I have overshot the tenth anniversary of this blog. The first posting was Invitation of 17th January 2012, in which my desire for change was apparent. Change from what? I had been one of the co-authors of The Anglo-Catholic (now defunct) and in about 2010, I began The English Catholic to counter the increasingly polemical tendencies of those who wanted to go to the Ordinariate and those who did not. By 2012, I had been in the TAC for about seven years and was effectively orphaned at this point. It took me another year to approach the ACC and Bishop Damien Mead.

My English Catholic blog did not please some and I had many really nasty comments. I will not mention the name of a genuinely radical Roman Catholic demon living and working in Japan. I was perhaps experiencing the same conflicts within. There were the several “narratives” of the Ordinariate and endless cognitive dissonance for all. Anglicanorum Coetibus was not about the TAC but the Forward in Faith bishops in England and a few in America. The canonically irregular Archbishop Hepworth would not receive any concessions, though some of his clergy might! I was not to be one of them, and I never made any application to Rome.

I very definitely reacted away from Roman Catholicism and its Counter-Reformation expression, even though such a reform movement was necessary in the sixteenth century. What I found most objectionable was the “technocratic” scholasticism in the traditionalist world, a kind of hyper-rationalism – coupled with popular lay religion. I sought along the lines of Northern Catholicism, one of the pillars of Anglican claims. I had yet to look into the influence of Romanticism, without which Christianity would have just about disappeared from Europe already in the nineteenth century.

Only this morning, I read an article in which a conservative Anglican author blames Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) for the present claims of the gay movement or other expressions of “identity politics”! Schleiermacher was one of the leading lights of German Romanticism reacting away from the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism in the direction of “liberalism” and a better balance between the human individual and the collectivity. One might as well blame Christ for the ills of the world as power and the will force out loving-kindness and compassion! Abusus non tollit usum!

The “trolls” who caused trouble in my previous blog, also deleted in 2012, have largely disappeared in the context of the Bergoglio / “Padlock” Roche regime. For that I am grateful, and I have been able to learn my own lessons.

This blog attracts the same numbers of readers each day as over the years, generally a couple of hundred to double or triple that when I write an article that appeals to the curious or the polemical. Each reader will (or will not) find what is of interest to him or her. Many things have changed in my own life.