What justifies our existence? By this I don’t mean our individual lives as human persons, but our continuing as priests, little sacramental Christian communities, or whatever. We often find ourselves in impossible situations like a boat in rough sea. There is always a way to survive… As priests, what have we to offer? This is a question I have been asking myself for the past couple of years. Will people go to hell without my saving them? I hardly think so. But, I might bring some consolation or happiness in a special or painful moment of life.
I wrote in Sessio and Missio that some Church bodies spend their time justifying their existence by trying to prove their canonical legitimacy in relation to the mainstream church that, in the Continuers’ estimation, lost that legitimacy. It is what some would call institutionalism. I believe we have to move beyond that vision of ecclesial existence to a more sacramental and spiritual basis. We often get so lost in technicalities, theological, liturgical or whatever, that people seeking the basics of Christian living get alienated.
Those of us who are married priests have only to ask our wives what they think!
Why be a priest? One is a priest for others, a pastor of souls. But there is not only the traditional parish ministry. There is also teaching, writing, blogging, taking part in ordinary life and trying to maintain a discreet Christian leaven. There is also the ministry of intercession through the Office and the daily Sacrifice of the Mass. The communal meal aspect of the Eucharist has been neglected in the past, but that doesn’t mean we have to abolish the Mass as a Sacrifice that metaphysically reconciles creation with the Creator. The sacrificial dimension of the Mass is enough to justify daily celebration, even if the priest has no congregation most of the time. The sacrifice and the community meal should be complementary rather than in opposition.
I read a lot about inclusiveness, for example of those some of us might consider marginal, but that alone is not enough. Inclusion has to be for a reason. I am opposed to churches being told they have to include this or that because it is someone’s political agenda. The Church is about spirituality and the common pilgrimage to the Kingdom. I am very concerned about ecology and doing something about the sea being polluted, but church is not the place for that. A part of our sailing club work is bringing people to appreciate the sea for sport, exploration, fishing or whatever – and then to participate in activities to promote environmental friendliness. Yes, it’s good for priests to get out of the sacristy and take part in life through work, play and social connections.
Like the sea for our sailing club, the metaphysical reality of God and our spirituality are for our churches. We can be relevant and justified in doing what we are doing insofar as we offer the spiritual and the transcendent as well as the immanent God. That is what I believe many people are looking for and don’t find in many of the mainstream parishes they look into on their way.
At one time, humanitarian work and the combat for human rights were the work of the Church. Not any longer. The Welfare State, public health services and social security have taken over. The system is highly bureaucratised and wasteful of resources, but it works better than the Church ever did. The churches no longer have the respectability they once had. They are starved of justification on the humanitarian and social front. Speeches about these matters by churchmen sound so hollow and devoid of meaning!
I think that independent sacramental churches have the relevance of being “pre-Constantinian”, relying solely on spirituality and the liturgical / sacramental life. No politics, no support from the secular authority, no way to force people to do or believe anything. One can try offering entertainment, but the TV does it better, and in the comfort of people’s own homes! The only way truth can be believed is by being credible. If this aspiration to the transcendental is not met, then people will not be interested.
If we are justified in continuing as priests outside the official canonical churches, themselves closing down at a rate of knots here in Europe (and I suspect elsewhere too), it is because we offer bread instead of stones, eggs instead of scorpions. If we cannot do that, then we might as well join the hundreds of thousands of laicised RC clergy, bitter souls for the most part. If we welcome the wounded, we have to do more than share their anger, but rather help them and ourselves to turn over a new page.
A fact we have to accept is that lay Christians find it much easier to stay in the mainstream than us clergy. That is why independent sacramental churches have higher numbers of clergy or candidates for ordination than laity. Is our purpose seeking out those who have canonical impediments in the mainstream churches? We have to remember that people can be wrong and justly punished for an offence against the Christian community. Having more open criteria for ordination cannot in itself be a justification for a church, for the obvious reason that some candidates for ordination are truly unsuitable.
One possible justification for the independent sacramental community is being a kind of “palliative ward” for clerics waiting for reconciliation with the mainstream Church they left. It takes a long time to get a response to one’s letter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, endless wranglings with canon lawyers to get them to plead mitigating circumstances, and so forth – yada yada. In the end of the day, if being in the official Roman Catholic Church is truly an imperative, you just go as a layman and do what they say (or don’t bother saying). We have indeed to ask ourselves why we got ourselves into the situation we are in. Were we looking for God’s Kingdom or something else? This is how I have been made to think it all out through my experience with Archbishop Hepworth and the TAC.
The experience some of us go through, at least those who resist the temptation to bitterness, brings us to consider that Christianity has diversified over the centuries for a good reason. There are the sacramental Churches and the ecclesial communities of the Reformed tradition in its myriad interpretations. I begin to see this diversity positively. My father is deeply agnostic and critical of religion, but he has befriended a Unitarian minister. My father speaks very highly of their universalism and openness, as well as their sincere spirituality. I have had wonderful conversations with Methodists and with a few of the more open-minded Evangelicals. In the independent sacramental world, I discover a new tendency, the resacramentalisation of the Unitarians, Methodists and Congregationalists. In the contemporary world, there are so-called emerging churches, à la McLaren. I have read McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy, and find real inspiration and sincerity in it. After all, it is a Catholic movement as happened in the Church of England, the Lutherans and even some of the Swiss Reformed churches.
It is a wider vision of the Oxford Movement, as it reaches beyond the national church and its institutions and embraces the diversity that was born of necessity in different times of history. Some speak of Free Catholicism as a reflection of the free churches of the Reformation. The great figure is this tendency was Ulrich Vernon Herford (1866-1938). He had been a Unitarian minister, and thus brought his experience and theological perspectives into a Catholic vision. I have been writing about Christian Anarchism recently, and this is all part of a new post-modern inspiration.
What I see in this is an aspiration to freedom, freedom of the spirit as Berdyaev put it. The emphasis is shifted from authority and jurisdiction to the shared belief in the sacraments as vehicles of divine grace. It is a spiritual approach of those who are for so many reasons alienated from the mainstream church, which are in the process of closing down though being unable to afford to maintain their infrastructures and institutions.
If a church bases is communion on relationships and friendship rather than laws and official agreements, we go some way to presenting something up to the aspirations of our contemporaries who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.
Many of us have been concerned for church unity and looking to the See of St Peter. What is the nature of this Unity for which Christ prayed. If it is getting people back into the ship, it is a futile exercise. Ecumenical dialogues have been going on for more than a century, and hardly any progress is made. The unity is situated elsewhere – because it already exists. This unity is supernatural, not material or a matter of horse-trading between career bishops. There will never be a united independent sacramental church any more than a single Continuing Anglican jurisdiction. That is one thing we have to accept, and the unity attempts can be more discrediting than the division. I have come to believe that the diversity is the strength of Christianity, not its weakness that impedes its credibility in a sceptical world.
We take our place in this enormous diversity, some of us in utter obscurity and confronted with the frustration of there being little or no demand to correspond with our offer. Indeed, I may be more of a priest at the sailing club than in chapel!
