From my isolation as an Anglican Catholic priest here in north-western France, I am discovering a different notion of Christianity. It is plain that if I stick up a sign outside my house saying “Anglican Catholic Church” and advertising a time of Mass, the first question is who I am trying to attract. Local French people? The local English diaspora? All the people I meet here are atheists, one exception being someone’s wife who is secretly a Buddhist. A place open to the public has to have facilities for the disabled including special toilets. My non-standard staircase would be considered as unsafe – and I am very careful with it myself. It is either very old or a complete botch-job. My tiny chapel is upstairs, so it is fine as a private chapel. If anyone comes to me asking for a public Mass (this hasn’t happened), then I would have to ask him or her to come up with the money to rent or buy a building that would be suitable as a public place of worship. This situation brings me to reflect whether the Christian Church means something other than numbers of people who don’t know each other, and what being a priest means in a situation in which Christianity has reached the end of its life – or has to continue in a different way.

What if I re-converted to Roman Catholicism? Well, it would be the end of my priesthood, since I was ordained a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, and incurred a “perpetual irregularity” for the delict of schism. That is what canon law says. We went into all this when I was in the Traditional Anglican Communion and Archbishop Hepworth, in more or less the same canonical irregularity thought that Pope Benedict’s project of Anglican ordinariates was about him and his “500,000 faithful”. There were some violent arguments on the internet, and I had to come to terms with the reality. Well, how about being a humble Roman Catholic layman? Maybe, if I were to go and live in a town… With the traditionalists or the local parish? For me, there is nothing positive about submitting to the Archons of this world, whether in politics or the institutional clergy.

I discover that many laymen without canonical irregularities are expressing their tiredness with the institutional churches and congregations of people who are strangers to each other. Without having formed any formal movement, there are minds like Rupert Sheldrake, Mark Vernon who for some reason left the Anglican priesthood, the old Oxford Inklings like C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield, Paul Kingsnorth who became Orthodox, David Bentley Hart (brother of one of our priests in the US) who also became Orthodox, and last but not least – Michael Martin. I have read articles and listened to interviews on YouTube, and a pattern is emerging. We might occasionally experience beauty and inspiration at an Orthodox Liturgy, Choral Evensong in an English cathedral, sailing along the north Brittany coast, doing one’s own garden, going for a walk in the country in fine weather, watching birds and wild animals, the possibilities are endless. These are individual experiences, and seem to contradict the social and collective notion of the Church which is inculcated into our minds. I have lived this contradiction for many years. Should I give up Christianity as something impossible and ultimately irrational, become a “none” or join another religion. There aren’t too many of those in the French countryside?

Yesterday evening, I went to join the people at the Café Associatif in my village. Most of us were English, but not forming a “ghetto” against the French. I am quite fascinated by what motivates people to come and buy a house and earn a living in rural France. The accents are clearly “working class” Yorkshire and West Country. They came in search of freedom and individual expression. I have been on the European continent, between France, Switzerland and Italy, for more than forty years. Some of those other men and married couples have been here for a while and make great efforts to learn French and integrate. I bring up this subject because I heard the opinions of the Yorkshireman and the one from Bristol that we were living in the last times before we would all become extinct from overheat. I recognised the climate-apocalyptic ideology as it has influenced nearly all of us, except that the temperatures in Spain last week were not 60°C but more like 40°C or high thirties. I know that if I asked these people whether they believed in God, we would only start discussing the scandals of the institutional Church and its hypocrisy. What we dealing with is a profound nihilism and conviction that we are all evil and deserve to die. Hope is abolished, cancelled with the last remnants of culture. I try to be nice with these people, but I live on another planet. I still live in the ideas of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Romanticism!

As a priest, I was unaffected by the Covid lockdowns, since I was celebrating Mass at home in a private chapel. Over the past few years, I have read about the scandals of cardinals, bishops and priests abusing children and young mean and women. There just seems to be a lack of proportion about being canonically irregular for “schism” and these enormous crimes of those who make the laws – and enforce them. After the downfall of Archbishop Hepworth and his eventual death, I joined the Anglican Catholic Church in the hands of Bishop Damien Mead in England. It was decided that I and a priest living in the Netherlands should be transferred to the Patrimony of the Metropolitan, under the direct jurisdiction of Archbishop Mark Haverland. I remain so to this day, in good standing, and with no tensions. The reality on the ground is living in this place in the world that is spiritually arid, a dry and infertile desert, but with a legitimate canonical status as a priest. For that I am grateful and remain loyal.

So the Church is above all a spiritual and mystical communion in experience, faith, balancing individuality and relationships with superiors and brethren. It can seem fragile but at the same time stable and strong. It is a framework, like the skeleton of bones in a human body. It gives form and structure, but calls us to adult self-reliance and the capacity to be a Novalis – “one who clears new ground”. I am not willing to throw away this link with the Church, but at the same time, I am unable to minister in the same way as a priest in the USA in a small town and neighbourhood “planting a church”. The Church has a social structure, but as such is compromised with this world. Michael Martin quoted the French Jewish mystic and philosopher Simone Weil:

I am well aware that the Church must inevitably be a social structure; otherwise it would not exist. But in so far as it is a social structure, it belongs to the Prince of this World. It is because it is an organ for the preservation and transmission of truth that there is an extreme danger for those who, like me, are excessively open to social influences. For in this way what is purest and what is most defiling look very much the same, and confused under the same words, make an almost undecomposable mixture.

It is interesting to consider the old Celtic Church far away from the Empire. It wove the Christian message and mystery into the paganism of the country. It lived in the wilds and the countryside. Does that not sound familiar to me? I quote again from the Michael Martin article:

As H.J. Massingham observed, the early Celtic and British churches were relics left from the time before “Christendom began to depart from Christianity.”

Unlike Michael Martin, I have no family, no captive congregation of wife and children. Is this a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. It is tempting to want to found something like a community of “new Christians”, but such an act would contain the seed of its destruction. I forget to mention the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer who advocated a “religionless Christianity” because he was utterly devastated by the collaboration of his institutional church with something as evil as Hitler’s Nazism. He faced the gallows in a concentration camp and found peace and freedom in death. “Religionless Christianity” can be dangerous, simple secularism and denial of the spiritual in the name of humanism. However, something spiritual remains in this asceticism. I was brought to think of men in post-war French Catholicism like the Abbé Pierre who dedicated his life to the homeless and Guy Gilbert, the prêtre des loubards, long-haired and dressed in motorcycling attire, helping young men get off drugs. They were judged for being original, but they are remembered when men of the establishment were  forgotten.

We live in an extremely polarised world between political opinions and religious beliefs. One of the severest scourges is “identity politics” to group answers to “Who am I and what is the purpose of my life?” and their opposition to other points of view. For example, there are clashes between radical feminists and LGBT-XYZ groups. It is heart rending.

Can we not simply be ourselves. Sometimes we have to be private and secretive, like the Christians in the early Church with the disciplina arcani. We have above all to read and add our own writings to the treasure house of arcane Christianity or simply the spirit that Christ left us and that no church could destroy. We need a wisdom tradition with what the mystics, philosophers, poets, artists and musicians left us. These are all things that came from the souls of individual persons, not from collectivities. We have to read and study instead of burning books, discovering Thomas Traherne, the American Transcendentalists, the Cambridge Platonists and so many more. We in the Anglican tradition need to refer to the medieval Church, yet with the mystical traditions intended by the first Reformers before evangelical zeal turned to bitter hatred.

Our understanding of the word tradition should be deeper and separate from corruption, bigotry, rigidity, “true church” ideology, identity – but rather with the spiritual and the arcane. I would welcome a return to the disciplina arcani, reserving what is most holy and symbolic to the initiated, and offering something like Quaker worship to newcomers and who would effectively be catechumens. That would be assuming a congregation. For those of us in France, we can only be good and kind human beings. Allow people to express their worries (possibly secret desires for death) of the end of the world, and perhaps throw out a word that might cause them to think.

A part of Romanticism was Weltschmerz, expressing “a deep sadness about the insufficiency of the world (“tiefe Traurigkeit über die Unzulänglichkeit der Welt”)”. I feel deeply for the climate-apocalyptic people, but in regard to the most selfish and greedy of this world rather than simple weather conditions. Perhaps this inconsolable desire can be an instrument for suggesting a spiritual solution rather than a political one. It is a part of our maturing and becoming adults having put aside childish things.

Can the Church live without a priesthood and the Sacramental life that flows from it? My personal experience is that I am a priest and can celebrate Mass that is as valid as the Church I belong to. Lay Christians without access to a priest will often say the Office and the Mass of the Catechumens, the first part up to the Gospel and the Creed, and will unite themselves with a Mass being celebrated by a priest in some other place. I am brought to think of the Petite Eglise in France and the беспоповцы Old Believers in Russia. They became sects and victims of the worst of human nature, but somehow survived for centuries. There are priestless sedevacantist Roman Catholics, especially in America, called “home-aloners“. They show the reductio ad absurdam of canonical legalism in refusing the ministrations of irregular clergy in a world where the canonical Church is extinct. We really have to learn to let some things go, in order that we may again find what Christ really intended all that time ago. Each of these groups or tendencies has some incomplete inkling of Christianity’s future.

What is the Church? It is not an empire, a political party, a humanitarian organisation, a bureaucracy. I break with the post-Tridentine theologians who affirmed the visibility of the Church. The Church is not visible, though it can become incarnate in some visible signs – the principle of the sacramental mystery. The reality is simply divine, meaning the universal consciousness in which we all participate by our very being. It may seem to be a Protestant idea, but not all Protestant ideas are wrong!

We just have to read, read many books and articles, study, think and write. The written word is something that can remain long after our bodily deaths. What we write might be read by those who follow us, and they in turn might write and give ideas. The communion of the Church is there. It is not for us to negotiate or make it. Bureaucratic ecumenism is futile and has never done anything concrete. I have no conclusion to offer, but rather that this road of discovery continues.