Old English Catholic Blog

Posted on Saturday, 14 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have had an enquiry about my old English Catholic blog which I deleted in the thick of the Ordinariate polemics. It no longer exists on WordPress or anywhere else. I saved the material to my hard disk prior to deleting, and later reconstructed parts of that blog concerning the story of Archbishop Hepworth and the TAC in relation to the Ordinariate movement. It may be of historical interest and this posting is not intended to reignite old polemics.

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Signs of New Life

Posted on Friday, 13 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I am not a professional journalist, but as one who enjoys writing in my native language, I recognise talent when I read it. I refer to the young author of Liturgia Causa who lives in the south-east of England.

Suburban life, working hard to earn a living and seeking to live out a spiritual ideal are rather hard to combine. I am lucky to live in the countryside and work at home, but still have to fight the same combats as all my contemporaries, namely keeping finances above water and paying the bills. Unlike priests in the “mainstream” churches, I share the common lot of humanity, having to cope with the ups and downs of running a house, managing money and making the right decisions. My good friend Patricius has his life and has to try to live in a world that seems to run like a machine, soulless and merciless. It is in such a condition of life, amidst closed-down churches and people who don’t even think about Christianity, let alone care – that we think about things like the liturgy.

For some time, Liturgia Causa has lain dormant for the reasons its author has given in a number of poignant postings. It is tempting to be judgemental about the attitude that seems to reflect the spiritual malady of acedia, what modern medicine would call depression and what the rest of us would term as tiredness of life. I correspond with Patricius and exchange ideas, and I find him a sincere young man. Having lived in the traditionalist Roman Catholic world – and having left it, I sympathise with many of his concerns. I cannot relate to much more than a very small part of Catholic Christianity and I acutely understand what keeps most people away from churches. That brings loneliness, except that I find company in the secular world between those who love music and those who love boats and the sea – and often the two go together. The Christian ideal is something that is lived in the desert, whether it is really the desert or the sea, or the world of people who are not Christians and are interested in other things or ideals. We can do what we want ourselves, without expecting the same from anyone else.

Just yesterday, he posted To kindle the ashes… He evokes the image of the crocus flower coming up through the snow. We’re a long way off yet, as we haven’t even reached the Winter Solstice and the feast of St Thomas, in just a little over one week. In spite of the season, it is still possible to be getting one’s life into order and thinking about what one really wants. Some of the things Patricius brings up take years to sort out, and we are alone in doing so. These are things that we have to do ourselves, because no priest or member of the medical profession can offer anything more than generalities and often hyperbole.

This is something I often encountered, namely, a desire for excellence in liturgy or any other aspect of church life or life in general. When those around us show only a relative interest in what impassions us, frustration is the result. The obvious choice is that the question itself is really unimportant and that we should rearrange our priorities in life, or be prepared for a long solitary slog and harmonise our solitary part of life with the part of life involved in family and occupational life. These are struggles many of us go through, when we treasure what others consider as junk to be taken to the municipal dump.

One thing I love about Patricius is his transparency. This is perhaps truly the freshness of spring that the rest of us in the post-war generation have lost. He knows that there is a discrepancy between his thought and idealism and the sensus communis of the crowd. He is aware that judging others for the lack of interest in what he seeks to promote flew back in his face. The matter in hand is the liturgy of the Church, and for all of us, how it relates to the rest of life. The problem is that it doesn’t, because the world has moved beyond the old medieval world view of Christendom. Our western world is secular and its god is money.

I have lived through a similar crisis over the years, but in my own way. Certainly, my clerical training in seminary gave me another perspective, together with my years of solitude and finally marriage with a “cultural Catholic” girl. I lived through the Ordinariate movement years and the splits in the TAC. At the end of that, I put what is left of my vocation to the service of the very marginal ACC in England, and my own priestly life is lived as a solitary. My wife gladly comes to Mass when she feels like it, but is distant from a Church that just cannot and does not relate to our present condition as human beings.

In the end, one can either kick everything in the teeth as an act of nihilist revolt, or simply persevere in what little we have and are. Patricius still lives his interior combat, not being a priest or someone with experience of clerical life. A change is required but of my own making and that entails eshewing that godly vice in my life, namely sloth. He indeed has got it! What he chooses to do about it is up to him. I have given him the address of my Bishop and one of our priests who lives not far from where he lives, and he can contact them if he wants. I think my Church is near to his liturgical ideals, using the Anglican Missal, essentially the Roman rite in English of before the Pius XII reforms of Holy Week.

Patricius lost his dog this year. I lost two of them, and I also lost my mother. Life has to go on, and he knows that. Things won’t be the same as before. The way to get out of a dark place is to get moving and hit the “reboot” button. We all have the things we like doing as hobbies, and those are different from person to person. He is more of an intellectual than I am, more indoors and in libraries or other quiet places. What about work? Most of our work is boring drudgery, but we have to establish our own priorities in life. I would hate to be employed in retail trading. I worked in a music shop when I was 18-19 and most of it was packing mail orders and filing order forms and invoices in the office. The only way is to make a decision about what we really want to do in life, and carry it through. There are various possibilities like higher education or travelling. That’s up to him.

There’s something that Patricius is good at – writing. There’s something of the Evelyn Waugh in him, the eternal satirist. Writing is something you have or don’t have. We all (or nearly) all learn to read and write thanks to modern education. Most people read newspapers and novels – and of course the internet – and write e-mails and letters. Few of us find the energy to write substantially. Blogging offers many possibilities of becoming an amateur journalist or commentator on myriad topics in life. If we are motivated to write books, that’s another possibility – and then getting them published. That has always been hard, even for the best writers. There is always the saying that artists are only appreciated after their death! I earn my living hacking out technical translations for business and industry. I seem to do a good job in spite of not having a degree in translation, but hands-on experience which is a lot more useful. In that way, I am a professional writer. So, perhaps, all we can do in the way of creative or artistic writing is to work in that perspective to leave our own epitaph behind so that someone will have a Mass said for our soul – and get by in another way. That just about describes my own vocation as a priest!

Patricius‘ writing is often quite shocking. But, is that not the charm of it? That is his style. It isn’t mine. I am of a mind to compromise and conciliate. His is to clash and oppose, and that brings the suffering of solitude. I remember the comparison made between John Henry Newman and Fr Tyrrell. Newman was the diplomat who sailed close to the wind without getting caught in irons. Tyrrell was the pugnacious Irishman who got himself excommunicated and banished, taken into a religious community so that he wouldn’t be out in the street, and had to work himself out in the mess he had allowed himself to get into. His early death from sickness was perhaps a relief for him! How far are we willing to go to compromise for the sake of a modus vivendi with the world, and how much are we willing to suffer to have things our own way?

I don’t suppose there’s much advice I can offer, except that he do what he thinks is right, somewhere between calling St Joseph Joe the Working Class git (I celebrate SS. Philip and James on 1st May) and being ready for some accommodation and compromise for the cause of the liturgy. Finally, it’s all about knowing what you want in life.

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Did I cause the Retro-Church blog to disappear?

Posted on Tuesday, 10 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have also noticed that Retro-Church had been deleted, even before discovering the article mentioned below. It is rare for blogs to be deleted, but they are sometimes put into hiatus as I have done with The Anglican Catholic. I myself deleted a blog about two years ago, before starting this one.

This morning, I found Retro-Church Blog Vanishes.

Retro-Church, an Anglo-Catholic blog that featured many articles written by ACC Metropolitan Mark Haverland and two or three ACC priests, has vanished into thin air.  Several days ago I asked one of the blog’s principals about what happened.  He wasn’t sure, but said he’d investigate the issue and let me know.  Thus far, no word.  I wonder if it has anything to do with this.

Is this some kind of conspiracy or machination on my part? I will give a simple explanation.

This blog (As the Sun in its Orb and New Goliards) is almost two years old, and I express myself on it as a personal blog. I said in my disclaimer that what I say does not engage the Church or diocese I belong to as a priest. I am loyal to my Church, but I am also an individual with ideas, convictions and interests. I also write on matters not connected with even religion, let alone the ACC, for example my sailing. I experience dinghy cruising and the wonders of the sea through my experience as a Christian and a priest. A blog is for sharing ideas and provoking constructive discussion, something like students at a seminar or gentlemen in an old-fashioned English pub.

My explanation is that I have corresponded with Archbishop Haverland, and he has been most positive and encouraging about my running something like an official blog for the ACC, as completely distinct from my personal blog. To do this, it would be necessary to have a team of blog authors writing material of appropriate quality and interest. Otherwise, there would be no point in it. I can say that out of some of those who might potentially be interested, one has a very busy professional life and hasn’t even the time for his own blog. I will not say any more about what has been discussed in private. This question of building up a group is the determining factor. Therefore I am leaving The Anglican Catholic blog in hiatus indefinitely. On my own, it is unnecessary because I already have my own blog, this one. This project has been there for some time, and the Retro-Church remained, though not updated for some time.

The disappearance of Retro-Church seems to have been an independent event, and at a time when The Anglican Catholic blog has itself been in hiatus for some time. Namely, there were no new events that would have caused Retro-Church‘s blogger to make the decision to delete his blog.

The reasons for the deletion of Retro-Church are therefore completely independent from my own activity as a blogger. There has been no covert conspiracy, and I have done nothing to cause this event like, for example, writing private correspondence.

From my side, there is nothing to report.

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Quiñones and Cranmer

Posted on Sunday, 8 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Fr Hunwicke has come up with some interesting articles about the use of Scripture at the daily Offices:

There is quite a lot in common between the Prayer Book Office and the radically simplified breviary of the Spanish Cardinal Quiñones. When I was doing my university work on the Tridentine missal, I remember reading this by Louis Bouyer (Life and Liturgy, London 1956, pp. 45-47).

* * *

There is nothing, after all, very startling in the fact that some Anglicans could see the way out of the chaos of the Reformation and out of a merely negative and superficial Counter-Reformation even sooner than most Catholics.   Such a fact is easily explained by historical causes.   For Richard Hooker and his disciples, the Caroline Divines, were reacting from within Protestantism itself against its own excesses.   They naturally possessed, therefore, both a clearer and a deeper perception of its root fallacy than most Catholics could have, since Catholics could only see the final effects of this fallacy from outside Protestantism, but could not have learned from the same personal experience what were the fundamental failures from which these final effects had flowed.  On the other side, these same Anglican Divines were not prevented in the least by their position from maintaining what had been good in the original surge of Protestantism and what had been good in the general movement of Christian humanism from which it had proceeded.  To defend their allegiance to their own church against the Puritans, these men were actually led on to emphasize the best tendencies in the primitive Reformation, — and to emphasize them the more as the Caroline Divines wanted to discard the evils of the Reformation as it appeared in its full development.

Such a desire, of course, often succeeded in making up a Via Media that was merely an illogical and ineffective compromise between yes and no. But in some superior minds and loftier souls, it produced at least a few beautiful sparks, potential beginnings of something far better than a compromise. Not only Hooker, but Andrewes, Laud, and later Cosin and many others of that school saw clearly wherein lay the great failures of Protestantism: — that its pretence of going back to the Church of antiquity was unsound, and that it was in itself as much of a novelty with no precedent as was that state of affairs against which it was rebelling. And these same men saw clearly that in order to answer the Protestant rebellion it was hopeless to treasure, along with practices that were truly traditional, the merely medieval corruptions out of which the errors of Protestantism had previously developed. In these ways, and to this extent, the Caroline Divines rediscovered something of what Christian humanism might have become in the midst of Catholicism itself, had men like Cardinal Quignonez in Spain or Cardinal Pole in England and Italy been in the forefront rather than Luther and Calvin.

How, then, can we best sum up these primary intuitions of what the liturgy should be which the Caroline Divines exhibit both in their written works and in practices that were actually carried out for a time in the Church of England? These men felt, first, that the liturgy should be the common and effective worship of the Christian people. They were opposed, therefore, to any re-building of those screens between the sanctuary and the nave which some modern Anglo-Catholics were later to make so fashionable. The services were not to be performed by some specialists instead of the people, but actually by the people. And this desire did not imply anything anarchic or out of order, for these men had suffered from the Puritans’ recklessness in such matters and abhorred it. On the contrary, they understood that the Christian people as such was to constitute a Church only with due reverence paid to the hierarchy as instituted by Christ and His apostles, and to the institutions which had been received from authentic Christian antiquity.

According to the Caroline Divines, this Christian tradition was not to be received as a dead letter to be carried out only materially, in the exact shape in which they had received it from its most recent and more or less untrustworthy transmitters. The true tradition was rather to be disengaged from all spurious and unhealthy additions, and thus renewed in its primitive freshness, in order to be re-expressed in a frame which should make it accessible to the people of that day. Hence the insistence on the use of the vernacular, and on a systematic educational effort to make the people understand not only the letter but the spirit of the liturgy. Hence also the attempt to have the whole Bible read during the course of the ecclesiastical year, but read in its traditional context of praise and prayer, in constant reference to the mysteries of Christ’s life and Passion seen as permanently actual and living, in and for the Church.

However, what was the actual success of the Caroline Divines, and what was best in their thought and in their lives? The limitations of that success are no less instructive for us today than are their first principles themselves.

We must say, first of all, that in everything done by these men there was too great an element of intellectual aloofness, of a refined but unpopular aristocracy of the mind, to make their efforts successful except among the very few. We cannot admire too much the personal piety which is exhibited in the Preces Privatae of Lancelot Andrewes, or the familial way of worship and of Christian living shown by the community of Little Gidding with Nicholas Ferrar. But we must realize that these beautiful achievements were appreciated by very few people, and had no power of widespread influence, for they had too many of the qualities of the scholar and of the highbrow English gentleman to appeal to more than a very small elite.

Secondly, and in close connection with this first defect, we must realize that although their reconstruction of antiquity was much more successful than that which was so unjustifiably the boast of Protestantism, still it was an artificial reconstruction and not a true revival. They acknowledged occasionally that good qualities were to be found in many aspects of the Middle Ages or even in the Roman Catholicism of their times against which they struggled ceaselessly; yet these men were, in their deepest hearts, antiquarians. To recapture the past—a very beautiful past, it is true—and to make it stand immobile was their ideal. And such an ideal separated them from the living Church no less than from the living world.

But the most striking failure of their work arose directly from their being out of communion with the Church. What was admirable about their work, and what had such a measure of success that it has endured even until our days in the larger Anglican churches, and, especially, in the cathedrals, is a Divine Office which is not a devotion of specialists but a truly public Office of the whole Christian people. This Office has some defects:—an exaggerated brevity in the psalmody, a too easy acceptance of the contemporary fashion for elaborate polyphony which tended to make the Office once more something heard rather than sung by the people themselves; and, finally, too lengthy prayers of intercession (along the lines of those preces feriales and litanies of all kinds which were a legacy from the Medieval period). But, in spite of these defects, we must admit frankly that the Offices of Morning Prayer and of Evensong, as they are performed even today in St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, York Minster, or Canterbury Cathedral, are not only one of the most impressive, but also one of the purest forms of Christian common prayer to be found anywhere in the world. This success makes even more striking the almost complete failure of the work of the Caroline Divines with the very core of the Christian liturgy, that is, the Eucharistic celebration.

* * *

Fr Hunwicke makes this observation:

However, Cranmer was obsessed by the need for simplicity. Medieval clerics did not have an ORDO; they had to work things out for themselves. The raw materials were to be found in a Directorium called Pie. Cranmer, notoriously, observd that “the number and harshness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the Service, was [sic] the cause, that to turn the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out”. So, lamentably, in his other draft Cranmer went instead for a lectionary based entirely on the civil year’s Calendar; Genesis started at the beginning of January and marched inexorably on, ignoring
the Ecclesiastical year. And this was the model which he followed in his first English Prayer Book of 1549.

These days, we can be thankful for a Sarum calendar. The Sarum Office is quite a handful, but really no more complicated than the 1568 Roman Breviary or the traditional Benedictine Office – provided you have the books. Personally I use the monastic office, in spite of its occasional incompatibilities with the Sarum missal. The books are easy to find – and read when travelling.

Here’s a convenient Monastic Diurnal (book of day hours without Matins) in Prayer Book English, which is in print and can be ordered.

* * *

Sorry these links are in French, but are indispensable for knowledge on the Breviary.

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Thomas Traherne

Posted on Saturday, 7 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Thomas Traherne (c. 1636-1674) is someone I have only just discovered, through the cantata for high solo voice and string orchestra by Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) Dies Natalis. This piece, completed in 1939, which I only today received from Boosey & Hawkes, is a setting of some poems of this amazing man – The Rapture, Wonder, The Salutation and an extract from the prose Centuries of Meditations. The common theme of these beautiful pieces is the sense of wonder and elation of a newborn child finding himself born into a world of such beauty. Dies natalis is also the Latin term for the day of a saint’s death, since the experience of dying for a just person must be something like this. The text and further explanation of the music can be found here in Dies Natalis. What a lovely theme for the coming Christmas, with the allusion to the pre-existence of the divine λόγος who finds himself born into this world! These poems are of such theological depth that we are made to think of Walt Whitman who wrote on the sea and much more, and particularly William Blake. There is a mystical aspiration that evokes the Gnosticism of the ancient Alexandrian school. Romanticism finds itself anticipated by more than a hundred years.

You can read an introduction to Thomas Traherne, which needs no summary. He was a priest of the Church of England at the time of the Restoration.

This is the text of The Salutation from Dies Natalis, as much inspired by Bach as original Finzi, which I would myself like to sing. In the meantime, here it is sung by the great English tenor Philip Langridge (1939-2010).

These little limbs, these eyes and hands which here I find,
This panting heart wherewith my life begins;
Where have ye been? Behind what curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my new-made tongue?

When silent I, so many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, how could I smiles, or tears,
Or lips, or hands, or eyes, or ears perceive?
Welcome, ye treasures which I now receive.

From dust I rise and out of nothing now awake,
These brighter regions which salute my eyes,
A gift from God I take, the earth, the seas, the light, the lofty skies,
The sun and stars are mine: if these I prize.

A stranger here, strange things doth meet, strange glory see,
Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,
Strange, all, and new to me: But that they mine should be who nothing was,
That strangest is of all; yet brought to pass.

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The Eschatological Quest

Posted on Saturday, 7 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I had not read Fr Jonathan Munn’s article Etymological Episcopalian Eschatology? when I wrote my piece this morning around the theme of monastic spirituality.

We have already arrived at the second Sunday of Advent, well, almost. This “little Lent” is a time I treasure, with the sublime prophetic texts from the Old Testament, especially Isaiah. We wait joyfully for three comings of Christ: in the crib of Bethlehem, in the Sacraments and the Church, and finally at some unknown time when he will come to judge both the quick and the dead, whose Kingdom hath no end as we recite in our Creed.

The final coming has not yet happened, and yet happens all the time, and has happened since the beginning of Church history. The Eschaton is timeless and outside time, time itself being an illusion. As in history the “big one” was still awaited, those who would have been martyrs in an earlier age become monks and retreated to the desert and the Church finally became a state-supported institution. From time to time in history, things go so badly in the world that the prophets of each age would announce man’s greatest fear – death and the end of the world. Even secular man has this theme in mind when producing films like Armageddon with Bruce Willis and 2012. Inevitably, the worst did not happen, any more than the all-out nuclear holocaust we all feared during the Cold War and which gave me nightmares as a child. But, one day, the end will come without our being forewarned of it – For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. I might venture to speculate that this sounds like a giant meteorite or a comet such as might have destroyed the dinosaurs, but it probably has several layers of meaning as biblical texts often have.

What is more likely is that we will die before such an event happens. Our lives are brief, and we have more to be concerned about this than an event that will probably take place long after we are gone from this earth. That is the “end of the world” we have to prepare for as Christians.

Reading Fr Jonathan’s article, I have the impression that he might have been reading my blog over the past few days, though he is an acute ad independent thinker. We both know how words can be understood in different ways, like any kind of humanly devised symbol. He is a mathematician and I am not. Words are less universal than numbers and are full of ambiguity. I have always been fascinated by words and language, by etymology and where our words came from, whether from Greek, Latin, German, French or any number of sources. Over the years, I have acquired the use of the French language, and that also has its subtleties and different meanings discerned from the context. It would be the same thing if I improved my German and Italian…

He is going the same direction as I: problems between Christians are invariably caused by people not understanding words in the same way. They mean different things to different people. Two words we use to describe our Church are a case in point – Anglican and Catholic. Some of our readers and commenters would like to dismiss us as neither and therefore unworthy of existence. Others are more sympathetic because they are aware of difficulties caused by imperfect communication and the use of analogy. When I was at university, our dogmatic theology professor explained to us an agreed statement between Pope Paul VI and the Coptic Church, where it was clearly shown that their understanding of the relationship between Christ’s human person and divine person is identical in spite of the traditional differences of language as used by the Council of Chalcedon. This fact impressed me and demonstrated the limits of human communication.

Fr Jonathan raises another point, which I have also been thinking about – our understanding of history and our assumption that the past was good and the present is bad. Perhaps I have given the impression of nostalgia for parish life in the fifteenth century, but there was not only the Sarum (or other local) liturgy – but also the Plague and the Inquisition. If you were at the bottom of the social ladder, you were in bad trouble. Chances were that the priests you came across were having it away “on the side”, getting drunk and were only interested in making easy money. I can only speculate that parish life was pious and healthy in some places and horribly corrupt and decadent in others. Documents and written accounts do not make history. They only convey a superficial understanding. He also understands the role of myth. Myth is not necessarily a work of fiction, but a literary genre to convey an allegorical truth. We take documents too literally, and this leads us to false judgements and errors.

History is probably 90% unknown, gone and forgotten. Does this deny the Church or any particular expression its existence? What is important is to get what we can from history – the notion of Tradition – but with that to live in our own time, just where we are. We are Catholics when we sincerely desire to be in communion in time with the whole history of the Church. Father Jonathan’s final paragraph is the most touching:

Our identity lies not in who we were, nor in who we are but in who God wills us to be and, if we continue in His Will in service and obedience to Him and the generous service and love of all men, that is where we will be. Our true identity as Christians is eschatological, our present identity merely an approximation. Until then, I will walk as humbly as I can (and my hubris often prevents me) as an Anglican Catholic thanking God for the spiritual direction that this body gives me as I walk into Infinity and in the hope that this little part of God’s Church will thrive in His Life.

Our true identity as Christians is affirmed by our short earthly pilgrimage before being given the privilege of passing on to where there will be no more time, pain and problems of communication. From that point, our worldly reason has nothing more to say…

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Liturgy Without Ideology

Posted on Saturday, 7 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I remember a conversation with the Abbot of Triors in about 1997 when he insisted on the value of monastic life in transcending the lines of division in Christian communities, whether they be dioceses, parishes, monasteries, groups defined by ideology or whatever. Those words came back to me as I re-read an old article (2010) about the competing claims to the term Anglican. There are no no fewer than 66 comments, and I find that this is extremely significant in comparison with the way some have reacted to my recent articles on “Sarum” Catholicism from Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Reformed points of view.

The bête noire is the kind of western Catholicism I have unsuccessfully tried to define as Anglican Catholic, Old Catholic, Conciliar Catholic or whatever – (Roman) Catholicism without the Reformation, without the Counter Reformation and without the Papal claims of the nineteenth century or the centralised bureaucracy of now – quite a mouthful.The trouble with this is that such a definition would be entirely in negative terms, like continuing Anglicanism being defined as being against women priests, modern language liturgy and homosexuality. There has to be something positive.

What is it we really want? I have a feeling that there aren’t two persons in agreement, but one thing I do notice among some of my brethren clergy in the ACC’s English diocese is a commitment to monastic values and ways of life in spite of none of us being monks. The Oblature is an old institution, now allowing secular priests and lay people to participate in the spiritual life of a monastic community without living there or wearing the habit, and with the Rule being mitigated and adapted to the reality of life. I am not myself an Oblate, because I know of no existing Benedictine community who would accept a priest of the Anglican Catholic Church as an Oblate. To be an Oblate of the French abbeys, you need to be a Roman Catholic. That is the least of things!

There is a monastery in America, Bethlehem Priory, and the Congregation of the Good Samaritan. I have had no contact with either of those communities, and it seems to make little sense to ask for Oblature to a community in which one could not make one’s yearly retreat for reasons of distance. Monastic life is an essential dimension of a Church, for it rises above the traditional fracture lines between ritualism, the Reformation and the liberalism of the mainstream. I am always brought back to this point.

Whether one has a formal link to a monastery or not, the essential is a single-minded quest for God and the consecration of one’s life to contemplative prayer through the daily living of the way of life mapped out in the Rule of Saint Benedict (or another traditional rule). The main means are prayer, work and community life. We all have to work to earn a living, and that becomes the framework of our daily life. If we don’t live in a monastery, we don’t wear a habit – and we look like everyone else. Our religious life is hidden except to those who have discerned that we are “different”. That difference consists of our life of prayer and the fact we abstain from certain behaviours that many people of our time take for granted. We have our Office book or breviary, which we can read and pray anywhere. All you need is the book and a pair of reading glasses! Those of us who are priests celebrate Mass daily in the church we serve, in our chapels or using a makeshift arrangement at home or away from home.

I have come to the conclusion that using temporal references, whether to the seventeenth or fifteenth or third centuries is unhelpful. Names like Anglican do not unite, but divide according to the different meanings we all give to words. The only approach is an intemporal or timeless one, using guides the Church has given us over the centuries.

One criticism I find of “ritualist” liturgy, especially when using a traditional non-reformed Catholic rite, is that of imitating the baroque period, or the late medieval period for that matter. Such commenters home in to stereotyped characteristics of the religious aesthete, whether he is morally upright or depraved.

Something very healthy I find about the monastic inspiration is introducing simplicity into the liturgy without going to excesses of austerity. My own time in contact with monastic life and monastic-inspired parish clergy has given me a taste for simplicity since my days at Gricigliano – plain albs, a simple altar and an unselfconscious way of going about things. This is something I have found in England with my brother clergy in the ACC. They are a little more “Tridentine” than I am, but the spirit is simplicity without any trace of affectation. That is something that confers nobility and dignity on our Diocese, that first priority is given to prayer and the worship of God – nihil opera Dei praeponatur.

There will always be those who would like to be aligned with reforming movements like that of the sixteenth century or that of the 1960’s and 70’s in the wake of Vatican II, which had its effect on all western Churches and other communities. Recent experience in Roman Catholicism shows the shortcomings of both archaeologism and so-called “pastoral” innovation and inculturation. When considering the issue of Tradition, no one seems to have come up with a more accurate notion than “organic development” such as is set out in John Henry Newman’s work and more recent theologians including Pope Benedict XVI. The alternative is refusing the trajectory of history and the Church’s universality in history and time. This point of view is not without its problems or the risk of itself becoming an ideology.

Certainly, a monastic “philosophy” of life would be helpful in forming our own attitudes and aspirations to be free from the fetters of bigotry and prejudice, or from anything that makes the Church irrespirable for the alienated. The best any of us can do is just to get on with living and doing what we believe to be right and what would keep us in the universal communion of the Catholic Church. If this humble blog can help towards that goal and for spiritual / sacramental unity in something that is beyond and higher than any of us, then we are on the right track.

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If might is right…

Posted on Thursday, 5 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that.

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Smoke and Mirrors

Posted on Wednesday, 4 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I suppose that like many people, I feel hurt when I am contradicted and manipulated. But I don’t mind a challenge, and many of my most treasured things are challenged. That is part of a blogger’s lot. You either stop discussing the subject and put a taboo on it, or try to reason things out or at least to “use the force” – listen to our intuition.

My intuition is to think of a world in which anything that attracts us is forbidden or not available. When the answer is always “no”, then one ceases to ask. There are domains in life that bring us joy and meaning, far from the cold, dark and empty churches that everybody have forsaken apart from a few old ladies who are not going to be followed by their daughters.

Michael Frost, one of my most prolific Orthodox commenters seems to be a sympathetic and sincere fellow. But, he does keep coming back to the same point. I have read from him the fact that he has been received into Orthodoxy (the Antiochian Church to be precise), but is too far from an Orthodox parish to do other than attending services in the Anglican Church in America (TAC) parish in Iowa of Archbishop Louis Falk without receiving any Sacraments.

I suppose that if I were not a priest, there would have been little point in my joining the ACC as it has no presence in France where I live. Only my priesthood enables me to live anything like a sacramental life in the Church. Otherwise, I would have to choose between what is available. In my area, within Christianity, it would be the local Roman Catholic parish, a free Evangelical community imported by American missionaries or the Jehovah’s Witnesses at a pinch. Otherwise, it’s a long drive to Rouen or Paris to go to some traditionalist place. Check mate – move somewhere else or give up Christianity as something futile and academic.

I don’t think  our friend accepts any possible definition of Anglican Catholicism except a dusty dry, totally irrelevant and narrow reference, that of the seventeenth-century Non-Jurors. There haven’t been any of those people around for a very long time. So, this delving into history to find a reference point ends up as quite subjective. It’s no good if we propose Henry VIII or before but perfectly fine when it’s to Michael Frost’s taste.

Now, I have vented my anger, and try to see things a little deeper…

He does bring up a valid point – that being the fact that doctrine and praxis develop and are never the same in one age as in another. Certainly, the Non-Jurors are more recent than Henry VIII or Cranmer or St Osmund of Salisbury. When I was discussing British light music some days ago and the nostalgia of those of us who have been around for a few years, I made the observation that the “old days” were not so “good”. My parents were in their teens during World War II, and that certainly was not an enjoyable time. I was in my teens in the 1970’s, and I have no nostalgia for that time. When was any period of history a “golden era”. In the seventeenth century, idolised by “classical Anglicans”, there were still gruesome executions and witch hunts, a notion of cruelty and inhumanity in the name of a vengeful God. We have various ideas of the middle-ages. There was great beauty as evidenced in the buildings and illuminated manuscripts, but there was also disease, violence and ignorant intolerance. The Inquisition was in full swing, something like in The Name of the Rose, and the fires were burning day and night. Is anything in this world more than an illusion?

We are encouraged to try to stake our claim to a denominational title for one’s particular religious community or sect, and in doing so, we try to refer to a foundational myth or our idea of a historical period. That’s what the Romantics did in their medievalism and reaction against Rationalism and the Industrial Revolution. They produced pastiche in the form of their art, poetry and architecture – but the sanitised version of what they thought of as “medieval” was in itself something original. When thinking of the fourteenth-century country parish or Salisbury Cathedral in the fifteenth, movements of dissident Anglicans in the eighteenth, Methodism, reactions to the delirium of nineteenth-century Roman Catholicism and just about anything “out of the box”, something original came about. The Renaissance was an attempt to revive the aesthetics and values of ancient Greece and Rome, but it also produced something new.

Old Catholicism had its foundational myth, and in the nineteenth century moved towards liberal Protestantism and reformed itself out of existence. The Dutch Church went into schism because they were too “heretical” for Rome to give them a bishop, and the Germans and Swiss revolted against infalliblism, but evolved beyond eighteenth-century Catholicism. That is certainly not the ACC or anything I would want to have anything to do with. Both Utrecht and Bonn referred to the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church and tried to move beyond it.

The ACC’s reference certainly is not post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism even though the Anglican Missal is a straight translation from the Pius V missal of 1570 with some Prayer Book stuff stuck in. Actually, the Anglican Missal of 1921 is a fine piece of work and the English translation is exquisite. True, we don’t exactly worship Thomas Aquinas, Bellarmine or Suarez.

I am not an American, so the PNCC means little to me, even though it approved the Nordic Catholic Church which has a few little communities in western Europe. There are any number of so-called vagantes bishops who seem to have been consecrated in order to establish a community rather than for a pre-existing community. The ACC is something different. Perhaps we should study Laud, Ken and other Non-Jurors, but their stage of development is far behind what we have discovered from more recent sources. Are the Non-Jurors any more relevant than documents from Henry VIII or the Thirty-Nine Articles – all of interest to historians – but of little use to us living at the beginning of the twenty-first century with our own problems and historical hindsight.

Devout Americans can be so narrow in their criteria and uncompromising that they end up as “one-man true churches”. I have seen this in the more extreme RC traditionalist ideologies. It is through this lens that any reference to a historical period is seen – you have to be exactly like as it was, otherwise you are incoherent at best and hypocritical at worst.

If I am not “Non-Juring” (this concept means so little to me), then, I must be

in the 1870s Dollinger model than the 1700s Jansenists, since this would put you squarely in the medieval scholastic era and Thomas’ Summa as interpreted by all of the medieval RC Church Councils thru the 1510s without accepting either papal infallibility or the Council of Trent as dogmatic in nature.

I don’t reject the Council of Trent, but being “bound” by it is fettering the freedom of our thought and spirit to see that period in its wider historical and cultural context. As I said at the beginning of this posting, I don’t mind being challenged, but I will not be manipulated into being loaded with considerations that are just not an issue for me. Many aspects of Trent cleaned up the filthy bathwater that the Protestants threw out with the baby. Unfortunately, the RC Church was over-zealous in its liturgical reforms and many things that were abolished were ancient and good, like for example the Laetabundus sequence for Christmas and many others. An atmosphere of centralisation and reform replaced something that had been laid back and “natural”, even if there were superstitions and accretions in popular religion to be pruned back. Bugnini and Paul VI only followed the same ideology and procedure in the 1960’s.

Our real reference is our own time, but we have just about nowhere to go. Rome is what it is, essentially like in the nineteenth century but without the pomp, faste and liturgy. Orthodoxy isn’t really interested in anyone but its own people. Modern Anglicanism has gone the way it has gone. Fundamentalist Protestantism is inhuman and unhealthy. Wherever you turn, the answer is “no”. Why should we not give up and be “spiritual but not religious” or explore the other word religious traditions? Many of us would find a lot of good giving things a rest and seeing life and the world from another point of view – if the world is anything more than money, raw power and greed.

Not being American, I see things from the European point of view – the bleak midwinter of our consciousness of our mortality. Yet, light is found in darkness, in that balance between pessimistic realism and hope. I am aware that all is illusion and our spirit never finds rest, what St Aelred called the Sabbath of the Soul. We search for the Philosopher’s Stone like a child after the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow or the fairies at the bottom of the garden. The nearer we get, the further away we are, like Tantalus dipping his head for the water he will never reach.

Historical references can only give a rough idea of things, but they like many other things are but analogies. The past is gone and only the memory remains. That is why so much importance is given to documents. They are all that remain of history as we remain prisoners of the illusion of time. All is illusory and we will not find rest in this world, but we can come somewhere near it, even if only for a short time. We live in our own era (2013, nearly 2014) and we can relate to it more or less well. Personally, I am very isolated from the urban world and the new generations. I am unable to understand modernity and post-modernity, yet that’s where the “church fodder” is found, since a business needs paying customers to keep going. Alternatively, the Church is something outside and above trends and markets.

For this reason, I can only conceive of Christianity in monastic and contemplative terms, the hidden leaven in a world that is hostile to the spirit or seeks a different and new expression.

I commented above on revivals of classicism or medieval culture being pastiches, but yet something new. In the final reckoning, Continuing Anglicanism can be something new and herald a new culture like the Renaissance and Romanticism. We refer not to one time or document, but to anything that seems to promote a break from what is stifling the spirit. It is for this reason that I would like to combat the centralising tendency of modernity from the Industrial Revolution to our own times and herald freedom and diversity. There may be many evils in such freedom and diversity, but the good and beautiful would be allowed to grow and prosper at least for a brief time like the Belle Epoque before the soul of man died in the trenches of World War I.

That briefness of the illusion is the condition of our life. We are born, grow, live and die – and live in hope that the life beyond the veil will give this transitory life meaning. I don’t know if our Anglican Catholic bishops or my fellow clergy would see things in the same way, but this is a part of our freedom and diversity. Thus, we will live in a single Church and see things in myriad ways, far beyond Protestantism or Papalism or whatever else.

I begin to understand the meaning of post-modernism as a new yearning and thirst for what is beyond us and present in our spirits beyond our reasoning. Perhaps it is the “new middle ages” of which Berdyaev wrote in his various philosophical works. We must be going somewhere in our dark tunnel. Perhaps it is this…

So, Michael, I might seem to be hard on you, but I assure you that I’m harder on myself and my own illusions. I keep you and all my readers in my humble prayers, aware of my own unworthiness and weakness, but living in faith, love and hope.

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Dr William Tighe on the Continuing Anglican Churches and Doctrine

Posted on Wednesday, 4 December, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I just received this from Dr William Tighe and his permission to publish it here.

* * *

I wrote the piece [Can the Thirty-Nine Articles Function As a Confessional Standard for Anglicans Today?] more with Continuing Anglicanism in mind than “Canterbury Communion Anglicanism,” which has reduced the articles to, at best, one selection from an a la carte menu.  Specifically, I had my one-time friend (and I suppose we are still friends, although we have had no contact for a couple of years) Fr. Robert Hart in mind, and his various shiftings-of-position since I first met him around 2001.  (Then, he occupied a theological position quite similar to what I discern to be your own, although with a more “mythological” view of the English Reformation; he once actually told me that “Anglicanism, as I see it, begins only with Lancelot Andrewes; everything earlier after 1559 I ignore.”  Subsequently, though, he has moved to a “Reformed Catholic” position, I suspect under the influence of Lawrence Wells and Peter Robinson, in which the 39 Articles and an essentially Protestant-but-with-real-bishops ecclesiology are the palladium of “Anglicanism.”  At the same time, he moved from the tiny and, after 2002, isolated “Diocese of the Chesapeake” [in which he was one of the clergy involved in vain discussions with the Polish National Catholic Church aimed at bringing that diocese into the PNCC as an “Anglican Rite” diocese] into the Anglican Catholic Church, in which he, together with Fr. Wells, form part of a small, but loud, group that wish to represent the Articles as just as authoritative for “Anglican identity” as “the King’s Book” of 1543, which the ACC seems to regard as the most authoritative statement of its doctrinal position; and they are certainly opposed to the ACC becoming a kind of “Anglican Old Catholic Church,” such as you, and Mr. Hailstone, seem to favour in your recent posting “Comprehensiveness, on whose terms?”).  If I were to rewrite the article with the ACC in mind, I might devote some space to “the King’s Book,” and question how coherent a doctrinal position it enunciates (not to mention its thumping defense of obligatory clerical celibacy; although Bp. Haverland himself once wrote somewhere that the ACC regards the KB as authoritative in the doctrine it teaches, but not the discipline).

* * *

Naturally, I don’t want to re-ignite old fires with Fr Hart, who is a respected member of the clergy in the Diocese of the South under Archbishop Haverland.

When I entered the English diocese of the ACC, I was made aware of Archbishop Haverland’s book, Anglican Catholic faith & practice, which is recommended for all incoming clerics and laity. The Affirmation of Saint Louis is the foundational document of most Anglican Catholics in the ACC, the TAC and most other Continuing Churches.

The King’s Book of 1543 (the Use of Sarum in Latin was still the official liturgy in England) is a source that bears looking at in the perspective of defining ourselves as Anglicans as opposed to independent Catholics. I have yet to read this historical work together with the earlier Bishops’ Book of 1537. Like any other formulary, these are historical documents of comparative interest, and need to be read in the light of historical knowledge and more recent theological developments.

I am indeed careful not to want to identify the ACC with the Dutch or Germanic Old Catholic positions of the late nineteenth century, but rather with a much earlier reference, namely the time of Henry VIII and before. The idea is not an exact reproduction is all aspects, but a general reference from which our identity is established. Indeed, we are Anglicans and not Old Catholics, but the Old Catholics have one thing in common with us – the Conciliar ecclesiology of the Council of Constance and the priority of the Episcopate over the Roman Curia and the Pope. The difference is subtle but real.

We obviously tolerate Protestant opinions in our midst without allowing them authority to dominate our whole Church at the expense of Anglican Catholic doctrine and praxis.

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