It is now a very long time since I was a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, and I was finally away from that situation in late 1997 after my stay at Triors Abbey. I wandered into the sedevacantist vagante scene and that turned out to be an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Between conservative Roman Catholicism and sedevacantism, it sufficed to return to Anglican ecclesiology which concords with the old Dutch Old Catholic view. I was also reinforced in my intuition by contrasting the rural parish against the bureaucracy of the elites – exactly like in modern politics.

I have been back in Continuing Anglicanism for twenty years, eight years in the TAC under Archbishop Hepworth and the rest in the ACC. I live far away from its parish life, but I try to get to the Diocesan Synod in England most years. Where I am in France, it is a world of laity without priests and priests without laity. I have long ceased to bash my head against the wall, and live more or less a semi-hermit life. I have gone the way of living alone and self-sufficiency, fixing and repairing things myself (as much as possible).

I keep informed about the situation in the RC Church, aware that much of the propaganda is as foggy as politics. It is best to stay away and let them get on with it. As one drifts further and further away from institutional churches, the temptation can be agnosticism, atheism or materialism. Paradigms have to change as questions have to asked about what the real message of Christ is, and how it can make sense by being above reason but not against it. Christianity must not be a mass ideology but a real life of love and meaning between the soul of the human person and God.

I have always been intrigued by humanism and the personalism of men like Berdyaev, Jacques Maritain and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) among many others. Religion that aligns itself with collectivism, socialism and totalitarianism repels me and many others, as does theocracy. Fascism (Mussolini) was defined as the State over the person, and personalism reacted both against Marxist Communism and various forms of nationalist socialism, against the Machine. The roots of personalism are found in Renaissance humanism and Romanticism as the imagination and the heart of the human person was re-emphasised against extreme rationalism, especially in its collective form.

As with many words and labels, personalism and humanism mean different things. It needs to be a wide and generous worldview, seeking what is in common between different thinkers. It is a question of emphasis of the person over the collective, uniqueness and inviolability of the person. The person should be the ontological and epistemological starting point of thought. I won’t go into a complete philosophical treatise on this subject other than seeing the way out of the present agony of modern politics and institutional religion.

As well as being myself, I am bound to be conscious of duties to be good to others, respect their needs and rights, and observe the law that is (or should be) based on the Ten Commandments. One thing the Anglican way has given us is the Via Media, the way of moderation – not only between RC sacramentalism and hierarchical authority and the Protestant authority of the Bible, but precisely between Ich und Non-Ich, the relationship between myself and the other, be it God or the same divinity in others. Ideal Anglicanism and Old Catholicism represent, or should represent, the way of Christian life in parishes and monasteries before its corruption by authoritarianism (Pope or Bible) or assimilation into modern ideologies like “woke”.

I am ethnically English, but I feel an emotional and spiritual attachment to France, Germany and Italy, and to other countries I have visited. We all have something in common in our aspirations to Christian humanism and the dignity of the person. I have not forgotten that the only thing that convinced me of the truth of Christ was beauty, both natural and artistic. Music is my Magisterium and Bible – though I became very fond of the prophetic and Wisdom books together with the New Testament, leaving behind the stories of some kind of Archon usurping God and breathing fire on those who did not make their sacrifice correctly !

Modern politics and ecclesiastical bureaucracy has convinced me that the truth is not there, only the machinations of evil people. We must come to something positive – beauty for priesthood, priesthood meaning something other than clericalism. The institutional churches of Rome, Canterbury and elsewhere, have been too fixed on authority. This authority represents power and money for those with vested interests, and express hatred for the independent-minded. Clericalism is not a vice of those who have received the Tonsure to some of the way towards the Episcopate, but of cliques of clergy and elite laity. Bishops and bureaucracies are complacent in their certitudes, watch their entire systems die, but yet put the blame elsewhere. Cuius regio, eius religio, the Latin phrase which literally means “whose realm, his religion”, no longer pays homage to Christian kings but to what is compatible to secular, socialist and globalist narratives. However, none of us can do anything about the countries we live in or the vast ecclesiastical systems.

I do not believe it is all hopeless, not if we take care of ourselves, those we love, our friends and family. My own ministry as a priest goes through reading, writing and music. It also means perseverance with the liturgical life, to celebrate the Mass and the Office with attention and enough recollection to resist distractions. I belong to a Church (Anglican Catholic Church) that still has its heart in the right place, resisting both secular bureaucracy and populist fanaticism. I live far away from my Ordinary and his parishes in the USA. The Patrimony of the Metropolitan is designed for us stragglers not living in a territory with a diocese and parishes. However, we have some of the intimacy of a south Italian diocese before Vatican II and the movement of Paul VI in the 1960’s towards larger and more bureaucratic jurisdictions.

One priest who has had a huge influence on me was Fr Julien Bacon (1920 – 2015). He was ordained in 1945 by the Bishop of Arras and most of his ministry in the north of France was in teaching. He did everything he could to help in parish work and scouting. As things deteriorated in French Catholicism, he gave his attention to the traditionalist movement and Opus Sacerdotale. This association of priests carries the motto Doctrina, Fortitudo, Pietas. It was founded in 1964 by Canon Catta, professor at the Catholic University of Antwerp, a Benedictine oblate of Fontgombault, with some priest friends. The members of this association to defend the Catholic priesthood are diocesan priests, religious and finally lay faithful who seek moral and spiritual support. Canon Catta was succeeded as prior by Fr Lourdelet and Fr Julien Bacon. The present prior is Fr François Scrive, parish priest of Belloy-en-France, not very far from Paris.

Some of the members of this association founded the Institute of Christ the King, to which was given the Villa Martelli near Florence in Italy where the monks of Fongombault had unsuccessfully attempted a monastic foundation. I joined the seminary in 1990 and got to know Fr Bacon who taught moral and pastoral theology and was available to seminarians for confession and spiritual direction. He was a gentle kind of priest, very much of the old school but completely in the lines of the post-war pastoral movement. That did not always endear him with the more reactionary elements of our seminary. He continued to help out in parishes around Beuvry until the end of his life. Fr Bacon also wrote several books, the most well-known being on religious persecution in France and Trois entretiens sur le Sacerdoce.

He represented a very French notion of the priestly life based on the incarnation of Christ, something like the society of St Sulpice founded in Paris in 1641 by Jean-Jacques Olier de Verneuil to improve standards of theological education and moral conduct. The Sulpicians set the standard for seminaries to which most traditional societies of priests adhere to this day. Without political fanaticism, it works well and gives a lot of stability to a young man discerning his way ahead towards the priesthood. Too systematised and rigid, the way is opened to sectarian deviations and psychological / spiritual problems. In medio stat virtus.

People in the parishes expect the priest to talk about God, give clarifications about the faith, teach them to pray, visit the sick and be men of God. If they want politics or sociology, then they would need to turn to someone else, perhaps the secular teacher in the village school who has a few more notions than the Mayor who is a farmer or a garage mechanic. The greatest example of the village priest was Saint Jean-Marie Vianney, the Curé d’Ars. “Show me the way to Ars and I will show you the way to Heaven”. This was a strong wellspring of parish spirituality as must have existed in fifteenth and sixteenth-century England, where the Cornish resisted as did the people of the Vendée and Brittany against the Revolution. It is the spirit of the Chouans. The heart of France was also expressed by the Résistance against the Nazi occupation from 1940-1944. I have been personally asked to bless the grave of a young man whose only crime under the Occupation was to have been caught with a hunting rifle and shot for it. There are some obnoxious people here, like everywhere, but the heart is that of a lion !

I spent time in country parishes, firstly Le Chamblac in Normandy where a former Anglican become a Roman Catholic got out from the stuffy English diocesan scene and was ordained a priest in Bayeux. This was Fr Montgomery-Wright – see With the passing years… which led me to write about my other experiences of French country parish life in Parochial Idealism with its traditionalist slant and resistance to the local diocesan bureaucracy. I was also motivated by a Romantic notion of finding a place that had escaped the “revolution” and had escaped the vicissitudes of history. This particular Blue Flower would not be found in this world but somewhat transposed my interest in the Sarum liturgy and the pre-Reformation world. We will not reverse history, but we can recapture something of its spirit. This is the positive message I wish to convey to you today.

Though I have no parish, I am constantly contacted by men who are discerning their vocation, in which case I can only refer them to my Ordinary or Bishop Damien Mead in England. Of course, if they wish, they can visit my “old country presbytery” a house that is free of modern minimalist renovations. I am glad to have a hierarchy over me, and I am thus protected from people with hidden intentions like wanting money or letters that might help them get a visa into England from the African country where they are unhappy. I go sailing several times a year, sometimes with a group, but most have shown absolutely no interest in “religion” – so I don’t push it on them. For the resisting French, the Church collaborated with the forces of evil that oppressed them in the 1940’s. It is still in the collective memory !

I can also try to make my experience of the “pre-reformation” Church concur with many things I read on the Internet. I have my ethnical roots in northern England and empathise with the people of Brittany and the Vendée. Their culture is formed by the sea, as mine is too. I have seen many problems caused by the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the French Revolution. We must seek to emphasise the ideal even though it is not a part of our present historical period like secular modernism and populism.

Anglicanism has given us the via media, or otherwise expressed in medio stat virtus. This is not a compromise between two bad and evil positions but a search for something fresh and new in its adoption of Christianity. Anglicanism is not alone, because parallel movements can be found in all European countries. This way of moderation excludes fanaticism and irrationalism, seeking to offer teaching to rebuild faith and reverence like in those old country churches of Brittany or Burgundy.

Living in a Church depends on having a priesthood for which bishops are necessary both for the validity of the ordination and the legitimacy of its exercise in the ministry. This is a way of true renewal – Novalis – new land. It remains in the spirit of exploring places where we have never been.

Our identity as Catholic Christians is not one of labouring under bureaucratic and despotic authority, but finding the truth in our freedom and yearning (Sehnsucht). It is also not one of playing the game of the Adversary by instilling fear and anxiety in the minds of the gullible. One scenario is an imminent chastisement (nuclear war or the earth being struck by an asteroid) on account of sex outside marriage, homosexuality, abortion, etc. Like the rapture and end-of-the-world threatened by fundamentalist Protestants, it never happens as predicted. There are also predictions of a “three-days darkness” during which the household is bound to have a pair of blessed candles, which would not run out as opposed to other candles or electric lights (even with batteries). As for victims of cults, some have been psychologically traumatised and needed therapy. Invariably they lose all faith in God, the good going out with the bad… If Christianity is to survive and have new meaning in the future, this kind of junk has to go.

There are ways around the cognitive dissonance and irrational thinking. The first thing is to be self-reliant and rational human beings with the idea that consciousness precedes matter. Then we need beauty like music (“classical” of course), art and nature to nourish and inspire us or to perform on instruments or paint on canvas, etc. It is up to ourselves. If we discard everything that is spiritual and we become materialists and atheists, then we have to assume the consequences. They cannot bring satisfaction for long.

We have to become simple like the priests and farmers of yore, discover how Piers Ploughman learned his Pater noster.

Teach us delight in simple things,
The mirth that has no bitter springs;
Forgiveness free of evil done,
And love to all men ‘neath the sun. Rudyard Kipling