Fr John Hunwick: At the Catholic Church of the Assumption and St Gregory on the occasion of the Centenary of the Foundation of the Catholic League, 2 July 2013
DOM GREGORY DIX, THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE, AND THE NECESSITY OF THE PAPACY
It is a truth
universally acknowledged, that an Englishman – or at least a proper
Englishman – dislikes ‘bells and smells’ in his churches.. And it is equally
well-known by proper Englishmen that ‘High Churchmen’ are obsessed with those
bells and those smells. What the Englishmen of my childhood – I’m looking back
to the forties and fifties – were less clear about was that those High
Churchmen fell into at least two distinct groups. There were those who thought
that the Church of England was pretty well the best Church on earth; it just
needed a few more bells and rather more pervasive smells in order to achieve
total perfection. But in the other corner of the ring, wearing the red shorts,
were the Papalists: men whose evil went far beyond even the most exotic smells;
men, traitors to the Church of England, who actually believed in the Pope;
fifth columnists of the enemy; Quislings. Such was the Henry Joy Fynes Clinton
who, a hundred years ago – a hundred years ago to this very day, the feast of
our Blessed Lady’s Visitation to S Elizabeth – founded the Catholic League; and,
for a hundred years, its members have remained fifth columnists. I well
remember the day when, a little fellow in my mid-teens, barely out of short
trousers, I signed solemnly an impressive document committing myself to
acceptance of the decrees of the Council of Trent and of the Vatican; including
the provisions with regard to papal primacy and infallibility. By these means I
became a member of the Catholic League – God’s best Fifth Column. I remember
instantly feeling safe!
You always knew
where there was a ‘safe’ – that is to say, papalist – church. It was not, as
the Anglican on the top of a Clapham omnibus assumed, a question of incense and
little tinkling hand-bells. What a proper ‘papalist’ church advertised was: ‘Full
Catholic Privileges’ and ‘Western Rite’. ‘Western Rite’ was code for what Catholic
canonists and liturgists now call the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. An
Altar Book called the English Missal
provided for its use, God’s own Latin being accompanied by some English and some
assimilation of Cranmerian formulae; its first printed edition had emerged,
incidentally, just one year before the foundation of the League. Papalism was
in the air. That ‘Tridentine’ Mass fed the spirituality of Fynes Clinton and
his fellow papalists, clerical and lay, for more than half a century. One such papalist,
the celebrated Benedictine scholar Dom Gregory Dix, wrote, at the climax of his
revolutionary book The Shape of the
Liturgy, “of a certain timelessness about the Eucharistic action and an
independence of its setting, in keeping with the stability in an ever-changing
world of the forms of the liturgy themselves ... This very morning I did this
with a set of texts which has not changed by more than a few syllables since
Augustine used those very words at Canterbury on the third Sunday after Easter
in the summer after he landed. Yet this can still take hold of a man’s life and
work with it.” For myself, I never feel closer to Fynes Clinton and Dix ... and
to S Augustine and S Gregory and Blessed John Henry Newman ... than when I
stand at an altar to say their Mass,
the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. But it is not about Dix and Liturgy
that I want to speak today. Six years before he signed off The Shape of the Liturgy... which rests upon the bookshelves of all
of you, well thumbed and worn with use ... he wrote an extraordinary series of
articles in the Nashdom periodical Laudate;
which, unlike the Shape, have long
been out of print. They are about the Papacy. I feel that they are due for
resurrection. I feel that their time has come.
The occasion of these articles was the
publication in 1936 of a book called The
Roman Primacy to A.D.461 by Dr B J Kidd, Warden of Keble College, Dix’s own
college; a Patristics scholar then at the height of his reputation. Kidd had
concluded that the early Roman Primacy “was a primacy of leadership: more than
a primacy of honour, though less than a primacy of jurisdiction”. I ask you to
remember that these were the days before men spoke about ‘the Petrine
ministry’; a common phrase then was ‘the Papal claims’: what a typically
Anglican expression; how effortlessly superior ... you can just imagine the
supercilious toss of the head, the disdainful sniff ... some Italian bishop,
eh, claiming too much for himself. So Kidd’s conclusion was very welcome to
many high church Anglicans. Thank God: we have an alibi; we can wait until Rome
modifies her ‘claims’ before taking seriously the need for unity with her.
Leadership ... not too much harm in that ... but not the jurisdiction claimed
in Vatican I: “A primacy of jurisdiction, ordinary, immediate, and Episcopal”. Sighs
of relief emerged from the lips of men who felt that they had been let off an
uncomfortable hook. Dix, rather acidly pointed out that it was “hard to
understand the cheerfulness” of the reactions “in certain quarters” since it
implied acceptance of the permanence of disunity. I am not sure how truthful
Dix is being when he calls it “hard to understand”; I suspect he understood
well enough the visceral anti-Romanism of the English psyche; a gut prejudice
still with us today.
Dix’s response to
Kidd’s thesis has a characteristically feline quality to it. He has a talent
for luring the reader into a sense of security, and then springing a deft
ambush. He criticises Kidd’s Roman Catholic reviewers for exaggerating
disputable factual points; he writes: “In point after point, as one turns from
the documents to Dr Kidd’s summary, one cannot but envy the compression and
justice with which he presents the events”. Full marks, you might think, for
Kidd. So what is there left for Dix to do? “[W]hat I shall try to give is
something more elusive than a sequence of events – a study of institutions in
their theory and functioning”. How donnish; indeed, how ... er ....
yawn-making. Surely, all a chap needs to know is whether he needs to resign his
benefice, become a papist, and tell his wife (I think Eric Mascall’s verses on
‘the Ultra-Catholic’ conclude: “I would have gone last Thursday week Had not my
wife objected”). Kidd has already Done the Business. Praise be to Kidd. But,
after Dix has finished deploying “certain considerations which, I hope,
illuminate and ‘situate’ Dr Kidd’s conclusions”, the reader will discover that the
trap has been sprung and that, for those who have been led stage by stage along
the path Dix has mapped, acceptance of the entire papal dogma, as defined in
the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus
of Vatican I is totally unavoidable.
Dix begins by arguing
that the word and concept of ‘jurisdiction’ are anachronistic in the period
before Nicaea. The ‘Early Church’ did not think in such terms. And, at this
point, it is a good idea to remember three things about Dix. First: his
training, and his first job as a don at Keble, were as a historian; second: his
admiration for bishops – not least Anglican bishops – was ... not unqualified
(this was the Dix for whom the symbol of a Bishop was a Crook; of an
Archbishop, a Double Cross); third: that he had a weakness for the ad hominem argument. He loved dilemmas
especially if they had really big and sharp horns. Putting it crudely, he liked
seeing people wriggle. And all the more so if they wore gaiters. (Zucchetti had
not at that point become fashionable among Anglican bishops.) So, when Dom
Gregory questions the applicability in the first Christian centuries of the entire
concept of ‘Jurisdiction’, we sense that he is moving in for a rather amusing
kill. If the Early Church is to be followed in all things, then we cannot talk
about papal jurisdiction. But: we cannot talk about Episcopal jurisdiction either.
And Anglican bishops in those 1930s were terribly enthusiastic about their
jurisdiction. Parliament had stymied their attempt in 1927/8 to discipline the
Anglo-Catholic clergy by imposing a new Book of Common Prayer; and there was
talk (derided by Dix in the Shape) about
a bishop’s jus liturgicum (amusing,
is it not, that so many folk regard the coining of a phrase in Latin or Greek as
the best way of getting away with something dodgy). Episcopal authority was
invoked to persecute Extreme Men; and the papalists, Fynes Clinton and his
associates in the Catholic League, certainly counted as Extreme Men (you
remember that when bishop Pollock objected to having his name linked with that
of pope Pius XI on the foundation stone of the Holy House in Walsingham, it was
the Bishop’s name which the Fynes Clinton and Hope Patten carefully obscured).
Bishops did not merely dislike the Pope; they had a particular, and
particularly intense, dislike of the Pope’s liturgy, the ‘Western Rite’, the
Tridentine Liturgy which Dix and his fellow monks at Nashdom, together with the
other papalists, used every morning. (When in 2007 Benedict XVI liberated the
Extraordinary Form and his episcopal critics inside the Catholic Church started
fuming and ranting, I as an elderly Anglican had a curious sense of déjà vu ... been here before, heard all
this.) So when Dix argued that, not earlier than round about A.D. 390-410, Christian
leaders became rulers with jurisdiction, he was in effect saying to Anglicans, ad hominem, “If you believe that bishops
have jurisdiction, you can’t really make a fuss about popes having it as well.
And if you dislike popes having jurisdiction, then you’ve also sawn through the
branch that the Anglican bishops are sitting on.” Or, as he puts it himself,
“Coming to Dr Kidd’s book fresh from a collection of early material on the
episcopate ... I am a little surprised to find that his definition of the early
papal primacy in the Universal Church corresponds very exactly with the
estimate formed quite independently in my own notes of the local bishop’s primacy in the local
church during the pre-Nicene period.” Sniggering, I am sure, up the sleeve of
his monastic habit, he adds “If the comparison holds good, there is matter for
serious consideration here” (this was the Dix who took the religious name
Gregory in memory of Gregory VII, Hildebrand, “who deposed more bishops than
any other man in history”).
The acute reader,
however, might ask whether Christians should in any case be obliged de fide to accept – as Vatican I
requires – a formulation of the Petrine ministry in terminology and in
categories which, as Dix has freely admitted, were known little or not at all
in the first three centuries. Here again, his answer has an ad hominem flavour to it. Anglicans –
particularly Anglicans with patristic instincts – have always had a great regard
for the first four Ecumenical Councils, and especially for that of Nicaea, at
which the foundations were laid of the Creed which Latins, Byzantines, and
Anglicans have all traditionally used at Sunday Mass. But “the Council of
Nicaea ... define[d] the Godhead of the Son in terms of Greek metaphysics ...
and the New Testament was not written by metaphysicians”. So, if you take your
Christology decked out in a metaphysical cope by Nicaea, you can hardly
complain about taking your Papal primacy arrayed in the underpants of Canon Law
by Vatican I. “They were in both cases the only terms practically available ...
it at least arguable that in both cases the Council succeeded in preserving the
whole of the original truth, while putting it into a quite different dress from
that in which it was originally presented. No one would deny that there has
been development in both cases. But it is a true development, as I see it,
bringing out only what was implicit and in germ in the original conception, and
guarding it from misunderstanding and error.”
Dix’s most
spectacular tour de force comes when he
discusses the pope’s ‘primacy of jurisdiction, “ordinary, immediate, and Episcopal”’
in every diocese in Christendom. He entices us to toy with dissent: “It is so
unlike the powers we Anglicans concede to a primacy!” However, you know your Dix
by now; he is clearly preparing to pounce.
He goes on: “But is
it?”. He tells the story of “a bishop in the Province of Canterbury [who]
refused to institute a priest to a benefice, for reasons which were found upon
question to be illegal ... The priest was ultimately instituted by the
Archbishop as Primate. That was an act of jurisdiction in another man’s
diocese. It was an act of ‘ordinary’ jurisdiction, since the Archbishop had an
indisputable right, in the circumstances, to do it. It was an act of
‘immediate’ jurisdiction, since he did not act as the bishop’s delegate, but
against his protests. It was an act of ‘episcopal’ jurisdiction, since it
conveyed cure of souls”. Dix may be referring to a fairly recent case involving
Archbishop Lang and the extreme modernist Bishop Barnes of Birmingham, but I
prefer to think that he has in mind a cause
celebre of the Victorian period. In
1847, the High Church Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, refused to institute
an Evangelical clergyman , the Revd G C Gorham, to a benefice in his
jurisdiction, because Gorham did not believe in the doctrine of Baptismal
Regeneration expressed in the formularies of the Church of England. Upon
appeal, the Privy Council found for Gorham, and Archbishop Sumner instituted
him, over the head of Phillpott’s protests (and even his threat to
excommunicate anyone who should institute Gorham). Notice the exquisite ironies
here. Dix is deftly reminding us that it was an Evangelical who caused an Evangelical
(and indeed anti-Catholic) Archbishop of Canterbury to exercise the
“ordinary, immediate, and episcopal” jurisdiction which Vatican I attributed to
the Roman Pontiff. (It was this scandal, incidentally, which caused the future
cardinal Henry Manning to become a Catholic.) But Dix also has the ‘non-Papal
Catholics’ in his sights. These people held what has sometimes been called a
‘Cyprianic’ view of the episcopate: namely, that each bishop is supreme in his
diocese and not subject to interference from any bishop whomsoever wherever
else. Dix is saying: “If you can’t accept the decrees of Vatican I which give
the Pope ordinary immediate and episcopal jurisdiction in another man’s
diocese, how can you accept the polity of the Church of England – which gives
precisely the same to the Archbishop of Canterbury?” He concludes: “In other
words, the whole Vatican definition of a primacy is latent in the harmless
Anglican conception, for use when needed. It is the minimum definition, in juridical terms, of a power of effectually representing the mind of the
whole towards a part. Less than that could hardly be predicated of the admitted
‘norm’ of Christian belief, once juridical conceptions of Christian authority
had been admitted”.
There is one
difference of emphasis between Gregory Dix and Henry Fynes Clinton which has
always intrigued me. Clinton, despite his robust and unbending papalism, had a
very soft spot for the Byzantine Orthodox. I have not seen any evidence of how
he reconciled in his own mind his own ecclesiology with the anti-Romanism of
quite a few of his Orthodox friends. But Dix, although fond of Orthodox and
respectful of their witness to Christian truth, did not share the romantic
attachment to the East felt by many Anglicans (particularly by those who found
the ‘non-Papal Catholicism’ of the Orthodox a useful stick with which to beat
Rome). He certainly had no sympathy with sentimental Westerners who believed
that the Orthodox Liturgy was somehow more ancient and venerable than that of
the Roman Rite. He had little inclination to make a fetish of an Epiclesis of
the Spirit in the Eucharistic Prayer. He once wrote about the Traditional Roman
Rite which he passionately loved as “so venerable, and so poetic yet so usable”
; about the preservation in the Roman liturgical books of “an incomparably
larger body of genuinely primitive – and by this I mean not merely pre-Nicene
but second and even first century – Christian liturgical material ... than any
other extant
liturgical documents”. He also had little time for the commonplaces of Orthodox
anti-Roman polemic. He disposes of the claim that the Roman Primacy had
anything to do with the status of Rome as the imperial Capital, and points out
that this theory is not found before the foundation of New Rome at
Constantinople made it convenient(“the pedigree of [Constantinople’s] bishops
from St Andrew .... had not yet been forged. [It] owed its position solely to
the Caesars ...”). Among Orthodox, Anglicans, and ‘liberal’ Catholics, Conciliarism
is sometimes offered as an alternative to Papalism; Dix’s account of Nicaea
begins with the statement that it “came before the Christian world of its own
day with no background of theory concerning the infallibility of ‘General
Councils’” and ends thus: “[T]he whole superstructure of theory concerning
‘General Councils’ and their place and authority in the government of the
Church, which was afterwards built up by the Eastern Church and by the
Conciliar movement in the West, was simply non-existent in A.D. 325”. (I wonder
what Dix would have made of the view of Paul VI that Vatican II was “more
important than Nicaea”.) It is the premise of his Laudate articles that the Papacy was there, and active, and
delivering great services to Christendom, long before the bogeys of Caesaropapism
and Conciliarism enter Church History. (A modern parallel occurs to me: while
the second Vatican Council was rearranging the deck-furniture on the barque of
S Peter, and sending out to the ‘World’ messages of cheerful optimism, it was
left to the Papacy, in Humanae vitae,
to spot the iceberg and issue a defence of Christian sexual ethics.)
In 1993, a great
Pontiff Benedict XVI, at that time Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, sent to the Catholic Bishops a document called Communionis notio, in which he wrote:
“[C]ommunion with the universal Church, represented by Peter’s successor, is
not an external complement to the particular [local] Church, but one of its
internal constituents ...” The Communio
Petri is not something which merely binds the individual Churches together as
a federation and operates on each one from outside, but a factor which belongs
to the inherent internal structure of each Church. Dix expressed this idea in a
paper, unpublished and undated, in the following words: “No one, I think, will
deny that the papacy, by whatever title, has consistently exercised a great
external directive influence upon the actual course of Christian history,
greater than that of any other single Christian force. But it has also
exercised a more subtle though no less powerful influence upon the internal life of the Church, comparable
with that of a gland in the life of a body.” Glands, of course, were a more
fashionable talking point among Thirties intellectuals than they are nowadays.
But it is clear what Dix – and Ratzinger – mean. Just as every part of our
bodily constitution is affected by our kidneys, our livers, our pancreas, so
the papacy has a direct effect upon every member of Christ’s Mystical Body. To
Fr Maurice Bevenot SJ, Dix explained : “[W]hat I am trying to get at is the
fact that the Papacy is organic to the Church”. I feel that this is an
important perception. One might link it with Dix’s fascinating demonstration,
in the same paper, that so many of the epithets which S Ignatius of Antioch
attributes to a Bishop in the local Church, are assigned to the Roman Church in
the context of the Universal Church. What the diocesan Bishop is to his own
Church, the Roman Church is to the Oikoumene.
One might ask why,
when so much ink has been spent for so many centuries discussing, on all sides,
the ‘Papal claims’, we should take much notice of the writings of one Anglican
theologian and a comparatively small group of Anglican Papalists. I can
think of two answers. Firstly, in the case of Dix, his perceptions seem to me
often brilliant, often to suggest approaches which have not occurred to anybody
else before or since. My second response would be this. Until the age of Hans
Kueng, it was expected that Roman Catholic writers would defend the papal
doctrines; that non-Catholics would
attack them. If you told me that a Catholic theologian had defended the Papacy,
my reply might have been rather like that of Miss Mandy Rice-Davies during the
Profumo scandal – when told in court that Lord Astor had denied her allegations
– “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”. Similarly, that non-Catholics should deny the
claims of the Roman See and should dispute the evidence for its primacy in the
first centuries would hardly seem shatteringly strange. But that Anglicans – or some of them – should
come to an acceptance of the whole Papal package, as defined in 1870 under
Blessed Pius IX by the First Vatican Council, must, surely, be noticeable. A
Roman Catholic theologian (at least before the age of Hans Kueng) might be
thought to have advanced his reputation or even his career by a particularly
adept defence of the prerogatives of the Roman See. But the Anglican Papalists,
by their witness to the Petrine Ministry, rendered themselves unpopular; and by
their adherence to the liturgical rites of the Roman Church, they invited – and
received – episcopal persecution and detestation. Their witness was
strengthened by the fact that they had nothing to gain – and a great deal to
lose – by adopting it. I suggest that this is still as true. I think many of us
were moved when his Grace Archbishop Mennini spoke, after our last Chrism Mass,
about the sacrifices many priests and laypeople made in order to achieve the
ultimate aim of the Catholic Revival, Unity with the See of S Peter, in the
Ordinariate.
I hope you will
forgive me for suggesting that the Papalist movement which led to the
foundation of the Catholic League by Fr Fynes Clinton one hundred years ago
today, was not the first such movement in the Church of England. The records of
the two or three decades leading up to the Canterbury Convocation of February
1559, three months into the deplorable reign of Elizabeth Tudor, (‘Bloody
Bess’, as I think of her) afford remarkable parallels to events in the Church
of England since 1992. Perhaps I could remind you of the situation. Convocation
was meeting in S Paul’s Cathedral, under the presidency of Edmund Bonner,
Bishop of London (the See of Canterbury being vacant). A few miles up the
Thames, Parliament was dealing with a government agenda which involved
dismantling the entire reconstruction of the English Church left in place by
Reginald Pole, Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Good Queen Mary.
Presumably, the Bishops commuted by barge up and down the river between the
City and Westminster. Rarely can the stakes have been as high; rarely can
English Churchmen have been faced by such uncomfortable dilemmas. And rarely
have English Bishops and Clergy conducted themselves with as much courage and
principle as did the bishops in the Upper House, and the Proctors of the Lower
House, on this occasion. I think it is worth remembering why.
Bonner had been a
crony of Henry VIII; one of those clerics who supported him in his matrimonial
enterprises and helped to provide backing for his breach with Rome. Elizabeth
Tudor, indeed, angrily asked him why he could not be as helpful to her as he
had been to her father. Bonner and the accommodating clergy of Henry’s reign
did not have the advantage of hindsight. English kings had tangled with popes
before. English kings had cast covetous eyes upon the Church’s estates before.
It was not the end of the world. And, at first, things moved gradually. There
was, arguably, never one exact moment at which it was clear that
men of principle could no longer tolerate the government’s policies. Even S
Thomas More, it appears, had to spend quite some time buried in his books
before he felt completely confident in his mind that the Petrine Ministry was a matter of principle, a matter of
divine institution. But in the reign of Henry’s successor Edward VI, things
moved faster. In came the 1549 Prayer Book; Bonner had had enough and left
Fulham Palace for the Marshalsea prison. But another ‘Catholic’ bishop, Stephen
Gardiner, struggled on, claiming that ‘1549’ adequately expressed the Catholic
Faith. So ‘1549’ was replaced by ‘1552’ and its more explicit blasphemies. What
the ‘Henrician Catholic’ bishops thus learned – and learned the hard way – was
that one thing leads to another; that deserting the Bishop of Rome is not some
little thing that does not really make much difference to ordinary parish and
diocesan life. The legislation of 1533 led inexorably to the stripping – and,
indeed, the dismantling – of the altars.
Upstream in
Westminster, the surviving Primate, Archbishop Hethe of York, defended in
Parliament the Primacy and authority of the Roman See. In doing so, he admitted
that that the current Pontiff Paul IV, Giovanni Pietro Carafa, was a very unpleasant
person; indeed, Carafa had hindered, one might almost say sabotaged, the Marian
restoration of Catholicism in this country. Cardinal Pole had died stripped of
his Legatine Commission and summoned to Rome on a suspicion of heresy by a Pope
who described Pole’s associates as an ‘apostate household’ little better than
Luther; Queen Mary had died at war with the Papal States. Yet Archbishop Hethe
manfully upheld the doctrinal and religious necessity of Communion with the
Holy See. He, and his fellow bishops, so supine under Henry VIII, had learned
from their experiences and, we might say, had acquired backbones. So, on
Saturday February 25 1559, the very day when the House of Commons sent up to
the House of Lords a Bill designed to enact both the Royal Supremacy and the
restoration of a Prayer Book, the Canterbury Convocation enacted its own
legislation: what we might call the Five Articles of the Church of England. The
first three Articles unambiguously asserted the doctrines of Transubstantiation
and of the Sacrifice of the Mass; the Fourth Article declared that “to Peter
the Apostle and to his legitimate successors in the Apostolic See, as to
Christ’s Vicars, has been given the supreme power of feeding and ruling
Christ’s Militant Church, and confirming his brethren”. And Article Five? It
engaged explicitly with Parliament and declared that “The authority of dealing
with and defining about those things which concern the Faith, the Sacraments,
and the Discipline of the Church has hitherto always belonged and ought
to belong only to the pastors of the Church, whom the Holy Spirit has
placed in God’s Church for this purpose, and
not to laypeople”. The Anglican Papalist Convocation of 1559 deserves to be
better remembered for its heroic martyrion
to the Truth; never in English history has a Convocation so fearlessly stood up
to a government.
I want to suggest to
you that there are uncanny parallels between these events and the happenings in
the Church of England since the early 1990s. Again, error and apostasy have won
the day by the gradualism with which they have advanced. It has seemed
difficult to pinpoint the exact moment at which it becomes impossible for men
and women of principle to stay where they are. In 1992, General Synod legislated
for Women Priests; some distinguished figures left (including the prophetic
figure of Bishop Graham Leonard), but most of us stayed and waited to see “what
the leaders of the Catholic Movement will do”. Only gradually did it become
clear that those ‘leaders’ had no rabbit
and, to be quite frank, not even a hat to hide one in. So the women were
canonically ordained to sacerdotal ministries; and we made do with PEVs, with
assurances, and with the ‘principle’ of ‘discernment’. Gradually, it became
clear that the assurances, although given in good faith, could not withstand the pressure which
was building up against them. And the gradualist movement towards the admission
of women to the Anglican episcopate became more and more determined. Moreover, within
our ‘constituency’, a gradual change was taking place. Clergy and laypeople who
were not particularly well-known for their adherence to the full red-blooded Papalist
agenda as mapped out by Fr Fynes Clinton and maintained by the Catholic League,
began to understand, from their experience of General Synod Religion, that we need what Blessed John Henry Newman
called the remora of Rome; Rome as a
breakwater against the incursion of error; Rome as a protection against
disordered innovation. Some quite surprisingly ‘moderate’ High Churchmen seemed
to grow quiet and thoughtful ... and murmured in your ear that they “had
submitted their dossiers to Rome”. They had learned the same lesson that Bishop
Bonner had learned between 1533 and 1559. Then came our ‘February 1559’ moment,
when Bishop Andrew Burnham, a member of the Catholic League, called upon the
Holy Father Pope Benedict for help; and help was indeed not denied. Pope
Benedict had witnessed the events of the 1990s when our hopes and labours for a
‘corporate solution’ were unfulfilled because of influences nearer home less
sympathetic than his. Benedict had learned the lesson of the 1990s; now he kept
his own counsel while he worked quietly and with determination until his
solution was ready. Then, as Universal Pastor, he gave it to us and to the
Universal Church; and waited for the commotion to begin.
In 1559, the English
diocesan bishops and most of the senior clergy declined to conform to the
Elizabethan establishment (it was to be a little like that in 1689). Exile and
prison became their only options. But many of the lower clergy stayed on. They
had seen successive governments making changes in the national religion which
sometimes only lasted months, and they lacked the hindsight, which we enjoy, of
knowing that this change was permanent. They stayed on, and they
grumbled on. It is not fair to call them Vicars of Bray or to regard them as
unprincipled; but those of you who have read Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath will be familiar with the figure of the good
Parish Priest who bunkers down and waits for better days, serving his people as
faithfully as he can under an alien regime, hoping against hope that Henry’s
bastard daughter will either die young or marry a Catholic Prince or change her
views. And the process and problems of Gradualism are still at work in the
Church of England today. Will the point of principle for Catholic Anglicans be
reached when General Synod has legislated for Women Bishops? Or when the first women
are consecrated? Or when the first women diocesans are appointed? Or when my own
diocesan is a woman? Or when some set of ‘Assurances’ is modified? Or when some
Code of Conduct is abolished? Or when ordinands are turned away unless they
undertake to collaborate ‘collegially’ with women pastors? Gradualism carries many
people along in modest comfort and ensures that their journey is never that
little bit too bumpy; and thus the kairos for decision and departure seems
never to present itself quite explicitly enough.
We naturally
remember our fathers – and mothers – in Faith who have faced dilemmas before;
in 1559, perhaps, or after the Dutch Invasion, or because of the Jerusalem
Bishopric, or the Gorham Judgement, or the Church of South India question which so
preoccupied Fr Fynes Clinton and Dom Gregory. In a sense, those crises
prefigured the problems of the 1990s. The difference, of course, is that those
periodical crises did not as radically disorder the claim of the Church of
England to possess the Catholic Ministry (and thus to be an association of true
‘particular churches’) as does
the integration of women into the three ranks of the Sacrament of Order; which
must inevitably be as irreversible as the processes involved in constructing an
omelette. So, here we are in the Ordinariate; and, from our new vantage-point,
surely we are free to see the Carolines and the Non-jurors as beloved parts of
our Anglo-Papalist, our Ordinariate Patrimony whom we take with us; and the
Tractarians; and that great Separated Doctor of the Catholic Church Edward Bouverie
Pusey; and the ‘slum priests’ who went and built the churches and the
congregations in the squalor of the Victorian slums. Today we particularly
celebrate the devoted witness of the priests and people of the Catholic League,
who maintained ‘Full Catholic Privileges’ and the ‘Western Rite’ from 1913
onwards. We owe them the most immense debt of gratitude for their work and
their sufferings. One thinks of figures like Fr Bernard Walke, at S Hilary in
Cornwall, standing in front of his tabernacle as a Protestant mob menaced it
and him with pickaxes; and Fr Sandys Wason finding the decaying corpse of a
donkey dumped on his doorstep. More recently, we recall the labours by which
Bishop John Broadhurst, and my own friend the late Bishop John Richards, in a
time of desolation built up a people for the Lord. We thank God that Admiral
Ratzinger appointed one Keith Newton to be Captain of the good ship Ordinariate
... a pocket battleship? An Aircraft Carrier?
And – I have tried
to suggest to you – we have what Colin Buchanan called the “mischievous,
maverick, learned perversity” of Dom Gregory Dix. Dix has bequeathed to us his
distinctive, and distinctively Anglican, account of why the Petrine Ministry is
an essential and central part of what it means to be a Catholic Christian. I
believe that this account is his and our gift to the ecumenical process.
