Look to the Rock - New History of the League and its 100 years of contribution to Christian Unity

A history of the Catholic League, the movements that led to it, its life and longer term and wider significance is now published by the Canterbury Press.

Written by the distinguished papal and Catholic historian, Dr Michael Walsh, it also has a foreword from Bishop John Hind who led on Anglican-Catholic dialogue for the Church of England as Bishop of Chichester.

All members of the League receive a complimentary copy. For others, and to order further copies, here is the flyer from Canterbury Press.

Alternatively, here is the link to purchase on Amazon. And here the link to order from Canterbury Press.

May they all be one: the vocation of Lambert Beauduin & Chevetogne. A film by Alexia Veriter

Part One

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Part Two

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Whole Documentary

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Unitas Newsletter, June 2017 - Priest Director's Message

2017 has seen Pope Francis visit Sweden to mark the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation. He both traced the positive aspects to Martin Luther’s religious thought and personality, praising him as a great Reformer, as well as warning Catholics of the present day of the dangers five centuries ago that contributed to the split, and that threaten the peace and future reconciliation in the present time: worldliness, corruption, greed, lust for power in the Church rather than the Church’s life of grace, the simplicity of “faith alone” in the power of God, and absolute hope and trust in the love of Christ for sinners, his forgiveness and our redemption.

Since all these virtues can be recognised in the lives of spiritual Catholics we know, and saints we venerate, and all the vices likewise penetrate all sides of humanity’s condition in the world, not just one Church or another, the large unanswered question is: why was it necessary to divide the Church in order to pursue the good and drive out the bad? What conviction, what principle is so inviolable that it stands above the Church’s unity in faith?

Advocates of the benefits of the Reformation have in recent years said that the breach was the result of a misunderstanding. At our events ten years ago to commemorate the martyrs on both sides, seeing that they were faithful unto death and paradoxically reached union with Christ in His sacrifice as they indicated the concrete possibility of our reconciliation in the world, one Anglican speaker remarked that Thomas Bilney, the first to lose his life under Henry VIII for Reformation ideas -and a heroic figure to the Protestants who came after him - would not have turned a hair at Vatican II, with his suggestions of reading the Bible in Church in English and the correction of abuses in spiritual matters (for unimpeachably Catholic reasons). Recently, the Catholic journalist Peter Stanford wrote a book that imagines how Martin Luther would have looked to us if he had emerged today. The case he proposes is that the perspective of today’s Catholic Church would have been able to address his concerns and embrace him through dialogue within the Church, welcome the spiritual renewal Luther wanted, correct Church governance and sponsor other good developments in the Church’s life. It would also re-balance his more extreme views, without disruption to communion. What if? Vatican II indeed called for the People of God to discover the Scriptures for themselves, expanding the amount read in the Liturgy, and permitting their proclamation in the vernacular. Under Pope St John Paul an agreement was reached between Catholics and Lutherans (since assented to by Methodists and Anglicans) on our justification by faith: that it is on account of the gift from God of faith in Christ that we are made righteous, not by good works - these are the essential fruits of faith and righteousness, for goodness in thought, word and deed are indispensable if our faith is real, thorough-going and authentic. The future Pope Benedict oversaw this agreement to overcome the great argument that stirred the Reformation movement; he later turned on a group of Protestant theologians from Germany and said, “If you had been truly Lutheran, we would have been one by now.”

Yet Luther went further than the desire for spiritual renewal, reform to governance, and better participation of the people in worship and sacrament to their daily conversion. He re-cast the Eucharist so that it appeared the same way as before, but concealed the loss of the Roman Canon (which was never heard by the people), and so removed the Eucharistic sacrifice and the core purpose of priesthood. There is an echo in England among Catholic recusants who still say, “Protestants think that our forebears died for the Pope; we know they died for the Mass.” Luther rejected not only the activities of the papacy of its day, but the need for a universal pastor cementing, ensuring and providing for the Church’s unity altogether. He envisaged the universal Church on earth to be an association of local churches, differently reformed and reshaped with a united confession of faith, rather than as a visible, organic whole. Yet his common confession could not be agreed. Identifying Catholic bishops as temporal lords, he viewed the episcopate as not essential for apostolic succession, but merely beneficial for pastoral organisation and the better preaching of the Gospel. He also found that, because his Reformation movement relied on protection and nurture from princes who used it to flex their independent muscles from the authority of the Catholic Emperor, he needed to back Philip of Hesse, and emboldened him to marry again, even though his wife yet lived. The Reformers Bucer and Melanchthon concurred.  The assault on the bond of matrimony was famously emulated in England by Cranmer and directly led to the martyrdoms of the Carthusians and Thomas More.

To summarise: even if there were great misunderstandings on points of belief and the interpretation of the Scriptures, there was a deliberate intention to alter the fundamental faith and order of the one Church across time and place; and this translated into practice and thus into division with pain and suffering on all sides.

It is sad to reflect that this division could have been avoided because reformation was already a vital movement of spiritual renewal within the Catholic Church. The popular Devotio Moderna, the Imitation of Christ, the piety concerning the passion of Christ and His redemption, the reform of the Carmelite Order with St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, the emergence of St Ignatius Loyala and the Society of Jesus all bear witness. They rest on earlier renewal movements in the Church which are still potent to this day as well: the Franciscan and Dominican preaching friars. And it is often claimed in English history perspective that the Reformation took hold here to correct corruption and abuse, and recover the Church’s pristine purity. Yet those who were at the forefront of pastoral, spiritual, and theological renewal in the life and mission of English Church people in the1530s, well aware of the breach that had arisen in Germany and now the Low Countries and France, were the Carthusians, the Brigettines and the Franciscans who were among the first to lose their lives under Henry VIII. He shut down a Catholic renewal because a reinvigorated Church, articulate with its own Catholic mind, could challenge dependency on royal power and policy. When the Carthusians in London met in chapter to weigh the consequences of their decision to oppose Henry’s marriage outside the law of Christ, the account describes what can only be described as a charismatic renewal as the Holy Spirit came upon them. They knew they faced their deaths. One wonders what might have happened to England and its Church had the renewal been allowed to proceed. Eamon Duffy, in his book Fires of Faith, describes how, under Henry’s daughter, Mary I, England becomes the laboratory for implementing the reforms emerging from the Council of Trent. The lessons of the Protestant Reformation had been observed, and here was to be a proper reform in continuity with the common faith of the Church, clarified, freshly re-proclaimed, with integrity.  No turning the clock back, but a fully Catholic reformation of the Church, its preaching and teaching, the celebration of the sacraments and the presentation above all of the Mass. But the rupture had already happened, and with Mary’s death her popular movement died too.

The instinct against rupture and recovering a lost continuity within the one Church of Christ – one flock under one shepherd – was what caused the League’s founders to draw attention to the scandal and violence of schism and its consequences: in England, two provinces of the Latin Church were detached, and every evangelistic, sacramental and pastoral effort was needed to repair the breach. This was not only to reveal once more the essential unity of the Body of Christ in the world, but also to give a convincing account of the hope the lies within us. The gospel of reconciliation in Christ is hardly compelling when Christians themselves are unreconciled. Yet it looks more and more difficult to imagine how the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church, nowadays with more pronounced differences on faith and order, can find the path of reunion. But we now call that “instinct against rupture” ecumenism, and we press on, because this is integral to Catholicity.

Thus Lund in Sweden was chosen for the meeting between the Pope and the leaders of the Lutheran and other reformation Churches for two reasons. First, it was in 1952 at Lund that the Faith & Order Conference of the World Council of Churches adopted the principle that Churches should act together in all matters, except those in which deep differences of conviction compel them to act separately. Subsequently, the Catholic Church has supported this at the local level and with the encouragement of the successors of Peter. Secondly, Sweden is a country in which Catholics faced civil restrictions on work and freedom of religion into the 1970s; so it is a country where rapprochement and reconciliation – the dialogue of love – has been hard won in very recent memory. It encourages us not to dwell on the failures of the past that we have been formed by, or to believe that the cause of Christian unity has become futile. Still less does it permit us to become further estranged from other Christians, seeing that the events of so long ago seem to explain why we still walk on divergent pathways. Instead, as Swedish Lutherans and Catholics found, the Spirit continues to come upon us, and surprise us with his power to bring us closer in Christ. The great Metropolitan Kallistos Ware often says that unity when it comes can only be achieved by a miracle; but that does not mean we are to be passive – ours is the task is to take down what barriers we can, because these are usually ones that we have erected. The miracle will come when we have faithfully done this good work by God’s grace.

So, marking the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation is a time to face honestly what happened, to thank God for any good and saving gift that emerged, to lament the divisions and the harm they have visited upon the Church and the world, but above all to love and long for the unity of Christ’s people, “that they may be one”, as indivisibly as the Father and the Son are one. As Catholics, our instinct is not to add to division and polarisation, but always to work for healing and reconciliation. MW

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).

December 2015 - Unitas Newsletter - Priest Director's Message

The continuing assaults on Christians in Nigeria, Central African Republic, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt and Syria reveal both the basic solidarity of all the baptised in a time of crisis, as well as our urgent need of the visible, organic unity of Christ’s Church. Towards the end of 2014, Pope Francis went to Istanbul to say to the Ecumenical Patriarch that, above all ecumenical objectives, he seeks communion with the Orthodox Church. The corporate reunion of East and West in communion with the Successor of Peter at Rome has been an objective of the League since its inception. In the mind of its leading founder, Father Henry Fynes-Clinton, reunion with the East forms the context for his immediate concern about the West: to end the detachment of the two provinces of York and Canterbury, and the Church of England’s reintegration as an entity in its own right with the Roman Catholic Church – “united, not absorbed”, as Dom Lambert Beauduin observed at the Malines Conversations. 

During the year that has followed the papal pilgrimage to Constantinople, the necessity of the voice and leadership of Peter for all the Churches has been obvious. Ecumenists are accustomed to cast the role of the Pope as a “Petrine ministry”: a focus of unity in such remnants of the faith that Christians hold in common; an exhorter and encourager; an indispensable servant of communion and its most persuasive advocate of the binding nature of the truth; an authority to appeal to, rather than one to take action. These tasks are already part of the Pope’s role; but Catholics also have a lively sense of the local immediacy of the Universal Church of which he is pastor “with a care for all the churches.”  It is not just because their bishop is in communion with him, or even across Church divisions a common faith identifies them: it is because the office of Pope, together with the teaching and acts of each successive Bishop of Rome, is part of our life and identity as Catholic Christians, when we articulate the faith of the Church in witness to the truth of Christ. Our Catholic straining for unity in one Body in Him, is not for streamlined administration, central control, or corporate take-over. It is “so that the world may believe”, when the Church speaks with one voice, credibly giving a single account of the hope that lies within us and the bearing of our Faith on the world of humanity. Thus we, and other Christians too, rely on the Pope to speak when others are not heeded – to speak “not as the scribes, but with authority”.

We are all one to those who hate Jesus

So, when Coptic migrant workers were murdered on the shore of the Libyan Mediterranean Pope Francis called the Coptic Pope Tawadros to say, “Your martyrs are our martyrs too”. Again, when last April the Armenian Catholicos at Holy Etchmiadzin canonised saints for the first time in 500 years – the 1.5 million Armenian Christians killed with many Greeks and Assyrians under the dying Ottoman Empire in 1915 - the Holy Father’s message was that, when the persecutor comes, he does not ask if you are Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Armenian or Syrian, or Anglican, Evangelical, or Protestant. He just wants to know that you are a follower of Jesus.

He has spoken vividly of an “ecumenism of blood”, because martyrdom unites us completely with the Lord in His sacrifice on the Cross. In England, we have come to see the martyrs of our different traditions as part of each other’s stories. They are signs no longer of bloody division, but of the pains taken to reach our hoped for reconciliation in Christ. Yet Pope Francis is not merely talking about our mutual coming to terms. He is describing how the Church is “all one” to those who hate it, and yet our solidarity together in all kinds of ways stands as a massive response to those who hate the words of the Beatitudes, those who long for nothing more than that the Kingdom will not come on earth as it is in heaven.

In his autumn visit to Africa, Pope Francis visited the Catholic Shrine of the Ugandan Martyrs of 1885-1887.At the pilgrimage basilica, he honoured the 22 Roman Catholic martyrs; but he also went with Archbishop Stanley Ntagali of the Anglican Church to the museum and shrine of the 23 Anglican martyrs, in the footsteps of Blessed Paul VI and St John Paul before him. “The blood of the martyrs makes us one,” he said. He knelt at the “torture tree”, where Catholic and Anglican Christians had been made to suffer without discrimination.

In his address to the Pope, Archbishop Stanley re-worked a local proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The principle of the Catholic League throughout has been to insist on unity in Catholic faith in communion with Peter not as the last piece of the jigsaw, but as the driving, prime objective from the outset. Thus keeping to the path towards Catholic unity has been no fast track. In recent times it has become drawn out, delayed, and even halted. The League’s founders and active members have “gone alone”, but not fast, in seeking unity with integrity – not just by holding to orthodox Catholic faith and order but by making the point, in season and out of season, that there can be no reunion, Christian unity, or ecumenism in the meantime, unless the reality is squarely faced that, for the Church to be completely the Church, it needs the pastoral care, spiritual authority and dogmatic teaching of Peter.

One Church’s one faith in the one Lord

No Church organisation is an end in itself. No tradition that is really Christian can rely on a separate Church to preserve it, if it cannot survive and actually flourish by finding its fulfilment in the communion of the Universal Church. Even the Catholic Church teaches that “the divisions among Christians prevent the Church from attaining the fullness of catholicity proper to her … Furthermore, the Church herself finds it more difficult to express in actual life her full catholicity in all her bearings.” (Decree on Ecumenism 4, Vatican II, 1964). More or less the same wording would fit all the other Churches in their separation from one another too. Hence the need not only for unity of spirit - starkly emphasised by the experience of our ecumenism of blood; not only for unity of body, in which we may share our distinctive religious traditions, organisations and patrimonies, in the common life of one Church; but also for a unity of mind - a single-minded conviction of the Truth of Christ and declaring in many ways our one faith.

In October, Rachel Treweek, the new Anglican bishop of Gloucester, declared that she would not refer to God as “he” or “she”. She went on to object to the writ of summons to the House of Lords for referring to her as a “right reverend father in God” and also to the suggestion that it be amended to “mother”. She believes that both terms indicate dependency and hierarchy, rather than the true pattern of Christian leadership, which is to be “among you as one who serves” (see The Guardian, 24 October 2015). Of course, the ordained ministry and hierarchy in the Church are always to be understood in the context of Christ’s sacrificial service as the self-giving Good Shepherd;  and, to quote the Westminster Confession, God is “a most pure spirit … without body, parts, or passions”. But Mrs Treweek seems to be dispensing with a fundamental insight from the revelation of Christ, and our faith in Him that holds Christians in one: God is made known in Jesus Christ, who reveals unequivocally and repeatedly that He is Son to a Father. Thus to behold this Father-Son relationship, revealed at critical events in our salvation, like the Annunciation, the Baptism, the Prayer in Gethsemane, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension, is the given way to approach the mystery of God and embrace the Faith of the Trinity. It is not enough to say, “Creator, Redeemer, Guide”. Nor is it other than crude to present God as “a male”. But the idea of Father-Son in relation says something that no other analogy can; and each of the Three are those made known to us in the Old Testament as “The Lord”. Into the life of this Trinity, Mary is drawn, filled with “the Holy Spirit  the Lord” and becomes Mother of God. She is not a model of dependency, but the first realisation of theosis, the process by which we too, following after her, share the life of God as the grace of Christ’s salvation fills our entire being, in return for His sharing our life and taking away its sin.

Roman Catholics together with orthodox Anglican believers have been dismayed at the Bishop of Gloucester’s reflections. This is not because of being “against women” or reinforcing a “defunct” patriarchal view of the Church and humanity that oppresses women, but because her thinking shifts Christian religion away from its central focus – the Son of God. Christ is the incarnation of the eternal Son of the eternal Father. He did take human flesh in general, but as a person who is a man; He does not cease to be this man after His Ascension, or else He would have ceased to be human. The incarnation would have dissolved and our union with God like His with us along with it. He was not a man by coincidence, but so He could make God known as His and “Our Father”. As the beloved and holy Archbishop Michael Ramsey used to put it, “God is Christlike, and in Him is no unChristlikeness at all”. Like Father, like Son – on the Throne of heaven, in the manger, on the Cross, on the Altar, the Lord.

When I served at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in the late 1980s, I once preached on Romans 10.9, observing that those who were so vigorously promoting the ordination of women to the presbyterate were finding themselves unable to refer to God as Father and Jesus as “Lord”, and that this seemed to me risk their salvation because they could not assert one of the Church’s earliest credal formulae: “If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” I was firmly rebuked for this, while the canons supporting the new theology of ministry were left unrestricted. It confirmed my conviction from that day to this, that there can be no unity in the Church and among Christians without an unequivocal declaration of faith in Jesus as Lord, who reveals the faith of the Trinity as Son to the Father; and that this Truth is not only believed by the Church, but manifested in its life, liturgy, ministry, hierarchy, pastoral care, proclamation and sacramental living “on earth as it is in heaven”. This declaration the Bishop of Gloucester seems unable to make her own. Without a unity of mind on this, from where and when will come our unity of body and spirit?

Taking up the Cross together

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been scorned in the press for “having doubts” after the terrorist attacks in Paris. What he actually said was that, in his prayers, he had asked God where He was in all this, and received the answer, “In the middle of it”. He recalled Psalm 56’s words, “He stores up our tears in a bottle, none of our sufferings are lost”. It is at moments like this that, whatever our differences and persistent disunity, Christian leaders give the world the hint that Christ truly is one and that He is nowhere other than in the world that is His: Paris, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Middle East all the same. Cardinal Nichols of Westminster added to Archbishop Justin’s words, “We really should be solid in our commitment to each other - to stand in the face of this evil”. So, after all, we are “going together”, not going alone, and prepared to “go far” because, when the persecutor comes, it is one faith in the one Lord that we declare. He asked us not to take up separate crosses, but “the Cross” telling us it would be “your Cross”. Whether we prefer it is like this or not, we press forward on His way together.

Peter said to Jesus, “To Whom else shall we go? It is You that have the words of eternal life”. So it was significant that on the Sunday evening after the Paris attacks, it was to Christ that the most prominent representatives of the secularist, anti-Catholic French Republic turned. Standing before Christ’s Altar at the special Mass in Notre Dame, were the Mayor of Paris, the President of the Senate, the President of the National Assembly, the delegate of the President of the Republic and the past President Giscard d’Estaing, because in that moment of horror only the Prince of Peace will do, only the Sacrifice of his flesh and blood for the life of the world. This is why the cause of Christian unity and the fullness of communion in one Church with the successor of Peter, who realised there was no other way to go, remains urgent: our priority as much as it that of the office of Pope.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2016

As we approach the observance of the 108^th Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, it is clear that we to “go together”, we have had to go far. It is our duty, as members of the League and as Catholic-believing Christians all together, to convince others that going far must not involve going far away – away from Catholic faith, away from Catholic order, away from the splintering life of human society that is entitled to look to the Church to be one more than any other body, the force above all that unites humanity in justice and peace, in goodness, and the reign of blessedness extolled in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

So, I invite you to use the usual leaflet accompanying this Newsletter (see sidebar for link) to pray more urgently than ever, however impossible and unrealistic it seems, for the unity of all the Christians, so that, in the heartfelt words of Father Paul Couturier, all humanity may seek to tread the path that Christ trod, grow with an ever greater holiness, and find union in God through the love and truth about humanity that is Christ Himself. We are sending you three copies of the leaflet. Please share the prayer by giving one to a friend, and pass the other to your priest. If you are a priest, please share it with your congregation at church.

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.

Bishop Harries, Islam, and the Purpose of Catholic Ecumenism in the World: Newsletter January 2015

Comfortable Accommodation: Bishop Harries and Islam

On 27th November 2014, the retired Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Dr Richard Harries, proposed in the House of Lords that the next Coronation include readings from the Qur’an. The next morning, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he spoke of the Church of England’s “creative accommodation” and called for more acts of “inclusive hospitality” such as he had witnessed at a cathedral service to mark the beginning of the legal year. The High Sheriff and the Lord Lieutenant were in attendance and, both being Muslims, they had asked for the ceremony to include readings from the Qur’an. Lord Harries admired the solution – a Qur’anic reading immediately prior to the entirely Christian service. There had been “no blurring of the edges, no syncretism”; but, said Lord Harries, the Church of England should provide for “reciprocity” towards other faiths in a multi-faith urbanised city, and there should be “scope” for other religious leaders to pray at significant ceremonies in national civic life. He had no doubt that this would feature at the next Coronation.

Lord Harries was challenged by the Spectator journalist, Douglas Murray, who complained of yet more Anglican leaders without faith in their own faith, possessing no ability to make an exclusive faith claim about the truth of Jesus Christ. He observed that there was no “inclusive hospitality” in Islam – no Christians are allowed in Mecca, there is no “reciprocity” on the part of imams inviting Christians or Jews to Islamic religious events preceded by readings from the Bible. British Jews, he said, pray for the Queen and the defence of the realm every week – where were such prayers on Fridays in Britain’s mosques? Furthermore, if the Islamic scriptures are to be read prior to Anglican civic services, why not Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh scriptures; or, for that matter, secularist writings? Murray’s answer to the Bishop was that fuzzy Anglicans don’t want their leaders to be fuzzy: they want them to set out what Christian belief is, the faith that Anglicanism proclaims. Even if some individual Christians are unclear about it in their personal faith, they want their Church to be clear. What they do not want is bishops who affirm Muslims in their faith, but who demoralise Anglicans by not affirming them in theirs. A reading from the Qur’an at the Coronation in Westminster Abbey, warned Murray, would cause great offence to Christians.

By the same token it could never happen that a British civic religious event took place in a mosque, let alone with a reading from the New Testament, even if prior to it. Islam only endorses Islamic jurisprudence, even though it expects Muslims to abide by the law of a non-Islamic society in which they live. Thus the request for the faith of Muslims to be shown “scope”, “reciprocity” and “inclusive hospitality” in an Anglican cathedral is disingenuous, since the favour cannot be returned. Christians believe the Word of God to be the Person of God the Son made flesh, speaking through His Body, and His Church’s Scriptures. Islam believes that the Word of God is a Book, conveyed by Gabriel in Arabic without modulation to Mohammad, who is honoured as its unimpeachable prophet. It assumes Christians are likewise a “people of the Book”, but according to an earlier and lesser revelation. Reading the Qur’an in Church (something the Queen already allows at the annual Commonwealth Day service in Westminster Abbey) lends credence to this false view of the Christian Scriptures and makes a wrong impression upon Muslims who believe that their faith to be the pinnacle and fulfilment of all others. Lord Harries counters that, just because Islam in the United Kingdom has not evolved as far as Christianity in its understanding of other faiths and their sacred texts, it does not mean Anglican bishops should not do the right, tolerant and hospitable thing.

But what he has encouraged, both as a legislator-for-life in our national senate, and with all the teaching authority of one of the Church of England’s most distinguished bishops, is the conclusion by Muslims in Britain and across the world that the established Christian Church in England does not believe in the uniqueness of the truth about Jesus Christ and presents it as one faith among many. If so, say those Muslims who beleaguer Christians across the world, why not recognise what lies behind all religions – faith in the only God there is; and why not go the whole way and make your belief explicit with the Islamic profession of faith? Find peace in submission to this ineluctable truth: “After all, the Qur’an has been read out foremost in a cathedral service in England, so they acknowledge the ultimate truth of Islam. If they do not believe exclusively in Christianity, why do you bother to continue?”

It is wounding to think that a bishop from the comfort of retirement in England, after a lifetime of following Christ and serving in the Church’s leadership, is proposing the reading of the Qur’an in Church, especially at the anointing and coronation of our next king whose reign and government is meant to be patterned on the universal rule Christ, while in Iraq, Syria, Kenya and Nigeria, as well as many other places, even children and teenagers are bravely refusing to deny their love for Jesus by submitting to Islam at the point of knives and guns, thus accepting martyrdom rather than giving up on the Body of Christ.

Christian Witness in Interreligious Dialogue and Friendship

This is not to say that interreligious dialogue, friendship, solidarity and common action for peace, mediation, justice and the relief of need are not beauties that humanly unite all those who are spiritual people.  A hopeful aid to building peace and good relationships is “scriptural literacy”. This involves learned and devout followers of different religions meeting in mutual charity and respect, but without compromise to the integrity of each one’s belief, to discuss problems and disagreements by examining one another’s sacred texts. This not only heightens awareness of what each religion truly believes, but illuminates where all can bear witness to together - for instance the sacredness of human life from the womb to the grave, and the stewardship of the created environment. And who can forget the love and faith of those Egyptian Muslims who held hands to form a cordon around Coptic Churches to protect them from desecration by Islamists, or the shared lamentation of Christians, Muslims and Jews at the terrorists’ destruction of the shrines of the Old Testament prophets, sacred to all three?

Such close approach to one another furthermore involves a recognition that in each religion people honestly strive to respond to the deepest questions that human beings and their societies have to  deal with, questions that only faith and spiritual living can answer. This very point was made repeatedly by Pope Benedict XVI on his State Visit to the United Kingdom in 2010, especially in his Address to Civil Society at Westminster Hall. Pope Francis in Istanbul symbolised it too at the Sultanahmet Mosque, which he respected as a House of Prayer and where he stood in moments of silent adoration. We should likewise be strong enough in Christian faith to visit other holy places with the same respect, the same spirit or prayer and praise. But he was not saying, “it is all the same”; “it makes no difference in the end”. He did not remove his Cross, nor did he make well-meaning Westerners’ error of referring to the founder of Islam as “The Prophet”. That would be to accept what he and the Qur’an say about Jesus: that he was not Son of God born to Mary, or die on the Cross and rise again.

The way to the end is for God to lead us on and it is patently not “the same”. How God will lead us and others to union with Him is for Him alone to judge. Our task in the Church is to bear witness to the truth that has been revealed to us in Christ. The Christian knows that this is neither in a book, nor an institution but in a person: the Person of Jesus Christ who is Son of God and Word made flesh, true man and true God, the Light from Light that lightens every one. Islam does not accept this faith and denies that Person. It holds that the Qur’an supersedes the Scriptures of other faiths and corrects Christianity.

The right Christian response is indeed one of “inclusive hospitality”: respect, welcome, dialogue, friendship and inviting each other to join in the practice of the spiritual values that our religions give us to share. It is notable thus that the most telling defenders of Christian holy days and the school Nativity plays have been Muslims who demand that the officials preaching inclusion on ethnic, gender and racial grounds do not achieve it by excluding the religious. The wrong response is the unmeant respect of praying out loud in a Christian Church the Scriptures of a faith that does not share the Church’s belief in Christ. Paul Couturier in 1933, when he re-worked the Church Unity Octave, saw this clearly: Christian Unity is not just an objective for organising or projecting the Church better, it is about the unity of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ. This comes about not through the “creative accommodation” of what you know by faith to be false, but by prayer that we will all be sanctified more and more by the God we adore. The holier we become, the closer to God we are drawn, the more at one in Christ we find ourselves. Thus when he launched the Week of Universal Prayer for the Unity of Christians, he imagined it like the Good Friday Liturgy’s prayers to include prayer for the sanctification of those who do not believe in Christ, as well as those divided among themselves in His Body. But mostly he saw that Christianity hides Christ by its division, since the Lord Himself had prayed, “Father, may they be one  so that the world may believe that it was You Who sent me.”

The Urgency of Unity in Christ’s Kingdom

For this reason, Christian unity and prayer for it are under repeated attack. One cannot help noticing that while a bishop calls for the “inclusive hospitality” of Islamic texts at significant ceremonies for which Anglicanism has responsibility, no such “creative accommodation” conducive to the union of all Christians with the Apostolic See of Rome - and not to its exclusion - has been facilitated by the final ratification of changes to the ordained ministry in the Church of England. This seemingly insurmountable block to reunion is a blow for all who have upheld unity in the Catholic faith, offering a convincing account of the hope that lies within us in the Risen Christ, as the true vision for the unity of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ, especially in this Anglican land where the largest number of churchgoers is actually Catholic. The fading of the ecumenical dream of visible, organic unity is a blow to Roman Catholics as much as to Anglican Catholics alike, because as fellow Christians we ought to rely on each other for mutual strength and encouragement; and for the sake of the Gospel we cannot afford for our separation to loom so large as to obscure the glory of Christ.

So we press on, without relenting in prayer for unity in the Church because of the holiness of our union in Christ, but knowing that God maps out a path that for the moment we cannot see. For its part, our Catholic League recently sponsored the conference in London to mark the 50^th Anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, especially the Decree on Ecumenism. The message from all sides was telling: we are tempted to give up and more easily go our separate ways; but years of prayer, and friendship and mutual theological learning have disinclined us to. No one part of the People of God can go it alone, as if it were exclusively the Body of Christ, and it is the essence of Catholicity to work as a countervailing force to wilful schism and as the impulse toward the truth that binds in one faith the Universal Church. So Catholicism is not Catholic if it operates as one mere movement among many. Its work is constantly to seek and to realise this Universal Church, the Church as God sees it from His perspective, the spotless Bride adorned for her Husband, inseparable from His Son. In other words, the supposedly failed Ecumenical Movement which has not led to the union we hoped for has still changed everything: the idea of the One Great Church cannot be avoided by divided Christians; everyone in honesty must know that no separate denomination is willed by Christ to serve as an end in itself, be it Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant or Pentecostal; and the Catholic Church’s engagement with other Christians and Churches is not only a current commitment, it is permanently the way that the Church is. Providentially for now it seems that, if we cannot be visibly one, the important thing is to walk as one wherever and whenever we can. What is at stake is the direction of humanity – whether it is still to be enslaved by the market of human options that take us away from true choice, by the forgetting of the sanctity of life and by the relative weighing up of advantageous options, or whether to be captivated by the truth about God and humanity in Christ, and to live it even now in the Kingdom of Christ.

Can it be that, in moving together against the world’s injustices, resistant to the hatred of peace, and contrary to the abomination of desolation that hides the Devil’s lust for blood and death behind a religion, to the horror of most Muslims and perverting Islam , whose name derives from peace (the word Islam is related to salaam), we will render “One Lord, One Faith, One Church” visible to those with confidence in nothing? Can it be that in together meeting the need of the world for relief as well as hope, spiritual as well as material, even separated Christians will be seen at one with the Lord, and be convinced that it is believable the He was sent by the Father after all?

Some think that ecumenism is wishful thinking, “finished”, or even a harmful delusion. But the prayer for the Church of the Christians to be one so that the Lord may make Himself seen will not stop its echoing. The fact is that we have all died and been raised in Christ, we have all been given His Spirit; the Kingdom has been given to us and we have all been rendered blessed, in order to live in it. Thus we can either persevere in disunity, complicit with the world that is satisfied with one Church strained into many, and falling short of our blessedness. Or we can act on the capacity we have been given to place our Catholic faith and our Catholic Church at the indefatigable service of the “unity of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ” (words from the annual prayers of Paul Couturier for the Week of Prayer). Now is not the time to despair of Christian unity or to disdain those who we feel are walking away from its objective. It is no harm to our integrity as Catholics to walk with them still, in firm conviction that our steps together will enable our leading by the Light that lightens everyone to the fullness of truth. For the sake of the salvation of humanity, and its true “creative accommodation” at the “inclusive hospitality” of the Celestial Banquet in the Kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, it is nothing less than our duty.

Fr Mark Woodruff, Priest Director

God knows where the women bishops vote leaves Anglican-Catholic relations - Mgr Mark Langham, The Tablet - Blogs

15 July 2014 by Mgr Mark Langham            

The vote by the Church of England to ordain women as bishops changes nothing in its official relations with the Catholic Church. And yet it changes a great deal. It is to be noted that the decision in England only confirms a reality that has existed in worldwide Anglicanism since 1989. The Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogue has been dealing with the reality of women clerics since the 1970s, (early ordinations took place in Asia, North America and New Zealand) and so this decision in one part of the Anglican Communion changes little; indeed, a woman bishop from Canada, Linda Nicholls, is a member of the current Anglican-Catholic dialogue commission, ARCIC III.

But ecumenical relations are not just about cold theological facts. Progress in dialogue is built also on personal co-operation, on feeling comfortable in each other’s presence. And here the decision does create a problem. Anglicans can be frustrated by Rome’s concentration on what happens at Canterbury (or, in this case, York). In 1989, the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, noted this fixation, suggesting that Rome had ignored “ the actual existence of women priests in the United States for a number of years … We have never tried to hide this.”

Yet among most Anglicans, the Church of England does have a sentimental position as “mother Church”, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is the “first among equals”. If anyone is a spokesman for Anglicanism, it is he, and accordingly Rome is right to take notice of developments in Anglicanism as they occur in the Church of England. The discussions leading to the 1992 vote for women priests occasioned a particularly frank exchange between Pope and Archbishop, and it was to a gathering of Church of England bishops in 2008 that the then-head of the Vatican’s ecumenical office, Cardinal Walter Kasper, gave his dire warning that the ordination of women would move Anglicanism away from Catholic orthodoxy and closer to the continental Reformed Churches.

Thus, this is a critical moment for ecumenical dialogue. Anglicans do not seem always to realise how difficult such a move is for Catholics. In 2009 Archbishop Rowan Williams tried to suggest that the ordination of women as priests is a “second-order issue” of mere canonical or juridical significance. ARCIC had previously argued that the question of the ordination of women is of a “different kind” to more serious theological issues. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gave short shrift to these notions, asserting that the ordination of women is a doctrinal issue, intrinsic to the theology of priesthood.

Thus, it is true to say that hope of union has receded. There is no mid-point now between having women bishops and not having them. From speaking of unity, realistically dialogue now considers how two traditions, one of which ordains women bishops and one which does not, co-exist. The rug has been pulled from under those who longed for unity within the foreseeable future.

Yet ecumenists are upbeat; they have come too far, and weathered too many disappointments, not to continue to have faith in the movement. Ecumenism, they point out, is not a human construct, but a divine imperative. Wonders have happened; the Holy Spirit is not discouraged. At a time when, institutionally, we seem far away apart, faith in God’s will for unity has to be stronger than ever.

Mgr Mark Langham is Catholic chaplain to the University of Cambridge and was previously co-secretary to ARCIC III and an official at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity
Source: The Tablet - Blogs, with grateful acknowledgement
And see The Tablet's report on the General Synod's decision and the ecumenical implications here.