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 16th 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).
