Route du Sable

Posted on Tuesday, 1 July, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The event has happened. It was a long drive to the tip of Brittany, and the weather turned unstable only two days before. I camped at the extremely welcoming campsite of Rodaven in Châteaulin from Friday night until this morning, for a very reasonable price. I have already explained the plan. On Saturday morning, I arrived at Rosnoën and found a nice place to park my van and trailer.

The heavens opened, and down poured a diluvian rain from a thunderstorm cell above us. I waited about half an hour in my van for the rain to stop. I was ready for rain with my waterproofs. That was the last time it rained for the whole sail of the day. The heavens opened again after our boats were moored at Port Launay and we had our evening around a meal and traditional Brittany folk music.

Here is the official association website soon to be updated with photos – Route du Sable. There is a Facebook page with links to pages full of photos, videos and press articles. The event, with more than seventy boats and two hundred participants, was enormously successful. Truly it shows another side to sailing than racing or having too much money for our own good.

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Berdyaev and Religious Freedom

Posted on Tuesday, 24 June, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

During my quiet week, I leave you with this meditation on freedom by the great Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, one of my favourites. I scanned this text from the book I have owned for many years. I suspect that most Christians are not free, but addicted to a religious system that distorts their perception and enslaves their intelligence. It is the problem I encounter all the time, and the most cogent accusation made against Christianity by atheists. Is our faith an illness or an expression of our spiritual freedom at its most sublime?

I continue to get my translating orders done and my boating stuff ready for the weekend. I’ll leave the comment box open, but read and meditate the text rather than jump into a reaction. What you write will make the difference between an addict in the Matrix and a free soul soaring with the Angels and the Saints even before dying and passing on. The choice is yours.

* * *

Nicholas Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit, translated from Russian by Oliver Fielding Clarke, London 1935.

Does Christianity recognize freedom of conscience and religious toleration ?

This is a question with a history written in blood and tragedy. The Christian world has gone astray. While fire and the sword, the most hideous of passions, and all the extremity of violence have found employment in the service of the religion of love and freedom, it has been left to men utterly indifferent to all religion to defend freedom of conscience and religious toleration.

For one who believes in nothing and is indifferent to truth it is easy to be tolerant towards every belief. But the real problem is how to reconcile an ardent faith and devotion to sovereign truth with a toleration for erroneous belief and a denial of that truth ? Is not religious toleration always a proof of indifference ? So at any rate those Christians think who deny liberty of conscience. The defence of the spirit of toleration has become the prerogative of liberalism and of a humanism which possesses no religious faith. Freedom of conscience is affirmed as a formal principle having no relation to any positive truth whatsoever. Religious men believing in a positive truth free from all error have only defended freedom of conscience when their own faith was persecuted and oppressed. The Roman Catholics, who are the least inclined to recognize the principle of freedom of conscience, appealed in Russia to that principle when the Roman Catholic faith was oppressed and its rights restricted. Christianity in the person of the apologists and doctors of the Church during the period of the persecutions before Constantine the Great maintained the cause of freedom of conscience in matters of religion. But when Christianity became the dominant religion we hear no more of these arguments in favour of religious freedom, and, on the contrary, we find appeals to force against heretics and dissenters and to the intervention of the sword of the State in questions of-faith. This, then, is how the question arises historically and it has been a fruitful source of lying hypocrisy and a gross utilitarianism.

But how are we to put this question of religious freedom from the Christian point of view ? How can it be stated in its inner essence and free from all human interests and from all the positivism and utilitarianism which are historically interwoven with Christianity ? Christianity is exclusive and cannot tolerate any approach to error. It cannot be indifferent as to whether men prefer a lie to the truth, because it cannot recognize them as being of equal value. A formal liberalism which is indifferent to truth is alien to Christianity, which cannot therefore defend freedom of conscience by recourse to its arguments. Christian liberty is not the formal and meaningless liberty of the natural man ; it is not a right as in humanistic liberalism ; it is an obligation and a duty to God, and if Christians have to maintain the cause of freedom of conscience it certainly cannot be by appealing to liberalism, and to the formal and juridical arguments which are employed by a world which is indifferent to faith and truth of every kind, and which clings to the freedom of untruth and evil. Those who deny the very existence of the religious consciousness cannot defend the liberty of religious thought except in a purely external fashion, for it is only useful from their point of view as a protection for their own right to atheism and untruth and to preserve their tranquil enjoyment of error. But is is only in Christianity that freedom of conscience has any inner meaning or religious justification. Christianity demands toleration for the inner experience and spiritual development of the human soul, because freedom is part of the Christian faith, and because Christianity is the religion of freedom. God Himself is infinitely tolerant towards the evil of the world. He bears with the greatest of wrong-doers for the sake of freedom. Christianity asserts freedom of conscience materially and in no formal sense, and it does this, not because it is indifferent to truth nor because it is tolerant of untruth, but rather because it believes in truth which is the revelation of the freedom of the human spirit. Christ opened up for us a freedom of the spirit which knows no limits and sealed it with His blood for all eternity. Faith in Calvary is faith in freedom.

The demand for freedom of religious thought in Christianity is far more profound than it is in liberal, humanist, and non-religious circles. Every form of coercion of the human soul in matters of faith is a betrayal of Christ, a denial of the very meaning of the Christian religion and of the nature of faith itself. Man has to be tested through freedom in order that he may know how to win the victory freely over the things which try him. Man must seek diligently for the truth. The denial of religious freedom, fanatical intolerance, and coercion in things spiritual all spring from the idea of salvation by compulsion, an idea opposed to the whole meaning of Christianity. God Himself could have saved the whole human race by force had He wanted to, and in a far more radical fashion than the hierarchy or the State could ever do. But God does not wish to impose salvation upon anyone, for it is quite contrary to His plan for man and for the world. God awaits man’s free response to His call, He wants the unforced love of His other self. God might say as man does, ” You cannot love to order.” Force cannot open the way to Paradise.

The idea of salvation by compulsion, which has had such fatal consequences in history, is due to a false identification of the Kingdom of God with the kingdom of Caesar, by which the spiritual world is degraded to the level of the natural. In the kingdom of Caesar coercion and slavery are everywhere in evidence, whereas the spiritual world, the Kingdom of God, is an order of liberty. Nobody can be saved by coercion because salvation presupposes an act of freedom and because it is the inner illumination of freedom.

The history of Christianity is full of acts of violence, but these form no part of the spiritual order of things, nor have they any connection with the inner history of Christianity; they belong rather to the social activity of mankind and are determined by the prevailing condition of the natural man. Though mediaeval Christianity witnessed only too many acts of violence and bloodshed, Christianity itself is not responsible for these things but rather human nature, which was only being Christianized with some difficulty. The things for which the Catholic Church has been commonly blamed should rather be laid at the door of the cruelty of human nature. But the question of religious freedom is not a historical problem, it is the question of the very essence of the Christian faith. From this point of view religious toleration is not the tolerance of the erroneous opinions of man, but a feeling of love and solicitude for every human soul.

Man comes to God by many arduous ways and through much suffering, through the experience of life’s tragedy, and through spiritual struggle. Trials beset his path in those personal experiences which belong to each individual alone. None of us can claim to possess truth in its fulness while regarding our neighbours as completely in error. Fulness and completeness are to be found in God alone, and all we can grasp is but a fragment of the truth, for only a few stray beams of its light become visible to us. The restriction and denial of freedom of conscience means the mechanization and the materialization of the religious life and the denial of the spirit and spiritual life which are essentially free. The present-day revolt of man against coercion in matters of faith and religion is completely justifiable. This revolt can and does bring in its train certain fatal consequences and may mean a loss of faith, yet it contains an inner moment of truth, namely the truth of freedom.

It is impossible to build the Kingdom of God by force ; it can only be created in freedom. It was the use of force which brought to an end the various historic theocracies and their fall was providential. Without man and without human freedom God cannot and will not establish His Kingdom, which is of necessity human as well as divine in character ; and here we have a truth which man must pursue to the very end. Nothing in this world can arrest its progress because God Himself wills that man should completely fulfil his freedom and come through liberty into the divine fulness. Man must pass through the tragedy of freedom in order to reach its final issue in the freedom of Christ, that is, in the third kind of freedom. Freedom is man’s fate and destiny, however paradoxical that may appear. The fanaticism which inspires to violence is only a form of madness which proceeds from the incapacity of the natural man for receiving into himself the truth of the spirit and of Christianity in all its divine fulness. Fanaticism means the imprisoning of the spirit within the passions of the soul and the body, the stifling of the spiritual man by the natural, and it is in continual conflict with even the most elementary laws of spiritual hygiene. For when man nourishes hatred in the name of. love, when he has recourse to violence on behalf of freedom, he is quite clearly mad, and has lost his ” psychical” equilibrium as a result of his powerlessness to receive within himself the truth of Christianity. Nothing is more difficult for man than to accept the freedom of truth within himself and to remain faithful to it. His ideas become confused and his heart burns within him. The evil which he compasses appears to him to possess a good motive. Now it is true that the Greek world was certainly more balanced and less prone to violence than is the Christian world, but that was because it did not have to accept for itself the supreme truth of freedom. It is this truth which has proved to be too heavy a burden for humanity, and having remained for long unapprehended it has been the origin of hitherto unprecedented violence.

It is through the tragedy of freedom that Christian renaissance on a world scale will take place. The Christianity of the future will be a Christianity of the freedom of the spirit which has successfully passed through the trials of freedom by overcoming the temptation to refuse them. Christianity can be renewed not through opposition to that which is eternal, but through the birth of a new soul able to apprehend its immutable truth. This new soul can only accept a Christianity of the freedom of the spirit, for the bondage of the spirit and the tyranny and coercion from which it suffers is part of the kingdom of Antichrist. The freedom of the spirit has been the fundamental theme of Russian religious thought. Slavophiles maintained the freedom of Christianity, and the greatest apostle of it was Dostoievsky himself.

The problem of the freedom of the spirit lies at the very centre of the Christian consciousness, and the problems of evil and of redemption, and that of man and his creative powers, are closely connected with it. Creation is impossible under the dominant influence of an authoritarian mentality. Creative life cannot simply consist in obedience and submission to authority. It always presupposes the freedom of the spirit and is indeed the manifestation of this freedom. In creation something else besides humility always has its part to play, for, though humility is an indispensable moment of the spiritual life, it does not mean that there is no place at all for the daring of freedom. The denial of freedom means a curtailing of human individuality and the extinction of the spiritual life of man. Individuality revolts against transformation into an automaton. The idea of Christian freedom, considered fundamentally with all its consequences, presupposes the affirmation of freedom in all spheres of human creativity, in science, philosophy, and art, in social relationships, and in love. Coercion in these matters has no value whatever from the Christian point of view. In all spheres of creation the truth of Christ must be revealed in the very depths of liberty. Science, art, society, like the free love between man and woman, must serve the truth of Christ and must turn their creative forces towards God as the manifestation of a free love towards God. No outward limitations can be imposed on freedom of thought and feeling. The life of Christ must be born within them ; the void and non-being of evil and the nothingness of all forms of atheism must be clearly revealed. This is the line of development, through immanence, the only one which humanity can follow, which has brought it to the very climax of the trials and contradictions of culture. The final separation of the two kingdoms will take place along this line of freedom which will lead definitively either to God or to the devil.

And the time is coming, indeed it has already come, when freedom will be found only in Christianity, when the Church of Christ will defend the freedom of man against the violence of the kingdom of this world, that kingdom of Caesar which has now become definitely irreligious in character. This has already happened in Communism, which has destroyed the freedom of the spirit and denies personality. The denial of the freedom of the spirit is precisely the spirit of Antichrist whose coming will be marked by extreme tyranny and by the absolute autocracy of the powers of this world. Only in Christ’s Church will deliverance from this destructive tyranny, this very incarnation of the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor, be found. In the kingdom of Christ all power and all autocracy, whether individual or collective, are limited, for there only the power of truth and justice are recognized. The Christian spirit of freedom is directed against all tyranny, whether proceeding from “the left,” “the right,” or “the centre,” whether it be monarchist, aristocratic, democratic, socialist, or anarchist in character. It is not the same thing as the spirit of liberalism, which is always indifferent to truth, but it is that of sanctified freedom and the freedom of love. The search for the Kingdom of God is the manifestation of the freedom of the spirit. The Kingdom of God, which is above all the object of our search, is the kingdom of the spirit. In the spiritual world external tyranny and compulsion of every kind, besides that which results from division, are no more. To attain to the Kingdom of God is to pass into a spiritual world where everything differs from that which we find in this natural world. God will be all in all and freedom will triumph over force. To enter into the spiritual world man must make an act of freedom and heroism, and this must not be something which he accepts from without but rather that which he must discover in himself.

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A Nasty Aftertaste

Posted on Monday, 23 June, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Sometimes, we open a bottle of wine and begin to discover the liquid sealed inside the bottle for many years. We usually anticipate something out of this world as we sniff the cork and leave the bottle to breathe for a while. As the first glass is poured, we look at the colour, and then we swirl it around the glass. We take a first taste, and the vital thing about good wine is the aftertaste. It is what remains after the wine is swallowed and we concentrate on what we can still taste.

My postings about churches and seeking either respectability or unity for the sake of healing the divisions between Christians have proved to be provocative. Unfortunately, people lose control and the semi-anonymous come swooping in for the kill. I haven’t moderated posters because I believe in people being entitled to their opinion and getting discussions going. Some are quite “radical”. I prefer to learn from my late friend in Oxford, Dr Ray Winch, who was always polite and above all modest as a historian and academic. My own father taught me to avoid trying to be self-important, but rather to achieve in life and say nothing about it. I remember also my old parish priest in the parish of Bouloire, a stubborn and determined man, but so self-effacing and good with all. He said the old Mass to the end of his life.

I have several times been tempted to go to America for the sake of something like a “normal” ministry as a priest. Each time, something made me pull back, usually some kind of crankiness that would destroy the trust I had in a given person. I thought we English were the Perfidious Albion, and the French can be two-faced at times, but nothing compared with a number of persons who let me down outre Atlantique. Fortunately, the down-letting occurred before I made any irrevocable commitments! These things happen, and I have a way to avoid disappointments – be unambitious in life and don’t stick your neck out lest it get chopped off. Be self-effacing. It’s a good lesson to learn.

I have seen this with my reflections on Churches. If Christianity is discredited by division, then there’s not an awful lot left. One thing that endeared me to the Anglican Catholic Church is that it got its act together after the “bishops’ brawl” of the late 1990’s and is reserved in its dialogues with other Churches of the Continuum and elsewhere. Our bishops do have close relationships with other Churches, their clergy and local communities, but we do well to live these relationships as they come without being in a hurry for anything.

Ecclesiology and uniatism are subjects that are too sensitive. For a long time after the election of Pope Francis, things went amazingly quiet, and it is unfortunate that old polemics still resurface from time to time.

The last few years have been hard on me personally, and I have a deep feeling of alienation and inability to relate to churches, clergy and “convinced” believers. I almost feel relieved here in France that most of the people I meet are non-believers, or when they are believers, are rather more of the “liberal” camp. I almost envy those who remained in the parishes and are able to do good and be unconcerned about the polemics. I don’t usually tell people that I’m a priest, though my wife seems to take pride in saying that her husband is an Anglican priest. That revelation invariably results in the same old questions about Henry VIII, Protestantism and the invalidity of our orders. I leave her to do the explaining, because I can’t be bothered!

In my articles The Quest for Recognition and Respectability and An Interesting Write-Up, I tried to be constructive. There have been some interesting comments. I was deeply hurt by some of the comments on John Beeler’s blog. I had the feeling that it was assumed I wouldn’t bother looking at it. Unfortunately, my blog administration page tells me which sites give a link to my blog. Most of the links are automatic and without interest, but some… I am only human even if I have become case-hardened against criticism and rudeness.

I have closed down the comment section on both those pages and this one. I have quite a lot of translating work on this week, and I am getting ready for the Route du Sable very carefully. I have fitted mooring cleats to my boat and have refined my anchoring system, because there will be places where the boat will have to be moored and not pulled out of the water. The preparation is almost as absorbing as the event itself! Yesterday, we had a little music school concert, and we all sang works by Ravel and Fauré, and in the evening we had a good meal with some old friends. This morning, I celebrated the Mass of St Alban with the memories of Corpus Christi and the First Sunday after Trinity – entirely alone as my wife messed about in the kitchen. That is my lot in life.

We open old wounds at our peril. At our last Synod, I was elected onto our Bishop’s Council of Advice. We have a meeting next month. The encouraging thing if that we have new clergy, new blood in our Diocese, and I am concerned to participate as much as possible in everything we can do to further our mission. I have not been called to be a pastor, but perhaps I can teach through a ministry of the word. This little diocese has given me life after my spiritual shipwreck in 2011-12. That is something to which I can relate and not be made to feel dead within and destroyed spiritually.

I have my e-mail on anthony.chadwick( AT )wanadoo.fr – and you are welcome to write. I will spend much of my week in bits of rope and sailcloth. I look forward to the weekend, and without doubt I will bounce back with lessons learned from experience. A quiet week will do a lot of good.

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Affluence on the Aulne

Posted on Friday, 20 June, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Further from my article on the Route du Sable, I went to the association’s Facebook page after the closure of registrations. Everything is in – L’Aulne connaîtra un record d’affluence … The Aulne (name of the river from the Rade de Brest to the Nantes Canal going through Châteaulin) will know know a record of affluence…

I asked how many boats we would be now that the registration list is complete. The association responded more than 70. Some of the boats will be very small dinghies with only one or two persons, and the larger yoles will have more than eight onboard.

The weather still looks to be holding, with the present north-east wind veering to the north-west and promising some ten knots. If that is a more or less accurate forecast (I don’t trust anything more than 48 hours), we won’t have to reef sail and it should be quite “sporty”). We would be in a full reach to a run almost all the way, gybing in the bend that leads to Port-Launay. With 70 boats on a river, tacking upwind could be quite difficult!

If the forecast proves right, the current will be in the same direction as the wind and we should avoid the vicious chop they got in a previous year, shown by the photo above.

I will be doing a little sailing today at Veules and will be bringing the boat home. I still need to fix two mooring cleats to the bow and check everything over. I have to confess that the choir stalls in my chapel are getting full of boat stuff, camping equipment and all sorts!

D-Day is next Friday, a long drive to Châteaulin and the campsite, and getting ready to take the boat to the launching ramp at Rosnoën for 10 am Saturday morning.

Seventy boats is going to be quite an armada. OK, you guys, we’re coming!

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An Interesting Write-Up

Posted on Wednesday, 18 June, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My article of yesterday The Quest for Recognition and Respectability has had something of a write-up by John Beeler in Splinter churches’ quest for recognition and respectability.

He took me up on my own observation that the fate of the TAC as it was under Archbishop Hepworth was predictable. Indeed, some of us clergy labouring under “perpetual irregularities” (ouch – but fortunately it doesn’t involve incarceration in the Castel Sant’ Angelo) were told there was going to be some kind of amnesty. That put us in an awkward position: Why go back to what we left, even in some kind of arrangement where we would be “protected”? Are we opportunists ready to get onto any old bandwagon if it would suit our selfish purposes as “charlatan” clergy? Good questions, usually coming from those who care only about cut-and-dried ideas, not about persons.

That last observation is a key to understanding many of the polemics of 2010-2011. The real powerhouse at that time was Christian Campbell’s The Anglo-Catholic, still in existence but totally inactive. It attracted the trolls like a rotting carcass appeals to flies! I set up a “rival” blog in 2010 which caused me to be locked out of the “distinguished staff” of Campbell’s blog. Those cold and heartless predators have few places to go now that Fr Smuts posts less frequently on his blog and shows no sign of having been swimming in “warm” water. Deborah Gyapong is still going with her Foolishness to the World but now writes on mostly Roman Catholic subjects and less frequently. Fr. Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment is the most lively. He watches his comment box very carefully. You can’t get in there and blithely crap on the floor!

Here on this blog, I have had long experience at keeping the poison dwarfs out, and by means that are completely acceptable to my blog provider. I simply have about thirty moderated e-mail addresses. They don’t get to crap on the floor, but like with Fr Hunwicke, they are filtered at the door.

John Beeler is a good sort of person, as fascinated with classic cars as I am with their counterparts on the sea, stout wooden gaff-rigged vessels. He idolises the 1950’s, a little like the “Romantic Ladies” of Aristasia, whilst I associate the whole of the century of my birth with the two world wars that marked the end of our civilisation. We can’t go back to any other era of history, but we can seek for better cultural references than prosperous post-war America. John is also one of those persons who self identify with a mental disorder called Asperger’s Syndrome or simply high-functioning autism. That means that a person has no emotional relationship with other persons. At worst, they lack empathy like those suffering from more sinister personality disorders. I am sceptical about psychiatry as a science, and am persuaded that it is a moral problem for the most part, a question of being completely human.

Something struck me in a war film, when a German soldier was threatened at gunpoint by Allied men – This is not correct. He was concerned more for the respect of rules and procedure even than for his own life! It’s almost as if he was thinking in terms of someone simply violating the regulations of the Wehrmacht in such a narrow-minded way. The reality was that he was up against enemy soldiers and his life was threatened unless he released the Allied prisoners being held by the Gestapo. The surrealism is striking.

This is a characteristic of many religious apologists who lack human empathy and perceive their philosophy of life as an intellectual game. John Beeler, like many of us, has been seeking his happiness as a church-going Christian. Being an American, he could find a whole choice of churches, among which he would more or less find his way. He discusses the options and his own experience, but the bottom line for is like the German soldier – order, procedure and authority take precedence over everything. It seems far from Christ denouncing the Pharisees as did many of the Prophets before him. John simply cannot understand any human dimension of religion or spiritual life, at least as far as I read.

Thus the true Anglo-Catholics are the Affirming Catholics who stayed with the establishment. Don’t like it? You have to come Tiber-swimming in the “warm” water. The TAC, ACC and others are abject losers because we got out of the “system”. On the other hand, the SSPX is OK because its teachings are like the “old time religion”. This is a game, like many of the computer strategy games on today’s market – or good old-fashioned chess. I have always had pleasant correspondence with John, and I have often got on with people even if they never look you in the eye, and they can only talk about their interests (I suppose as I do on this blog).

After John’s reasoned piece, and he is entitled to his opinions and convictions, some of the comments are a little more “salty”. “Anti-Gnostic” discusses Eastern Orthodoxy.

I had dealings with “Conchúr” on the old English Catholic blog, someone who reminded me a little of some of the men attending talks held by the Catholic Evidence Guild and preparing for their Sunday afternoon heckling at Hyde Park Corner. I had a lot less experience of life in 1981 or thereabouts, but in hindsight I see always the same thing. It’s an intellectual “order” that they are trying to build and they don’t care about the person they are trying to convert. I may be wrong but I suspect that’s it.

(…) passive-aggressive sniping at Rome and expounding an “idiosyncratic” ecclesiology that I’d be surprised would be regarded as doctrinally kosher by the ACC.

Hmm, interesting. I find the ACC very tolerant in matters of theology and research. I have not been taken to task for formal heresy, which is no real surprise since I assent to the teachings of our Church. In point of fact, I tend to be inspired by twentieth-century ressourcement theology, which in the minds of some is “tainted” by Modernism more than by Catholic / Protestant scholasticism.

“Diane” says “That is certainly my impression, from the very little I’ve ever seen of his blog. Is this a minuscule group? It certainly seems to be pretty teeny, but I would welcome real numbers, if available.”

I don’t even bother responding, because this lady has certainly read my writings. Usual ploy, Chadwick’s blog is too radioactive to read, but I’m curious all the same! I think my bishop in England has written about numbers in our diocese. We are very small, though some building work is going on through house groups and new clergy coming in. We don’t have the right to get discouraged, but rather to rejoice in our smallness and family-like intimacy. This human quality certainly is far over the heads of the authoritarians and apologetics geeks of our world.

“Anti-Gnostic” comes back in with my Englishness. Sorry I can’t help it. That’s where I was born. I suppose we have no less of a choice of churches and denominations as the Americans. The comment seems something of a non-sequitur.

The saltiest is William Tighe. He is kind enough when he comments on my blog. I am grateful for the many books he sends me about things he finds I should know more about. I read those books and renew my thanks for these generous gifts. He too is an intellectual, a historian. I remember from my courses with Fr Bedouelle OP at Fribourg that studying history needs a clear mind uncluttered with our modern perspective. One example is our abhorrence of torture and gruesome executions, believed at the time (up to Enlightenment times) to be genuinely pastoral methods of ensuring the wrongdoer’s salvation.

I am not the historian Dr Tighe is, but I do get the impression that there have been times when the Church was understood differently. The plain language of the Fathers and the liturgy seems to indicate a rigid disciplinary and penitential way of thinking. At the same time, St Augustine opposed the rigorism of the Donatists, and the “gentle” approach was vindicated in time.

Ecclesiology is a relatively new discipline in theology. Until about the time of Möhler in the mid nineteenth century, the Church was defined in institutional terms and a sacramental notion was not yet developed. If one wants anything better than Bellarmine’s idea that the Church is visible like the Republic of Venice is visible, we need to have recourse to theology from our own times. That clashes with the certitude of the “pharisee”.

I am aware that no human ecclesial or theological system can rid us from all doubt and cognitive dissonance. We are plagued with incoherence wherever we turn, and peace will only ever be found at the level of the spirit. At the material and intellectual level, no inner certitude can be found except by way of delusion. As time goes on, I find that the less we try to solve these problems, the better it will be for our remaining belief and spiritual life. My fingers were burned long ago! Is the position of the Anglican Catholic Church perfectly coherent? I don’t think anyone’s position is immune to any criticism and challenge. We are all fragile. I am not “cradle” ACC. I was baptised and confirmed in the Church of England and foolishly left it long before women’s ordination in that quest for intellectual cohesion and perfection. Indeed, as the French say – Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. That experience made me sensitive to the “Conchúr-type” who would proselytise you without once looking you in the eye.

Many of us have made mistakes in life, and will continue making them in our ignorance and being unprepared for the hidden small print on the back of the glossy paper. Am I making a mistake doing what I am doing? Perhaps. In trying to discern the right thing, we are just utterly alone and can only rely to some extent on our intuitions, betrayed as we are by exclusive use of reason.

None of us in the ACC would ever claim that our tiny community is the “one true church”, and that is one thing that attracted me to her. We can cope with doubt and insecurity, as God alone is our rock and sure foundation.

(…) complexities and incoherencies of an Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology implemented in “the real world”

What is the “real world”? Perhaps that real world is that dark mass of glass and concrete in central and eastern London, the vision of hell on earth I saw last May from my car as I drove out of the capital! I would find it difficult to believe that Dr Tighe’s Church is the hard reality of London’s financial empire. I expected something else of Christ and what seems to be implied in the Our Father and the Beatitudes.

Incarnate Christianity needs something tangible, since we are earth-bound creatures reliant on our five senses, and we have not experienced the larger part of the “multiverse”, universal conscious energy or whatever you want to call it. We as humans are of different temperaments. I am a Romantic and rely more on intuition and emotional empathy. My interlocutors in the blogosphere are often classicists, intellectuals, men of law, order and authority. Romantics give second place to such considerations, behind prophetic inspiration, art and poetry, the ecstasy of love and beauty. Law and authority are not of the esse but the bene esse of society, without which the arbitrary is of a much more fearful tyranny.

This is the fundamental difference between the way I feel and think and my critics. I am grateful that this article came up, since I believe in free expression of the convictions, beliefs and conscience of all. That is one great potential of the Internet.

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Route du Sable

Posted on Tuesday, 17 June, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I am beginning my preparations for going away for the Petertide weekend at the end of this month. I began some months ago with my registration in a major sail & oar gathering at the western tip of Brittany called the Route du Sable in memory of the industry of transporting sand inland to counterbalance the alkalinity of the soil. I will be camping for three nights in a small tent in Châteaulin on the Aulne river. We will be anything from thirty to fifty boats, accompanied some of the way by three magnificent classical fishing boats.

Here is the map of the Finistère. Rosnoën, where we will launch our boats, is in the circle marker. We will be sailing on the river to Châteaulin, marked to the north of Quimper. Early indications give signs of fair weather, but the wind might be on the light side or gusty up to some twenty knots. That should be possible with a reefed sail. We’ll see as the forecast gets more accurate next week. I pray for a north-east wind which will allow reaching and running without too much tacking. On the other hand, the wind might drop and we’ll be rowing!

The dates of this gathering are the 28th and 29th June. Saints Peter and Paul take precedence over the Sunday, and they will be solemnly celebrated on my travelling tuck box chapel on the tailgate of my van. Again, I pray for good weather, since I will only have my van and small tent for shelter. After this early Mass, I will be getting breakfast and back to the boat for the second day of the cruise.

The event is well organised, because when we get to Saturday night and our boats are moored at Port Launay, a bus will take us to Rosnoën to get our vehicles and boat trailers and drive them to where our boats will be at Port Launay. I will have pitched my tent at Châteaulin from Friday afternoon.

See the official site of the event, which is full of photos of previous years. We will be in lots of little boats, propelled by their sails or by rowing – no engines. Most of the boats will be built in wood with traditional lugsail rigs. There will be some Bantry yoles, splendid replicas of eighteenth century longboats with two main masts and a spanker and which are rowed upwind by eight strong men. Fortunately, we are not racing! My boat is not a traditional build, but it is an oddity – just two of us in the world between Normandy and Barcelona in Spain – a gunter rig on an ugly plastic hull. Unfortunately Juan will not be with us in Brittany. The organisers only insist that the boats are driven by sail and rowing.

On Saturday 28th June from 10 am, we will be launching our boats and trying out the waters. After a picnic lunch, we will be setting off on the rising tide at 2 pm. We will be going through locks – sails down and in an out by rowing or sculling. We will be needing our fenders and warps as the current in the locks will be strong. On our arrival at Port-Launay, we will moor our boats or pull them out of the water and then be treated to a drink offered by the local town authorities. We will then have a meal together which we pre-paid with our registration. There will be much singing of traditional sea shanties and popular Breton music.

On Sunday morning, 29th June, after my early Mass at the campsite, we will be sailing (or rowing) from 10 am in the Châteaulin direction. In Châteaulin, there is a low bridge, for which we all have to take our masts and rigs down and continue by rowing. I need to do a drill next week to see if I can stow everything in the boat and be able to row. We will row to the lock of Coatigrac’h. We will then return to Châteaulin and have a picnic at the slipway of Rodaven (where I will be camping). We will then re-rig our boats and sail back to Port-Launay where our trailers will be waiting.

This event promises to be friendly and a moment of meeting people who all love boats and sailing. We will be accompanied by several traditional sailing boats carrying spectators, photographers and journalists. They are the Loch Monna, the Dalh Mad, Korriganez, Fée de l’Aulne and others. There may also be a newly-restored old river barge. They will be photographing us in our little boats, and I will have my camera for snapping the big boats (photos on the event website).

These events bring joy to life and are a new experience for a man with his boat. My mind is open about the people I will meet, and that is something to look forward to.

More news as it happens.

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My Spanish Sister Ship on the Water

Posted on Tuesday, 17 June, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This video is hot out of the camera:

Juan de la Fuente has modified some of my rigging on his boat. See Mirror rigged Tabur 320 (2). For example the side shrouds are adjustable, where my forestay is adjustable and my shrouds are fixed. He finds the boat has lee helm with the Mirror jib. I find the opposite. If I let go of the rudder, the boat luffs into the wind (weather helm), however slowly depending on the point of sail and the trimming of the sails. Last week, in light weather, I let go of the rudder and steered the boat only with the sails and my position on the boat. Odd, because our boats are identical and the mast and centreboard positions are the same.

Perhaps Juan hauls in his jib too much for the point of sail. I find, when the boat is well off the wind, that I need to go lightly on the jib. Take it in just enough to stop it flapping and just a tiny bit more. Setting the jib at the same time as the mainsail has become second nature for me.

Juan seems to have forgotten to tighten his cunningham, because the luff of his mainsail is loose and there are creases in the mainsail when the boat is in a close reach or pointing up. A perfectly set sail is that much more efficient.

All said and done, his boat sails very well, and he is a good and confident sailor.

I still don’t have video, but can take photos, as I will be doing at the end of this month in Brittany at the Route du Sable.

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American Insularity

Posted on Tuesday, 17 June, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I’m going to have to be daring with this article, because it is about the ignorance of very large numbers of people on matters that threaten the very notion of democracy and freedom.

I’m not insinuating anything about Michael Frost, who seems to be a well educated person, but this suggestion is frightening if you read behind the words: – If I was a CA [Continuing Anglican], I’d always start my serious ecumenical discussions with the PNCC. That would seem to be the most natural area for better formal relations in USA. In short, does nowhere else exist? Is everything to be measured against American standards? Of course, there is the Nordic Catholic Church in Europe, and that possibility may be available for some.

Our conservative British newspaper The Daily Telegraph published an article Americans surveyed: misunderstood, misrepresented or ignorant? This article reveals the extent of ignorance about the world outside (and also within) the USA in large numbers of persons.

6% do not know the date of Independence Day.

0.01% correctly identified the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution (freedom of religion, free speech, free press, association, and the ability to petition government). Only 25% can name more than one of these rights.

25% do not know that the earth orbits around the sun. 6% of young Americans failed to locate the USA on a map of the world. Only about 30% could identify the UK on a map. Three years into the Irak war, only 37% could find Irak on a map. Only the same percentage would find Saudi Arabia and as few as 25% could find Israel and Iran. 70% believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks at one time. Only 58% of Americans knew anything about the Taliban, compared with 75% of British.

Americans who are not burdened with this degree of ignorance need to take an interest in other countries and those of us who live in them. I tend to agree with the opinion that Americans are not more pious than anyone else, but simply behind the times. Our European present is their future, and complacency will not avert the inevitable.

I am myself English living in Continental Europe. I have visited the USA four times. I am hardly the Modern Major General of Gilbert and Sullivan who knows everything vegetable, animal and mineral, but I am forced to believe that I belong to a very tiny elite with a reasonable knowledge of geography and world cultures. I am only a very average kind of person! All the same, I am interested in discovering other peoples and the way they live. Life is too short to travel everywhere and see them all for myself, but discovery is to me second only to breaths of air, food and drink.

I ask our educated American friends to make that much of an effort to encourage their country folk to take an interest in Christians in the UK, continental Europe, Africa, Asia, South America and everywhere else – and take them into account when offering reflections.

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The Quest for Recognition and Respectability

Posted on Tuesday, 17 June, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I lived through this whole thing with the TAC and the illusion we entertained that we were going to get an instant fix from Pope Benedict XVI and suddenly become “respectable”. It was a big wave to ride on in late 2009 to about mid-2011, and I was being invited to conferences and radio broadcasts here in France to talk about the TAC and our quest for corporate reunion with Rome. Something happened, but not as Archbishop Hepworth expected. The Ordinariates are still going, but no one other than themselves knows what is going on. There is nothing to report.

Some will suggest to Continuing Anglicans that we should turn to the Orthodox. Why should they be interested? It is like the virgins who were out of oil in their lamps asking the virgins with oil to share it with them. Through not being prepared, those without the oil (or rather those who had to leave their preparedness station to go and buy some) were turned away from the gate. The Orthodox kept their traditions. Roman Catholics and Anglicans squandered theirs. You squander your money and you have to earn it back yourself. Why should anyone else care?

Others still suggest knocking on the door of the PNCC. Who are they? They are simply the descendants of a Polish Roman Catholic community that got a raw deal from the local Roman Catholic bishop in the 1890’s, and they split off and eventually joined up with the Union of Utrecht (and since broke away over women’s ordinations). However unjustly they were treated, they were schismatics. The difference is that they had quite a lot of money, like the Society of St Pius X today, and could afford to build churches and employ their priests full-time. Many years ago, they embarked on a programme of liturgical reforms similar to those in the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960’s and 70’s. Is that what we want?

The big question is whether we believe in ourselves. Faced with any of those “big” churches, we have invalid orders, we are not a “true” church, and we have only to close up shop and crawl under our carpets. Do we believe in ourselves, or are we so insecure that we need “their” recognition and respectability?

I think this is a good starting point to examine ourselves and think what we are all about. We don’t believe in papal infallibility and “totalitarian” ecclesiology, we value our liturgy and our own community life, we believe in our priesthood. We are western and are unconcerned with Eastern Orthodox theology except for purposes of comparative study. We are not dissident nineteenth-century Catholics but dissidents from the sixteenth-century and have followed another historical experience. We are Anglicans like French Catholics critical of excessive papal power are Gallicans. To some, Anglicanism means the English Reformation and the prevailing Calvinism from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, to others, it means the local Catholic Church of our ethnic culture.

No other Church can accommodate our specificities without surrendering their own identity to an extent. Why should they? Roman Catholicism has always found eastern rite uniatism an acute embarrassment in its relations with the Orthodox. We can manage on our own as we have been doing for years. I see the effort to “herd cats” (work for Continuing Anglican unity) in the same way. It is a question of why – to become a big status, “official” and “respectable” Church, or to settle disputes quietly and humbly, developing friendships and greater empathy. The most important thing to remember is that we are all formed by our history and experience, and we are not going to give up our own identity or resources to take in “shipwrecked” people from a broken-down community or negotiate with a Church stronger than ourselves.

The big problem is knowing whether churches have credibility without being committed to this “horse trading” process. The more time that passes, the less I care and the more I see nearly all our contemporaries alienated from Christianity. If we don’t believe in ourselves, the best thing is to give up and “get a life”.

Hankering for being what we left (Church of England, ECUSA, Rome, etc.) is a temptation. Insecure men go and get themselves consecrated bishops and then start trying to negotiate their way back in with Rome. It doesn’t work. The elephant in the room is “perpetual canonical irregularity” even if they can produce evidence of the ordination being sacramentally valid. Such “wannabes” usually start to imitate what they desire, and lose all credibility.

We can just be ourselves. We each have our place, and nearly all of us will be forgotten within a couple of generations of our deaths. What is it all for? That is the question we have to ask ourselves. In the end, it is just living the Christian life and giving ourselves the sacramental means to do so. If God calls any of us to anything extraordinary, most of us are “ready for any good work”. Otherwise we stay in our place and know our limitations.

We are here to sow. Others after us will reap the harvest. Is that not just?

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My Sister Ship is in Spain

Posted on Sunday, 8 June, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have corresponded with a Spanish amateur sailor, Juan de la Fuente, who has the same boat as I have. He has experimented with different rigs, but finally he has rigged his boat in the same way as mine.

I like his story on Mirror rigged Tabur 320.

Here is the unflattering description of our boat:

The Tabur 320 is just about as ugly as a boat can be.

It has got large hips, a flat nose and the black front deck looks like the lid of a rubbish bin. Its pale yellow colour looks like puke. It is simply awful.

But if you don’t care about looks, and are looking for a cheap, light and sturdy old banger, the Tabur is like no other. Forget about road trailers and paint and plywood rot, fibreglass cracks or anyone stealing it from your backyard. For one thing is sure, it will never attract jealous glances from anyone when you are in it. So the meek shall inherit the earth. And I love it just like that.

Sure it accelerates like an old diesel van, and it cuts thru the waves bouncing like a drunkard in a crowd, but its daggerboard would resist shark bites, and you’ll never break the rudder. It is stable and very forgiving on a broach, you’d have to be drunk to capsize it…

Last year, I rigged the boat at the same time as a sailing class at Veulettes. They asked me – “Does that thing float?” At the end of the class, with me sailing near the school boats, we arrived on the beach and they had to conclude that not only did my boat not sink, it sailed very well with its rig.

I will be taking Σοφία to the far tip of Brittany at the end of this month to the Route du Sable sail-and-oar gathering. My boat doesn’t win races but she can sail with very little wind. The rig gives a terrific amount of flexibility of response to the weather, including the possibility of lowering the mainsail totally and sailing downwind with the jib alone – not forgetting the possibility of going under bridges of only 3.20 m height without de-masting.

Juan’s account is full of humour and he has improved on many of my own modifications based on those of David Sumner, Mirror-tuner and intrepid cruiser of the English South Coast!

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