet in union. There has never really been a spiritual dialogue between Anglican Evangelicals and Anglican Catholics, but now the opportunity is arising.  A spiritual dialogue, a dialogue of prayer; for the deepening the spiritual life is one of the objects of the League. And Jesus showed us in his prayer to the Father that prayer, not human effort, is the way to unity, and prayer for unity has always been at the heart of the League. The new movements in the Catholic Church illuminate this way and give us confidence, and my hope is that just as the Catholic League has for a century pioneered and continues to  lead the Anglican Church into a deeper understanding of the hierarchic nature of the Church, and the necessity of unity with the See of Peter, so it will now help the Church to grow into an ever-deepening appreciation of the charismatic gifts the Holy Spirit bestows upon us all, ‘building bridges from all sides towards reconciliation through the Catholic faith’[v]

 

Michael Rear, President

Catholic Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, LONDON

July 2nd, 2013

---

[i] Vatican II Unitatis Redintegratio, para. 1.

[ii] Joint Statement by the Archbishop of Westminster and the Archbishop of Canterbury, 20 October 2009.

[iii] Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, para. 4.

[iv] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, para. 14.

[v] Catholic League, Our Work, Catholic Ecumenism, para. 1.

 

Centenary of Foundation: Mass at the Catholic Church of the Assumption and St Gregory, Warwick Street

The Centenary of Foundation of the League was celebrated at Mass in the Church entrusted by the Catholic Diocese of Westminster to the care and mission of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

The League was established not to support a separate Anglican version of Catholicism, but to evangelise society and the Christians of that society in the Catholic faith and so to bring about the corporate reunion of the Church of England with "the rock whence it was hewn" - the Catholic Church in communion with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome. The challenge was large in 1913, 17 years after the blow of Apostolicae Curae, but a setback did not deflect the founders from the truth about the nature and divine constitution of the Church. Christ founded but one Church for all, not several for many diverse people. Thus in 1908 the Church Unity Octave had been started by Anglicans (Paul Wattson and Spencer Jones) to pray for the Catholic unity of Christianity. It was the League and no other that promoted this devotion, which would later become the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, when no others would. Paul Wattson, superior of the Friars of the Atonement, prophetically led his community into full communion in the Catholic Church where they have worked generously ever since for Christian Unity into the age of the modern ecumenical movement. in the 1920s Anglican-Papalists and Anglo-Catholics undertook discussions with the Belgian Primate, Cardinal Mercier, that struck upon the idea of an "Anglican Church united not absorbed". This phrase has inspired Anglo-Catholicism ever since, until it became a mainstream aspiration of the Anglican Communion as a whole. In the 1930s it was the League that fostered contacts with European Catholics when few others would or could, notably Fr Paul Couturier, the visionary who took the Church Unity Octave and transformed it into the means to spiritual ecumenism, a phrase enshrined in the Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism, as the path to the conversion of all Christians to Christ and thus towards each other in the deepening unity of the Church.

When from the 1980s onwards it became clear that the Anglican communion was resolving upon a different course from one that would lead to unity, members of the League led discussions with Catholic bishops in England to find a way to realise long held hopes for an Anglican church united not absorbed. In 2009, these thoroughly explored plans themselves led to the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus and the establishment of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham the following year for Anglicans seeking to be Catholics while retaining elements of their canonical, liturgical and spiritual patrimony - as well as their corporate mutual belonging.

The League was the first "third party" to support this new development unequivocally, both as an important outworking of Ad Gentes, Lumen Gentium and indeed Catholic ecumenism in a very fast changing world of overlapping faiths, cultures and associations by which we belong to one another - the diversity that is the measure of the Church's universality. Ever since we have been its advocate as a prophetic signal to ecumenism and the contribution it can make to the work of all Christians alongside each other, with integrity for the legitimate tradition of each, towards the unity expected and demanded by Christ. We have indeed devoted a considerable proportion of our modest assets to help the nascent Ordinariate in England to get on its feet, because it realises the objective of the League's founders and historic membership - not the whole story of Anglican-Catholic reconciliation, nor the last word, which is yet to come - but the mission and culture of Anglican Christianity embedded not merely in an ecumenical process for future hope of what might be but here and now in the wholeness of the Catholic Church, as part of all that is and needs to be to realise the Universal Church of Christ that perfectly subsists in it.

So it was that His Excellency Mgr Keith Newton readily agreed to be the one to celebrate our first Centenary Eucharist. We were delighted and honoured, the more so because it was the first occasion on which the newly authorised eucharistic rite of the Anglican Use for the Ordinariates was offered in England. In a sense this was strange for the League as it had once historically nailed its colours to the mast of using the Roman Rite, not as an imitation of Rome, but because it was the only available canonical rite in the western Latin Church. To the founders, since the Book of Common Prayer rite was inadequate to the mission of Catholic proclamation and practice and had been imposed by the civil power, there was no question of using a version of the Prayer Book like 1928 aimed at meeting some Anglo-Catholic aspirations but also at excluding the principles of Papalism and reunion with Rome, nor of a rite that mixed elements of Anglican worship with elements of the Roman rite - this had no legitimacy and even the Interim Rite with episcopal tolerance, or official sanction of the doomed 1928 Revised Prayer Book thrown out by Parliament, was objectionable to the League as unprincipled. Yet here we were celebrating a version of the Roman rite in traditional English translation, with elements of the historic Anglican liturgical patrimony. Here was the Roman Canon, alongside the Collect for Purity, the Prayer Book Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus, the Prayer Book Confession, the Comfortable Words, the Prayer of Humble Access in full, and the Prayer of Thanksgiving (the version from the Book of Divine Worship already in use in the Pastoral Provision for Anglican Use parishes in the US, which corrected the impression of Receptionism but also made some novel changes to the grammatical constructions, presumably on the ground of simplification, which can trip up the rhythm of what one is repeating from memory).

Fr Mark, our priest director, who had once been an Anglican cathedral precentor, remarked, it was good to go to a new version of the rite of mass where you did not have to learn new words.

The readings were Ephesians 4 (1-7, 11-13) and John 10 (11-16). The proper of the mass was provided in a Votive for the Unity of Christians, and enabled the use of the principal chants from the Roman rite, along with carefully chosen and deployed hymns from the Anglican tradition. The music was as follows.

• Introductory Hymn: O thou, who at thy Eucharist didst pray - by William Henry Turton, to the tune, Song 1 by Orlando Gibbons.
• Introit: God in his holy habitation (Deus in loco sancto) - Gregorian
• Choral Setting of Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus: Communion Service in C, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, 1852-1924, completed by Jeremy Dibble in 2010
• Gradual: Psalm 122, "I was glad" - translated by Coverdale and sung to a chant by Sir George Clement Martin
• Alleluia: Ego Pastor Bonus - Gregorian
• Offertory Hymn: Thy hand, O God, has guided - by Edward hayes Plumptre, to the tune Thornbury, by Basil Harwood
• Communion: Amen dico vobis - Gregorian
• Motet:  Beati quorum via - by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford
• Post Communion Hymn: The Church's One Foundation - by Samuel John Stone, to the tune, Aurelia, by Samuel Sebastian Wesley

The preacher was Fr Michael Rear, President of the Catholic League. The text of his homily is in a separate post.

 

2013 and Future Steps for English Church Unity

The Director, Fr Mark Woodruff, writes in our December Newsletter:

 

 

2013 is the Centenary of the Catholic League. This will be a year not only to celebrate a dedicated history, but also to renew our prayer for Christian Unity, in fullness of communion in the Catholic Faith and in union with the Apostolic See of Rome.

2012 has seen the continued search of the Church of England to resolve its internal differences and, indeed, for its own internal ecumenism. If the Church of England majority, which sees the admission of women to the presbyterate and episcopate as a legitimate development to the received tradition, cannot allow a place for fellow Anglicans who believe the Church should keep to the Tradition on which all can be reconciled as they were once united; and, given the uncompromising tone with which some of their number have called for the rejection and even exclusion of the minority, it sends a powerful message to the ecumenical partners of Anglicans working with them, beyond ecumenism, towards reconciliation and fullness of communion. If most Anglicans do not want spiritual ecumenism to work within their own ranks, and fullness of communion cannot be achieved within the juridical bounds of the Established Church, how can it seriously engage with the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church on unity, let alone the other Churches stemmed from the Reformation?

The answer is the same basic “fact of life” that has animated the League for 100 years. There can be no ecumenism worthy of the name that does not take into account communion with the bishop of the See of Peter in Rome, not as the last piece in the jigsaw, but as the destination from the outset of our Christian ecumenical journey. Piecemeal ecumenism – such as the Porvoo agreement between the Anglican Churches of Britain and Ireland with most of the Lutheran Episcopal Churches, or the Union of Bonn with the Old Catholics, or the Leuenberg Agreement with non-episcopal Reformed Churches – is hopeful and should be encouraged. But where it constitutes to all intents and purposes the exclusion of the Apostolic Churches of East and West - most especially communion with the successor of Peter at Rome - there is a risk of “settling for less”, or even an ecumenism that is anti-Catholic. A substantial bloc of Anglicans and Protestants in a staged process of reconciliation that is not taking the Petrine ministry into account as a first principle (and as it is, not as some may wish it to be) is not necessarily a building block to Church union. All too easily it risks standing as a rival to Catholic faith and life; the instinct is for schism.

This is not even true to what the Reformers thought they were achieving by their reform of the Church, and its tradition as they had received it. To employ the terms of Pope Benedict for a different controversy, their thinking was that of a “hermeneutic of continuity and of reform”, and not of “discontinuity and rupture”. Continuity with the rest of the Latin Church has long been part of the Anglican apologetic, even though, along with the other churches of the Reformation, the new direction for the English Church led to rupture, because of the imposition upon it of the boundaries of a nation state. So it is surely a sore in the spirits of all belonging to the League that our Anglican members are seemingly forced by events further from their lifelong hopes for the reconciliation of their Church with the Church of the Apostolic See of Rome, the more faithfully they seek to live by the Common Tradition which has formed us all. As Pope Benedict put it, when he spoke to representatives of all the Christian traditions at Westminster Abbey on his Apostolic Visit, the account of the hope that lies within us that will be convincing to the world does not lie in a facile accommodation to the spirit of the age or theological relativism, but an ever deeper unity in the apostolic faith.

One of the things that has become apparent, in the two years since the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was established, is that those who have joined it as they realised long cherished hopes for Anglican-Catholic reunion (perhaps not the way once planned, but the way that has been opened up by Divine Providence in the Church that God has given us) have moved by their conscience, not without cost; and that this has been rewarded by the focussed efforts of the Catholic Church to create, within its otherwise largely regimented system, new space that makes sense of 450 years of Anglican custom, culture, heritage and tradition. As Fr Aidan Nichols OP has recently observed, with an urgent need for a new evangelisation of an old Europe, it is seeking to fill a gap in the Catholic Church’s mission that it did not realise was there. The Catholic Church in England is a marriage of many worthy families - the recusants, the body of converts from the last two centuries, the Irish and Scottish diaspora of in the same period, and nowadays a large number of Catholics settling here from all over the globe. But what of our engagement with England, its people, its culture and its spiritual sensibilities? This is the question the Ordinariate will be addressing in its worship and mission. Properly understood, it is the most profound ecumenical signal that the Church’s supreme authority, exercising the Petrine ministry, has acknowledged that the Anglican tradition is not only an essential tool in the Christian Church’s mission across the Anglophone world, it is also to be seen as an integral component in the Universal Church as the Catholic Church understands it and hopes it can better manifest.

Another thing that has become clear is that Anglican Catholics are not “Romanisers”, or (as the press would have it) people of suspect loyalty, threatening to destabilise the Established Church and “defect” to Rome if they don’t get what they demand. They are Anglican churchpeople by conscience, devoted to Christ and his work in the Church and in the world, believing in the Catholic faith “as the Church of England has received it”, serving the ideal of Catholic unity, in the way that luminary Anglicans have striven to do throughout history, and convinced that they have an integral place within the communion of their own Anglican Church, none to say them nay. It has been sad, therefore, to hear this confidence and hope expressed in terms of recrimination against those who have accepted the Holy Father’s invitation. Indeed it is ironic that Catholics in the Ordinariate are enjoined by Rome to observe the provisions of their Anglican patrimony, while there are Anglicans whose ecclesiastical bearings are expressed in adhesion to Roman Catholic patrimony. This is not, however, the occasion for rivalry or a spirit of estrangement among those who are united in what Pope Paul VI called the “communion of origins”.

When the Church of England bishops and the Catholic Bishops of England & Wales first met as bodies together, they agreed that the task of mission and evangelisation in this country is so large that neither can encompass it alone and so, faithful to the integrity of their respective principles, must not work in competition but in mutual charity and peace, side by side. In the same spirit, there must be no condemnation from the Catholic side of those Anglicans who, believing in conscience that they must be faithful to the Tradition and remain committed to the Church of England, reminding it that, while its foundational principles may be Scripture, Tradition and Reason, no one may prevail and all must agree. By the same token, on the Anglican side there must be an end to hostility directed at the Ordinariate and those who have entered it no less as a matter of conscience, obedience to the Christ who calls us all, and in a spirit not of division but of healing the wounds in the Body of Christ that human sin has shown to be divided in this world.

In a society which is indifferent to the Gospel and the Church, even hostile, with our two Churches as leading fellow members of Churches Together in England, we rely on each other. Those who share the “communion of origins” in the Anglican patrimony by which we have been formed in the Spirit of God need to work together from both sides to draw Christians together, not apart. According to what is required by our times, it is up to us on both sides to remind the Church of England (and the wider Anglican Communion) that the Church cannot transmit God’s Holy Tradition in the new way that is called for, without passing on the Church’s doctrine, “pure and whole, without attenuations or distortions” (Address of Blessed John XXIII at the Opening of the Second Vatican Council). And it is up to Catholics and Anglicans together to reveal to the rapidly changing society in which we find ourselves, that its deepest questions, its spiritual sensibilities and its distinctive religious culture have a place in God’s purposes, not as an isolated, possibly declining, and even marginalised phenomenon, but as a key to the re-evangelisation of culture in the struggle for the soul of Europe that is currently being waged.

Anglican Catholics must restore their Movement to its original state – a relentless obedience to the logic of Catholicism, that it cannot be consummated without communion with Peter. And Catholics in England, members of the Ordinariate and members of the dioceses alike, cannot allow the Roman Apostolic Catholic Church to function as a self-sufficient club to the exclusion of those with whom we share the fact of Christian division in this world. The Catholic Church dropped the futile idea of itself as the “perfect society” at the Second Vatican Council, whose Decree on Ecumenism taught that the Catholic Church is somehow not Catholic in all her bearings so long as there are Christians and church communities separate from us. The impulse to Catholic unity is what drives our sacramental life, the pastoral mission of the Holy Father with a special care for all the Churches, and our relations and encounters with other Christians. Schism in Christ’s Church, and false ecumenism that settles for less, should make Catholics restless.

Scott Anderson on the New Evangelisation and the Ordinariate

Scott Anderson, for many years vicar of St Andrew's, Willesden Green, and now a member of the South London Ordinariate Group, has written a thoughtful piece in the Catholic Herald on the useful role the Ordinariate can play in the Pope's programme of a New Evangelisation.

Although a sub-editor has given his words the trouble-making title "Ex-Anglicans are eager to lead others across the Tiber," this is not what he is talking about. The provision of Ordinariates for groups of Anglicans is a pastoral response, not poaching. Poaching the members of other Christian churches and uniatism have been repeatedly repudiated by the Catholic Church for a century, especially in the light of the teaching of Vatican II, as not just an offence to charity but destructive to the trust and hope needed for reconciliation. Poaching is a tactic used by a small number of unrepresentative Pentecostalist and extreme Protestant churches that have more in common with extreme sects and a loose hold on orthodox Scriptural theology. No matter how hard people convince themselves that fishing in other churches' ponds is mission, it is lazy. It is a waste of energies that could have been devoted to those who had never before had any encounter with the living Christ in his people, or who had not realised that it was Christ they were encountering in their society and culture, or who had forgotten an encounter that had once meant something to them.

Scott Anderson makes a useful point. The size of the Ordinariate groups in England is small and here lies their present value. It would waste that value - as some commentators, including bishops and even some Ordinariate priests, hope - if they are constrained to "integrate" or "assimilate" with their host parishes and dioceses. For one thing, this is expressly deprecated in Anglicanorum Coetibus. Yet people are at liberty to go and particpate where they like; and by the same token diocesan Catholic lay faithful may find they gravitate to Ordinariate groups and feel a sense of belonging and collobaration there: the Spirit blows where it is inclined to. Only last week I met a Caribbean Latin Catholic who regularly attends the Divine Liturgy at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral - a different rite in a different language, but a place and a community where instinctively she recognises her point of communion with the Church. Thus there is space in the Universal Church for everyone to follow the course by which they are drawn into the Kingdom. The Ordinariate, even in its embryonic state, is one of the vital new spaces like some of the new ecclesial movements that have emerged in our own times and conditions in society, for people to respond to as the "point of communion" when no others quite work. This is an evangelistic tool we would lose if the Ordinariate's groups were all assimilated with geographical parishes. All clergy know that there are faithful Catholics in our parishes who do not attend our church - they go to the Cathedral, or other churches in central London, or to a monastery or a religious house, or a chaplaincy, or somewhere other than where they live, or somewhere they can be anonymous. There is no reason why Ordinariate groups cannot serve, alongside the extensive variety of Catholic liturgical and pastoral life that is already there, as new places for people to belong to the Catholic Church in a way they could not before. Anderson likens the Ordinariate's groups to "church plants," small established bodies whose mission is to go where either there is no readily visible church, or there are rising new elements of society which do not identify with the existing church provision. They are meant to be supplementary to what the Church and its pastors are already doing, corroborating it, not compete against it. They are meant to reach the parts that others cannot reach.

To be honest, "church plants" in Anglican dioceses have a mixed record. Some faithful congregations (often High Church ones) with decades of solid pastoral efforts and a valued presence in their local communities, even when this does not translate into numbers on Sundays, have felt their struggles undermined and the effectiveness of their witness openly criticised by the arrival of a young, lively and often well-funded new worshipping church on their doorstep. They complain that their fortunes may have been different if the same investment and confidence had been placed in them as in the new ventures. They also say that the new arrivals do not seem interested in collaborating and sharing resources. Doubtless people thought the same of the old Anglo-Catholic mission churches of a century ago and more. On the other hand, parishes which no longer fulfil their earlier mission, because the local population has changed or even disappeared, have been revived by the planting of "Fresh Expressions" of the Church of Christ. Thus new groups have come in and transformed a church otherwise in decline. In the Catholic world, one can cite the entrusting of St Charles Borromeo, on Ogle Street, to meet the needs of the Neo-Catechumenal Way; the exciting restoration of St Patrick's, in Soho Square, as a centre for evangelisation in central London; and the devotion of SS. Gervais and Protais in Paris to the Jerusalem Community. Is the Ordinariate also a "fresh expression", able to respond to new needs, opportunities and gaps in the Church's mission?

If it is not, I cannot see what other purpose it serves, beyond a merely temporary means of transitioning numbers of Anglican clergy and faithful into the Catholic Church. Everyone agrees that this is not ecumenism, neither mission, nor respectful of the unique heritage and identity that God has given his Church through the Anglican tradition. That is why the Apostolic Constitution notes the enduring significance of Anglican patrimony as needed by and for the Catholic Church as a whole. For ecclesiological purposes, the Catholic Church desires the Anglicans' patrimony for being better at realising the Universal Church in all its bearings (cf the Decree on Ecumenism, Vatican II). For practical and ecumenical purposes, it seeks it for relating better to the Anglican Communion in the search for complete restoration of unity (inevitable, because it is the prayer of Christ). For evangelistic purposes, it wants it for extending the way it can relate to the multi-faceted cultures, shapes of society and networks through which people live and belong in the present age - and win them for Christ and his Kingdom. Clearly we need as many different evangelisations, structures that attract people's capacity for belonging, and spiritualities for this very new "old Europe" as the Church has inventively developed in the past.

Anderson cites the example of his own South London Ordinariate Group. It seems to have found a home in the parish of the Precious Blood, once a hive of local pastoral and missionary activity in the hands of the Salvatorians, and now depopulated with a very different cultural and social milieu grown up around it. The group has been welcomed alongside the existing parishioners as an invigorating new presence. Can Precious Blood, which might otherwise have faced amalgamation or closure liek many other inner-city churches, serve as a beacon of the distinctive mission that the Ordinariate alone can add to that of the wider Catholic community, and that the Catholic Church as a whole can thus bring to society in a new phase? Can it be a place where we can find the eagerly awaited Anglican Use of the Roman Rite, as a fresh liturgical expression of our Catholic Church's dialogue with the culture, public life and society in which we find ourselves? Can it be a place where, like the Salvatorians up until the present, the Ordinariate priests and people can consolidate their mission to draw people to an encounter with "Christ in his Mysteries" and his people? After all, such sacramental and liturgical evangelism was a driving impulse in classic Anglo-Catholicism at its finest.

One of the appealing perspectives shared by Monseigneur Keith Newton at various ordinations has been the hope shared by him and his clergy to be of service to the priests and people in the dioceses and parishes alongside which they serve. 120 new priests and deacons in 18 months are a considerable gift that God has called into the Catholic Church, on top of the 500 or more new Catholic priests who have trodden a similar path in the two decades before, to say nothing of many thousands of the lay faithful. It would be a shame, however, to use this gift in a short term way that plugs holes for which dioceses need to form a longer term strategy, or that solves the immediate problem of where to house younger clergy with families and give them jobs and sustainable incomes. Both are important; but in the medium to long terms, if the mission of the Ordinariate as a God-given and vital component in our efforts at the New Evangelisation is to play its full part, we need to be able to locate the Ordinariate in worshipping communities, not just as an also-ran or a chaplaincy provision, but as a reality in its own right, where we can tune into its religious and cultural language, allow its distinctive liturgical voice to be heard, and appreciate the special orientation of its proclamation of the Catholic Faith that other Catholics may lack, but which can strengthen ours, as much as ours strengthens theirs.

Scott Anderson calls for dioceses and religious orders to take the brave step of looking at their parishes where there is either a pattern of declining use or under-use, or else an obvious turning point a change in mission and direction has arrived. Could it be, he wonders, that such churches be entrusted to the priests and people of the Ordinariate for a "fresh expression" towards the New Evangelisation of Old Europe, like parishes and mission churches were earlier entrusted to religious orders? Doubtless this is more easily said than done. It is not obvious that such places exist near where the present batch of groups are, or vice versa. And there will be communities of Catholics less disposed to embracing an Ordinariate identity, or an Anglican patrimony that is not their own. All that we are saying is that there is common cause to be made here - and some imaginative opportunities not to be missed.