Having entertained a friend of mine for a few days, this person has left many things in my mind to reflect. He is a priest under Bishop Alistair Bate who extends his ministry over many different kinds of liberal and independent Catholicism. I consider my own situation of being in the Anglican Catholic Church (Original Province) which can seem almost “mainstream” in the English-speaking countries. I live in France, where the word Anglicanism is understood as Protestantism without any consideration of the high-church and Oxford movements in history in the Church of England. I am also friends with a priest who served many years ago in the ACC, who returned to the Church of England and is about to retire having reached the canonical age. His view of the future of Christianity seems, frankly, quite nihilist. What can I say?

It is a confusing world in which many of us cannot relate to the Anglican and Roman Catholic establishments for one reason or another. We may be canonically impeded, not up to their institutional standards – or we no longer recognise Christianity in them or any scope for our spiritual aspirations. This is the way of many souls who sought their Blue Flower and never found it, or were not ready to face solitude and ostracism from others. I have read John Plummer’s The Many Paths of the Independent Sacramental Movement. He has also been interviewed on a podcast at Answering the call with John Plummer. We might not agree with everything he says, but we discern a different kind of thought distinguishing him from the crooks who sell exorcisms and ordinations, and from the Patriarch-Metropolitan of the Bicycle Shed to express it at its most cynical.

Many who leave the “mainstream” Churches are faced with the choice of giving up, converting to what they have been brought to believe is the “one true church” or to find a new definition and way of living Catholic or Sacramental Christianity. Whilst reading Alan Jacobs’ The Year of Our Lord 1943 – Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, I was particularly impressed by the reflections of a French Jewish woman by the name of Simone Weil. This book is centred on the spiritual and philosophical condition of mankind during the second World War. Because this dimension was far from acquired by the end of the war in 1945, we suffer the consequences to this day of consumerism, materialism and over-reliance on technology. Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others sought to outline a new vision for the post-war future in which I lived as a little child in the 1960’s. A capital word associated with Simone Weil was the notion of being a Christian as an outsider.

Weil went to live in Marseilles in 1941 where she met and befriended a Dominican priest whose influence shaped her thought and spirituality. She died in a sanatorium in August 1943 having spent her life heroically working for the poor and the victims of war. Perhaps it is after her death that she had the most influence through her posthumously published essays and letters. She could never accept Baptism on account of a notion of solidarity with those on the outside of the Church. She was also repelled by many inconsistencies in the institutional Church like certain saints having approved of the Inquisition. She could not relate to the collective thinking and feeling of the Church through her self-awareness of being too easy influenced. Though I am baptised and ordained, I feel very close to what this young woman must have gone through. She was unable to love the Church, but she loved God, Christ and the Catholic faith. She was enchanted by the liturgy and the beauty of church buildings, but there remained something she could not accept. Her writings need to be read to understand her particular sanctity and desire for God.

Another example of the outsider is Pierre de Calan’s Cosmas and the Love of God. This is a novel, a fascinating study of a spiritual crisis of the sensitive and young Cosmas who believes that he has a vocation to become a Trappist monk. He has to face the reality of a monastery that works as well as prays, of other human beings whose nature seems at times to hide their contemplative vocation. Sanctity is not perfection. He is sent home several times by the Novice Master. The final time he attempts to return to the community, he dies on the way. After much debating, the community decides to bury him in a monastic habit as a novice. It is an extraordinary and moving book by someone who himself had no first-hand experience of the monastic life. Cosmas died an outsider as he sought his Blue Flower.

These movements and aspirations of the soul are often labelled as instability, a label that absolves the institutional churchman of all responsibility and care for certain persons. Reading works like Peter Anson’s Bishops at Large, we come across many personalities to whom the label unstable is applied. Vilatte and Mathew are two prime examples of dreams that corresponded with no reality. Peter Anson, as a convert to Roman Catholicism, was not always kind with his subjects, apart from Dr Friedrich Heiler (1892-1967) who belonged –

to another class from that of most of the bishops mentioned in this book. He is a world-famous scholar and the author of several widely read books.

Peter Anson did not show opposition to the incoming tendencies of Vatican II and “progressivism”. Having been a Lutheran pastor, Heiler was consecrated an independent bishop in the Vilatte succession. What I discern in this and other studies on the subject of independent bishops is the conflict between independence and the need for an identity label of some kind. We can, with Peter Anson, trash just about anyone who does not either conform to an institutional church or give up Christianity altogether. We are confronted with the old notion of Extra ecclesiam nulla salus – but it depends on whether the Church in question is the Pope and the Code of Canon Law or something more mystic, spiritual and sacramental.

The more any of us resembles one of the mainstream institutional churches, the more difficult it is to describe and justify ourselves. “We are like N. except…“. William Shakespeare in his play Hamlet famously said “The lady doth protest too much, methinks“. How does such-and-such a bishop or priest explain himself to those whose only experience of Christianity is in the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England or the Methodists, Baptists, etc? Some talk of inclusivity like ordaining women or giving Communion to the divorced and remarried. Nowadays, the mainstream churches are doing the same thing, so the keywords become tradition and the old ways. One fails to answer the question of who he is called to be without criticising and copying a given institutional church.

Unfortunately, independent clergy for the most part defy explanation. Catholicism, to most people, means Roman Catholicism, the Pope and the Vatican, and the local dioceses and parishes. Even adding adjectives does little to overcome the prejudice and confusion. In my own experience, I spent several years as a “schismatic apostate” from Roman Catholicism, but still trying to live those ideals as a half-hearted sedevacantist. I finally joined the Traditional Anglican Communion, a large continuing Anglican body, and laid down my episcopate from Bishop Luc Strijmeersch. As a result of the débâcle surrounding Archbishop Hepworth’s attempt to become the main element of Benedict XVI’s ordinariates, I joined the ACC, firstly under the Diocese of the UK and was then transferred to the Archbishop-Metropolitan’s personal jurisdiction for reasons of living in continental Europe. I suppose I would be “semi-mainstream” through belonging to a relatively well-known institutional church. But what if that Church broke up for some reason and I was left an “orphan” as happened to me in 2012? I suppose I would be expected to go sailing and say that I care nothing about Christianity unless I were willing to be a tithing layman with no real connection at a parochial level. Would I be an outsider like Simone Weil?

This notion might help with a new direction for a few independent priests and bishops. Two characters come to the fore, John Plummer (mentioned above) and John Treat who was at one time a Cistercian monk and now engages in academic work and fine cuisine. I have great esteem for these two men who are exploring a spiritual world that differs from imitation Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Anglicans who spend their time arguing for their independent existence. I call myself an Anglican because I belong to a continuing Anglican church. I do believe that it is justified to use the titles Catholic or Orthodox generically to describe our theological and sacramental commitments, but this seems to be in the perspective of some kind of “church planting” which is more relevant in the USA than over here in Europe. Calling myself Anglican will not impress most French people, nor will traipsing around in a cassock. I remain in my catacomb. Without trying to build some kind of community or parish, there are plenty of ways the priestly vocation is expressed, through study and teaching through writing, through humanitarian work as an “ordinary guy”, a contemplative ministry of invisible intercession – a vocation similar to that of Simone Weil who was not a priest.

Another aspect is stability – coming to terms with being what we are, ordinary guys with the spiritual gift of the priesthood and our devotion to serving Christ in very ordinary and down-to-earth ways. This is the lesson of Cosmas, as I mentioned above. In the independent sacramental world, many unsatisfied souls “church-hop” because the objects of ideal desires are never found.

Most independent clergy seem to have  a preference for the western liturgical tradition with an affinity for Orthodox theology and mysticism, but not all. Again, my experience is not that of the Americans. I have been a convert to Roman Catholicism and situated myself in the world of its own traditionalist dissidents. I am thankful to be far away from the ideology to return to my own origins as a “cradle” Anglican and the wealth of forgotten inspirations.

It would seem that a part of my ministry is to “outsider” priests and bishops. Perhaps some might hope to get me “under their jurisdiction” to add to the numbers of priests and names of chapels. The person who recently spent some days with me was more interested in intelligent and profound conversation to find something he had not thought of before. I have little contact with “official” clergy, especially here in France. I recently visited the Basilica of Evron, a beautiful medieval abbey church, but I felt like a ghost seeing one of the priests (conservative Communauté Saint-Martin) in conversation with a family whose little baby he had just baptised. I left as silently and unseen as when I entered. Simone Weil again?

The independent movement is a mixed bag, as mentioned in many books of decades ago and our own times. Those men are capable of new and innovative ways of thinking and imagining possibilities. It is a vision of Catholicism that is theologically orthodox whilst offering a church based on spirituality, mysticism, personal pilgrimage – more than authority and canon law. Through the apostolic priesthood, it participates in the universal and eternal Church through the liturgy and the Sacraments. There are cranks and crooks, as there are in the “official” institutional churches, but there are also men of God, visionaries.