Annual General Meeting, 3rd July 2017 - Priest Director's Report and Address

Report on Activities, 2016-17

To review our activities as a charity on the members’ behalf, the pursuit of our historic objectives and the wider public benefit that they serve, it is most convenient to categorise them in terms of

(a)   External grants

(b)   Pilgrimage work

(c)   Publications

(d)   The management of our historic movement devoted not only to Christian Unity but also to the reconciliation of the Churches and all Church Bodies.

A. External Grants

First, we have made several grants, as usual. These include:

i) The Anglican Centre in Rome, for bursaries so that Anglicans from parts of the world with fewer resources can benefit from study in Rome and a deeper encounter with the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith at its heart

ii) The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, towards the refurbishment of the Catholic League’s Chapel, dedicated to Our Lady of Victories and the Holy Cross, with the Chantry for Fr Fynes-Clinton, the founder. Our trustee

iii) The Sodality of the Precious Blood, a constituent society of the League for celibate Anglican priest members in pursuit of holiness of clerical life and the promotion of the Catholic faith, life and worship in the pastoral work of the Church.

(Declaration of interest: One of the League’s trustees, Prebendary Graeme Rowlands, is a Guardian of the Holy House at Walsingham and Priest-Director of the Sodality, and took no part in the decision to award the above two grants.)

iv) The Society of St John Chrysostom, which we support to advance East-West unity and the reconciliation of western Christians and Orthodox Christians in fullness of communion with the Apostolic See of Rome, in pursuit of the League’s objects

v) The Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust, which we support to promote the spiritual life and Catholic faith in devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the reconciliation of all Christians in fullness of communion with the Apostolic See of Rome, in pursuit of the League’s objects.

(Declarations of interest: One of the League’s trustees, Fr Mark Woodruff, is Chairman of the Society of St John Chrysostom and Secretary of the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust, and took no part in the decision to award the above two grants.

Another trustee, Mr Cyril Wood, is Treasurer of the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust, and took no part in the decision to award it a grant.)

B. Pilgrimage

Secondly, to promote the spiritual life and the reconciliation of all Christians and their Churches, we actively promote ecumenical pilgrimages.

i. The League is an official sponsor of the biennial Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust’s pilgrimage to Walsingham and other Marian shrines, in view of the League’s foundational involvement with the restored Pilgrimage to the Holy House. Two trustees of the League are also trustees of EMPT, namely Fr Mark Woodruff (Priest Director) and Mr Cyril Wood (Treasurer). Other trustees are also actively involved as supporters and pilgrims.

ii. The League’s annual pilgrimage to Bruges, visiting the Basilica of the Holy Blood and Our Lady of the Vine at the Beguinage has been a permanent feature of the League’s devotional life for over two decades. 16-20 pilgrims attend each year, drawn from Anglican, Catholic and occasionally other traditions. This covers its own costs and only exceptionally draws on the League’s resources. The addresses in the past few years have been given by Fr Philip Corbett, Brother Theodore De Poel osb, Abbot Hugh Allan o.praem, Ian Knowles, Fr Thaddee Barnas osb, Fr Peter Geldard, Fr Michael Woodgate, Fr Tim Bugby, Fr Andrew Walker, Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, Canon John O’Toole. 2017’s addresses will be given by Brother Henry Longbottom SJ.

Owing to the advancing years of the Benedictine nuns at the Beguinage and their reducing numbers the pilgrimage will sadly only last a few more years.

iii. With the developments and improvements at the Catholic Basilica of Our Lady of Walsingham, it emerged that the former Sue Ryder House was to be reopened as the Dowry House, a place for retreats and spiritual support work for pilgrim groups operated by the Community of Our Lady of Walsingham. The building contains the Walsingham Martyrs’ Cell which the League once furnished with an altar in memory of Geoffrey Wright, the late and long-serving General Secretary of the League. Therefore, now that the building is restored to Church use, the altar has been recovered from its place of interim storage and restored in the Cell for the priests of visiting groups at the Dowry House to celebrate the Eucharist. As previously, this is on condition that its use be available alike to Anglican and Roman Catholic groups, which has been readily agreed by the Bishop of East Anglia in the spirit of hopes for reconciliation. The League has also purchased sets of vestments for use in the chapel.

C. Publications

Several publications are in preparation. These include:

i) A collection of articles and essays gathered over the years since the foundation of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, to which the League gave considerable support in its first years. This will follow up on a Special Edition of The Messenger in 2010 marking the Ordinariate’s foundation and supporting the case for it from the perspective of the League’s historic objectives.

ii) A collection of articles and essays to summarise work conducted by Fr Philip Gray when he was Priest Director, on themes of reparation, martyrdom, restoration and reconciliation. This too will be a Special Edition of The Messenger. Long in preparation, almost all papers have now been collected.

iii) Father Michael Woodgate’s booklet on devotion to the Precious Blood will fill a gap in contemporary devotional provision. This will join a small number of books of prayers developed by the League for wider use.

iv) Dr Michael Walsh’s complete history of the Catholic League. This not only gives an expert Church historian’s view of the first fifty years, already covered by two earlier histories, but a comprehensive review of work and influence since the time of the Second Vatican Council, and the League’s work to commend the documents and reforms of Vatican II in Anglican Catholic circles but also ARCIC, from the 1960s into the present day and the League’s Centenary. It is hoped this book may be adopted by a mainstream publisher and available in 2018.  

A copy of each publication will, as usual, be supplied to each member and complimentary copies will be presented to each Anglican and Catholic bishop, the seminaries and theological colleges, and significant libraries. The Executive considers that with the release of these publications, especially the history following on from the Centenary, the work of the League will largely have been completed.

D. Management of the charity, towards Christian unity and Church reunion

The management of the Catholic League’s work for unity has largely been manifested in the activities of the trustees in various parts of their extensive ecumenical networks. The Priest Director serves as a member of the Department of Dialogue and Unity at the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales, with a special focus on Catholic-Orthodox unity, but in the same department meeting serves Mgr Keith Newton of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, together with others charged with promoting good Catholic-Anglican relations and rapprochement. Fr Mark is also chairman of the meeting of the Bodies in Association with Churches Together in England and with Churches Together in Britain & Ireland, which coordinates with these official ecumenical instruments the work and advocacy of ecumenical societies.

The Priest Director was invited during the year to represent Cardinal Nichols, Vice-President of the Council of Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Europe, at the biennial meeting of representative bishops of the Catholic and Orthodox bishops of Europe. The League generously made available some resources to enable preliminary consultations in advance of the presentation he made.

Two officers directly assist the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, either in its management or in the production of its online monthly magazine, The Portal. The Priest Director currently writes, too, a monthly column on diversity in the Catholic Church’s life, of which the Ordinariate is a notable instance, with particular reference to the Eastern Catholic and other Christian traditions.

Mention should also be repeated of two officers of the League who serve as trustees of the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust. Three officers have also been closely involved with the Catholic Walsingham Association and one is a Guardian of the Holy House. Thus the League enables a certain strengthening to the ecumenical ecology, both in the official and the spiritual spheres.

As in every year, the League issues liturgical and prayer materials for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, based on the principles of its re-founder, Abbe Paul Couturier. These are specially designed to be used within the prayer of the faithful at daily Mass. It bears repetition that the English co-founder of the Week of Prayer, then known as the Octave, was Spencer Jones, an Anglo-Papalist priest, whose influence led to the foundation of the League towards Anglican-Catholic reunion, and indeed played a part in its early work.

The League’s work of regular prayer is also sustained by its constituent body (composed of all members and other supporters), the Apostleship of Prayer. We are grateful to its own Priest Director, Fr Christopher Stephenson, who brings great diligence and thoughtful care to the production of the regular Newsletter which contains the prayer intentions of the Holy Father and other objects of intercession, including prayer for our deceased members.

The League maintains four websites in pursuit of its objects. These are:

• The League's own website, a basic information and history website with occasional updates of news and documentation, at www.unitas.org.uk;  and linked from it:
• www.weekofprayerforchristianunity.org.uk, a website to promote the story and observance of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
• www.paulcouturier.org.uk, website in honour of Father Paul Couturier, re-founder of the modern Week of Prayer
• www.seedofthechurch.org.uk, a website concerning the martyrs of Christian disunity, reparation for the blood of Christians shed by Christians, the mutual “healing of memories” called for by Pope St John Paul and the reconciliation of life and memory commended by Pope Benedict.

In association with the League’s project to set out its own history, we gave access to our archive to the Revd Dr Mark Vickers, a Church historian and priest of the diocese of Westminster, to look at various initiatives in the 1930s from a number of quarters, including leading figures in the Catholic League, notably Fr Fynes-Clinton, towards Anglican-Catholic reunion. The resulting book, Reunion Revisited, was published by Gracewing in June 2017.

Finally, the League is always very grateful to Prebendary Graeme Rowlands, Priest Director of the Sodality of the Precious Blood, who is always a generous host for the Executive’s meetings and our General Meetings at his Church of St Silas, Kentish Town. His support, and that of all the other members of Executive – David Chapman, Secretary, Cyril Wood, Treasurer, Fr Chris Stephenson, Membership Secretary and Priest Director of the Apostolate of Prayer and Mrs Mary Bacon – is invaluable. It is especially good to give thanks for him on the occasion of his fortieth anniversary of priestly ordination. Many congratulations, Father Graeme.

Priest Director’s Notes

Normally, and throughout its history, the Catholic League has concentrated on matters of ecclesiology and reunion; in other words, the nature and purpose of the Church, its order and composition, and its re-integration.

My predecessors as Priest Director and the past editors of The Messenger, notably the much loved Prebendary Brooke Lunn, have all provided penetrating critiques of how the Catholic faith - in teaching, discipleship, spirituality and worship - is to be presented in its entirety as an integral whole to our society. It is essential, they have said, for the Catholic Church to be the means to unify all Christians in our society, if its vitally needed witness is to be credible and embraced by all.

It is with this firmly in mind that we regularly promote three of our objects: the encouragement of fellowship among Catholics, the union of all Christians with the Apostolic See of Rome, and the spread of the Catholic faith. But we have another object: the deepening of the spiritual life. This concerns not just prayer and spirituality, but the way follow Christ  in our inner lives, our homes and families, and also in public at our places of work and within the wider community as public citizens.

Recently, the Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby exhorted Prime Minister Theresa May to pursue her policy of the United Kingdom’s leaving the European Union only in a way that overcomes the recent polarisation and mutual recrimination in our society, so that British people stay together at a momentous turning point in our common history. Yet this patently Christian perspective aroused indignation. A correspondent to The Daily Telegraph remarked that Dr Welby should stick to religion, just like Norman Tebbit told the Anglican and Catholic bishops to stick to saving souls after the Faith in the City initiative and in the wake of insistent concerns from the Church over the effect on the poor of social and economic policy at the height of Mrs Thatcher’s government (N.B., not the politics themselves but their clear adverse effect). But what is religion, and what is having your soul saved, if none of it has any bearing on how individuals pursue their lives in the civil sphere of the world, if none of it has any bearing on the conditions and ongoing course of our Christian civilisation? Living our lives before the world is living our lives before God, just the same. Our life in the so-called “real world” is no less about deepening the spiritual life than the enrichment of our personal prayers and communing with God in Church. For it is always our concern that by our lives as individuals and as the mystical Body of Christ we also deepen the spiritual dimension of the whole world. Pope Benedict on his visit to the United Kingdom in 2010 underlined this time and again: faith has bearing on public life, society and the way we reason; and public life, society and reason have bearing on our faith. Religion has bearing on our personal, political, social and economic life, just as all of these conditions, in the midst of which we find ourselves, bear down upon our religion and our discipleship of Jesus Christ in His Church.

At the moment, the crisis point on which this encounter between faith and reason, religion and society, is balanced has formed into a three-pronged piercing of the side of the Body of Christ and the future of our world alike. First, there remains the morality in commerce and politics lying behind the current economic emergency which Pope Benedict directly addressed and which continues to cast its shadow. Secondly, there is the environmental and climate emergency confronting the very future of our common home, which Pope Francis has addressed in his encyclical in honour of his namesake St Francis, Laudato Si’. His teaching reflects the teaching of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch, the considered views set out by the Anglican Communion and the World Council of Churches, as well as leading figures in the Buddhist, Islamic and Hindu religious worlds. Third, there is an assault on the sacramental institution of marriage and its integrity. Pope Francis has attempted to address this through two sessions of the Synod of Bishops, a reform of the canonical procedures for investigating cases of possibly marital nullity, and an enormous Apostolic Exhortation arising from the two Synods, Amoris Laetitia, the Delight of Love.

Every priest knows a number of cases of good and honest people in their parishes, people seeking to be faithful to God and the Church, yet whose histories, experiences and situation do not match the provisions in the Church’s discipline of the sacraments, and the express command of Christ that marriage is indissoluble. Almost every family has members or knows relatives who have seen the heartbreak of a marriage that failed. Rightly in the Church, these are not matters for public judgment and are to be addressed with compassion and mercy by wise and faithful pastors. And it is just as difficult to make general rules to take account of every hard case, as it is to apply a general rule in the same way for exceptional cases. This is why Pope Francis has made the assessment of most marital cases pastoral rather than judicial, entrusting the decision to the bishop personally.  He has clarified the grounds on which a marriage can be judged to have been null from the outset after all. He has placed checks and balances in the procedure, so that there is consistency among the bishops overseen by the metropolitan archbishop, and therefore between dioceses there is to be no such instance as a hard line in one, and a soft line in another. He is trying to do two things. First, he is trying to make a full life in the Church possible, for those who seek the Lord in good faith, as they approach His mercy with their regrets and repentance, but also with hope and trust when the way ahead seems barred. For this, people need to be able to have confidence in both the Church’s pastors and the Church’s laws that they will clearly expound the Gospel of Christ and the wholeness of Catholic faith, as well as manifest in every way the light and mercy of God. Thus, secondly, the Pope is saying that if there is a way to be found through the immense pastoral and personal difficulties facing those who desire with all their heart to be free of sin and failure, and to be faithful to Christ, it is the Church that is to find where the light of God shines from the Kingdom to show the way through.

Pope Francis has said he wants not a change in Catholic teaching on the indissolubility of sacramental marriage, but a change of attitude to people among the lawyers and pastors.  Yet this has led to the supposition that he wishes effectively to relax the rule that you cannot be united to Christ in the Eucharist if you are in a second marriage while the partner to whom you are still united in your first and sacramental marriage is still living. In other words, he is said to be encouraging communion for those divorced and in a second union. The Pope says he absolutely insists on the fundamental Christian dogma of the indissolubility of marriage, but no less insists on mercy and compassion in applying that very teaching and the canon law, when it comes to making a judgment about a marriage’s original nullity. Meanwhile, a judicial vicar in one of our dioceses in England observes that, whatever the good faith of those who entered into their marriages at the time, as Christian marriages probably 80% in his experience are nullifiable because the couple lack a full understanding of the commitment they were making and the Church’s faith about marriage: their “informed consent” was lacking or not freely given. Elsewhere, Pope Francis has agreed with interpreters who have drawn the conclusion that the breakdown of a marriage may be an indication that it was not quite there to begin with, and so the principles of sacramental and pastoral discipline are superseded by those of mercy in a rather different situation. Thus the principle of indissolubility of marriage is maintained where it applies, but not where the unbreakable “gave way”. In straightforward cases, a nullity procedure to the bishop and his marriage tribunal has been simplified; in cases which are impossible to resolve, is it possible, then, to overlook the marriage bond and tolerate the admission of those divorced and remarried to Communion?

In search of an answer to this complex question that has now arisen since the opposing interpretations and reactions to Amoris Laetitia have emerged, we can consider the experience of the  Anglican and Orthodox worlds. Here, the same principle of indissolubility of marriage exists, but its strict application is in effect mitigated. Yet the indissolubility of sacramental marriage has disintegrated as civil divorce is recognised by Church authorities, and new marriages in Church permitted and celebrated. Of course, in the Anglican Communion marriage is not fully recognised as a sacrament but as a divine ordinance; but the same belief in the permanent bond of marriage between Christians, and by extension to others, applies. Nonetheless, there is an effectively institutionalised system of divorce, re-marriage and admission to Communion that does not necessarily depend on the justice or pastoral circumstances of the cases concerned and the soul-searching of all the parties involved.

So a confused position now obtains in the Catholic Church. Some, including certain national hierarchies, favour taking the same path as Anglicans and Orthodox. Others - including those whose faithfulness to the teaching of Christ and the sacramental discipline of the Church is nothing short of sacrificial - are concerned that here we face a defining question as to what the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church are. Yet there is one interpretation that cannot be: it cannot be concluded that there is any change to doctrine, or that the changes to canon law and Pope Francis’ pleas alter how our faith “demands my life, my soul, my all.” Theology is faith put into words, it is said, and morals and ethics are faith put into practice. Thus the clear teaching of Christ is to be followed with mercy and without mercilessness, with compassion and without hard-heartedness, yet always with integrity and not out of commending ourselves to the passing values of the world, and heedful constantly to the express words of Christ.

It surprised me in the late 1990s when beloved Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s picture in the National Portrait Gallery was labelled, “Liberal Churchman”, and Henry Chadwick’s biography of him denied him the title Catholic Anglican, both on the ground that he justified ecclesiastical recognition of divorce and remarriage other than on Catholic canonical rules. He would have been wounded to the heart to see this, as he saw the approach of the Eastern Church, which forbids divorce but sees that some marriages die or fail and that it is best to recognise this with penitence and move on to a fresh attempt, as an important witness from the wider community of Churches no less apostolic than that of Rome.

Yet marriage is, according to the Book of Common Prayer, the “honourable estate, instituted of God Himself signifying the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and His Church”.  Our concern for sacramental marriage, its practice and the protection of its bond, is in the end, then, not only a pastoral matter, or a matter of personal conduct and moral responsibility. Those who have personally been through the ordeal of a broken marriage and family above all know this from the wounds they bear and then offer up in sacrifice, in hope of a redemption of their situations.  For it is indeed a matter of the bearing of faith on life in public, and the way Christians deepen the spiritual dimension not just of Christ’s followers but of all society. It is a sign about how humans are in families and communities, and how human society is supposed to be as a reflection of the Kingdom of God’s love.

It directly affects our vision of the Church restored in fullness of communion, our efforts of ecumenism, and the reintegration of Christ’s society made perfect and complete in the Kingdom of God, that we must serve, on earth as it is in heaven.

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

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 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.

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.