Trolling Psychology

Posted on Saturday, 8 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have been doing a little bit of reading on “troll” psychology, and in the end, I wonder about the validity of any of these studies. Why does anyone write on the Internet?

I used to see the Internet as a vast public library and a forum for discussion. I was too optimistic about human nature. Finally we are all good people and all bad people. Good and evil are in each one of us and we all live with our shadows. The Internet is what we have all made of it, millions of soap boxes where people scream to the world without having to listen to anyone else. Religion and politics are the two taboo subjects of any respectable English public house.

Are we becoming more polarised, or has we always been like this in other forms at different times of history?

Why are people so aggressive on the Internet? The other day, I compared the Internet with a person in his or her car. It is the phenomenon of deindividuation – losing one’s own individuality. The Internet and the public highway have two things in common, the former more than the latter – you can insult someone and you don’t have to face physical retaliation. Get anonymity and you still have teeth! It must be a little like getting drunk.

The Internet brought freedom of speech, but some people cannot live with being free! This is the greatest paradox for us all. It is perhaps Nicholas Berdyaev who has come to the closest to defining a theory of “freedom of the spirit” according to whether a person is of the “aristocracy” of the spirit or the herd of modern urban life, whether one is more motivated by higher things or by money, possessions and power. Most of us are probably a mixture of the two and determined by necessity.

So we have freedom, and will lose it through being unable to live with it. This is the supreme tragedy of humanity. The greatest temptation of the Internet is freedom without responsibility. Thus the troll is born – of anonymity. The obvious cure is to remove anonymity – make the commenter engage his responsibility as a human person and suffer consequences for the abuse of freedom. That is easier said than done!

Looking at reasons for trolls “doing it” when they have “kicked the habit” vary. The attitude is quite nihilistic, the mentality of people who – at a more extreme degree – go in for planting bombs in public places or serial killing. For some, it is a sport, like killing animals and not having to face the prospect of being put in prison for life or strapped to an electric chair. There can be a sense of domination and control. Absolute cynicism in the “pathetic” lives of others would motivate some to provoke and escalate a war, a conflict between two or more people who hate each other, yet never met or knew what each other looked like.

So, for some, it is a game. One can play computer games that involve killing virtual people. They are said to contribute to young men who flip, buy firearms and go and massacre a number of people in a public place. James Holmes for example among so many others… Trolling is assassinating people “virtually”. You don’t actually kill them, so you don’t end up on the wrong side of the law for murder. But, in the Gospel, thinking about killing people is already murder, and the sinner will get back what he gave.

The one thing that gives immunity from retaliation is anonymity. I once fell foul of trying to force the issue by exposing e-mail addresses and IP addresses. What happened?

Remember the last time? I contacted WordPress, threatened them with legal action over your posts, and they immediately shut your blog down. I received a very nice reply again later informing me that should I find out you have breached their rules, to please inform them and they themselves will initiate legal action against you. So think before you try schoolyard bully-boy actions. You might just end up with more than a bloody nose.

This was from a person calling himself a “Catholic” and a “Christian” using the trick of “hiding behind authority”. Then the troll projects his own character as a bully (I know that my own life history and temperament show me as exactly the opposite of the bully profile). The comment on another blog containing these threatening words was removed by the blog’s moderator at my request. If I could get that man permanently disconnected from the Internet and his computer confiscated together with all his data, would I go for it? Frankly, I see no point. Anger must calm and the only response can be a Christian one – turning the other cheek and praying for him.

No dialogue is possible with the troll. In this particular case, the troll ratcheted up a conflict from early 2011, and ended up threatening physical violence. Blog sites do not offer the possibility of forcing commenters out of anonymity.

There are various ways to react. Let them “win” and close down one’s blog. That is what happened to the English Catholic. I gave in, but had the intuition of setting up another blog on a subject that would be interesting to “genuine” readers but would bore the pants off trolls. Another reaction is trying to get even by “trolling the trolls”. One can get a sickly Schadenfreude over imagining how grotty those people must be and how unhappy their lives are. To what end? Taking pleasure in other people’s unhappiness is just another way of man doing what man does best – killing, the curse of Cain and Abel. What is the point of all this? I can imagine nothing more futile, time-wasting – and sinful – about out-trolling trolls!

There is a potential troll in each one of us, motivated by anger or the playful instinct. The Internet is one place where we have a measure of control, unlike real life where our fate is determined by things like the amount of money we have. Perhaps the elites of our world are happy to see people trolling, because their power base in the real world remains intact – but we have to be careful about “conspiracy” thinking.

Trolling could become the subject of legislation like spamming, sending viruses and scamming. Would it work? Who does the policing, hunting down and actually going to a person’s home, confiscating his computer equipment and taking him to the police station for interrogation? Surely, the police are busy enough hunting real murderers, muggers and robbers. If that is so, their priorities are right. However, trolls who have been proven to have caused their victims to commit suicide have been prosecuted and imprisoned. The law can only act on the basis of proven damage either to life or property.

“Don’t feed the trolls” is a slogan that is widespread, but difficult to implement. There is the possibility of refusing all comments unless the person clearly gives his or her identity and a valid e-mail address. That is difficult to implement, because people are deceitful and give an unverifiable false identity. One can switch off the comments altogether, and exclude those who send constructive and genuine comments. It is not an easy one. One can put all comments on moderated status, and large numbers of comments take a lot of sorting and wading through. Myself, I ban a handful of the worst e-mail addresses known to me, moderate a few others and leave as much freedom as possible.

The greatest difficulty is commenting on the blogs of others, where I have no control over troll comments, and then I begin myself to go on the slippery slope towards trolling by counter-trolling. The best is to stop commenting on other people’s blogs and mind my own business. This is a learning curve for us all, and it is up to each of us to be vigilant. Things change little except the technology. In the old days, we had anonymous letters written with printed letters cut out of newspapers, the green inkers, and the chain letter people. There have always been pathologies out there, and we are all affected to one extent or another. We are surrounded by spooks and we carry our own ghosts.

It’s a choice we have to make.

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An Adjusted View of Modernism

Posted on Friday, 7 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This is truly a vast subject to which my attention had been drawn by traditionalist and conservative polemics. All, the same, it deserves attention on one of these one-day wonder blog postings. I took the trouble to read J. Lewis May’s Father Tyrrell and the Modernist Movement published in 1932. In my life, there are two characters who have haunted me and acted as a kind of mirror to understand why I am as I am. One is historical and the other fictional. I name Fr George Tyrrell and Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The former gave me extreme intellectual curiosity at the time when I was at university and at seminary. The second gave an example of excessive zeal for pacifism and anti-imperialism. Verne’s Nemo character is a complex man of paradox, between love of nature and human inspiration, and his dark side of playing God through sinking ships out of vengeance. Nemo haunted me as a small boy – he and my great grandfather gave me my love of the sea. Tyrrell haunted my time as a theological student, seminarian and priest.

So then, a new joke could begin: What have a submarine captain and a Jesuit priest in common? The mind boggles!

The rhetorical question of Walt Whitman also comes out of this – Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and Whither O mocking life? That is the spirit of Modernism, of a new world emerging from the stiff and pharsaical orthodoxy of the nineteenth century, a short-lived optimism that died on the battlefields of the Somme and Flanders.

The word was coined in Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis. Tyrrell, and even Loisy, did not describe themselves as Modernists. It was a mixed bag, and the Pope and his advisors missed vital distinctions. Some of the movement was influenced by liberal Protestant theologians, starting with the Tübingen school in the mid-19th century. This tendency is now represented by Hans Küng and much of the Anglican Communion, together with the general tendency Pope Benedict XVI characterised as the tyranny of relativism. Von Hügel and Tyrrell saw the general movement in a different way. There was indeed a need to speak about God and theology in terms that would be credible to the modern scientific mind but without denying all spiritual life and the supernatural. There are several characteristics of Modernism.

For example we have an approach to the Bible that seeks to depart from literalism and fundamentalism. That gave the phenomenal biblical movement that Leo XIII sought to channel in the 1890’s. The second would be secularism and the ideals of the Enlightenment – the best course of action in politics and other civic fields is that which flows from a common understanding of the Good by various groups and religions. Secularism is far from perfect, but it seems to be better at maintaining order in society than a theocracy. I am personally convinced that the future of Christianity lies in its complete separation from politics and becoming an invisible leaven of prayer among people who live in the community and help the poor and the weak. Yes, evil will be committed by secular authorities, and we observe the reply of Jesus to Pilate “My Kingdom is not of this world”. That says it all for me.

I also see merit in what I understand of philosophies like those of Hegel. Much of the philosophy that underpins modern thought goes back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What is usually understood by modernity by historians is something like the latter half of the eighteenth century to our own times. The essential criterion is the mindset of the Enlightenment. It did a lot of harm to the Church, guillotined many bishops and priests, but the Church had brought it upon herself together with the Monarchy and the Aristocracy. Louis XVI’s desire for reform came too late. The pent-up anger exploded and the bomb had gone off!

One aspect Pius X nailed onto Modernism was the idea of evolving dogma. Newman was very lucky to spend much of his life as a theologian under the Roman patrician Leo XIII. There were many subtleties like considering the definition of papal infallibility as inopportune or talking of development of doctrine rather than evolving dogma. That to me sounds a little like criticising a piece of writing because synonyms could have been used (or employed) instead of the words actually used. Children at catechism are (or were) taught that Revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle, namely Saint John. Whatever that means to the average eleven-year old is difficult to imagine! On the other hand, the Papacy is hard-pressed to find evidence of papal infallibility in the Scriptures or the Fathers of the Church!

Life progresses and develops, at least before it grows old and dies, not before having passed life to new generations that will do the same. We post-moderns challenge many of the assumptions of our forebears when we ask whether technology and progress are a good thing when it is used for making weapons of war. What about our moral and spiritual progress? There, Captain Nemo comes out in me. I would have gladly joined the Merchant Navy as a boy, becoming a “lorry driver” of the sea, but I would have been too much of a pacifist to consider joining the Royal Navy. To this day, I find it incredible that no ship designed to carry freight or passengers is nuclear powered. At least there are facilities that split the atom to make electricity – and some of that goes into this computer! Back to theology. There is not much to update in theology – except the language we use. Nearly all disputes in theology are over the language used to express concepts. It’s all in the technical terms, and wars are started for less.

I once wrote about the Sodalitium Pianum, an organisation set up under Pius X as a response to the Modernist “crisis”. The Church responded by coercive means rather than work on the theology with real intellectual rigour. With a more pastoral and educational approach, I am sure the dialectics of conservatism and relativism could have been avoided, leading to the tragedy of the 1960’s – not only in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in all western Christian denominations.

Some of the Modernists were the greatest and most enlightened historians of their day. I think of liturgical scholars like Pierre Batiffol (1861–1929) and Louis Duchesne (1843-1922), and am embarrassed to read of their work being referred to as the synthesis of all heresies.

Distinctions have to be made, but this theological movement, which colluded with the Pre-Raphaelites and Arts & Crafts and much of the reaction from the materialism of the nineteenth century, needs to become better known and popularised. Perhaps this will become a new goal and foundational myth for this blog.

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Von Hügel and Tyrrell

Posted on Friday, 7 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I would like to offer you this text by Canon A. L. Lilley which is a part of the Preface to M. D. Petre, Von Hügel and Tyrrell, the story of a friendship, London 1937.

Some might wonder what this text is doing here. For me, it has everything to do with a forgotten aspect of faith and holiness which is kindness, love and beauty. Surely, such is the true sun in its orb, that giver of light, warmth and life.

* * *

Here were minds [George Tyrrell and Friedrich von Hügel] through which the theological horizon was indefinitely enlarged! Theirs was a theology which carefully included, but included only to transcend, existing confessional differences. The Catholicism which was the foundation and support of their own religious life, the Catholicism of the Roman Church, had indeed, they believed, in its traditional theology provided both for the inclusion and the transcendence. For them the sectarian note in Catholicism was a betrayal of its deepest instincts and of the classical moments of their expression, a betrayal which must be steadfastly exposed and resisted. Religion was, in one of von Hügel’s favourite phrases, the ‘deepest kind of life’ reflecting the complexities and conflicts inherent in every phase of our human living. And the only theology which could be adequate to such a conception of religion was one which would first of all take careful and conscientious account of the complexities and conflicts involved, and only then proceed to a reconciliation of them which could never hope to be for the intellect completely satisfying. Faith still remained a venture of the total human spirit, every requirement and incident of which such a theology would record with a jealously faithful and loving insistence, but could never hope to enclose in an intellectually coercive system. It was a conception both of religion and of theology which made irresistible appeal to the characteristically English type of mind and its habitual outlook upon things of the spirit. Its influence upon English religious thinking was immediate and universal. It crystallized what had been hitherto but dispersed and fragmentary intuitions. And it persuaded theologians of different confessional groups of their essential kinship alike in the possession and in the quest of religious truth. These two strangers came among them, treating them all alike as in possession of the same implicit faith as themselves and seeking to explicate it in more or less the same manner as themselves.

But the methods and opportunities of these two unconscious, but very real, apostolates were not quite the same. Von Hügel’s action was the more personal and direct, its sphere more self-chosen. Before the publication of his Mystical Element of Religion, his influence was exerted either through letters, personal talks, or small group discussions. (…)

Tyrrell’s opportunities were different, as was his mode of action. First of all, he was a born writer, one of those really great masters of language, for whom thought seems to arise out of the underground depths of musing, like Aphrodite from the waves, in perfect and accomplished beauty of form. Among friends, but especially with a single friend, he was a brilliant though never an abundant talker. His speech was a lightning flash cutting through the brooding darkness, coruscating, illuminating for a moment vast horizons, and as suddenly ceasing to be. The rumble that followed was your own uneasy movement of thought ponderously awaiting the next flash. But the brilliant talker was really a silent man. He lived most vividly, most satisfyingly, in meditation; and out of that prolonged meditation upon the deepest things of the spirit were formed those pearls of spiritual wisdom which he afterwards strung upon a thread of purest gold. So long as men delight in beautiful and sensitive English speech, and so long as they can recognize skilled guidance in probing the deepest mysteries of their own being, will the writings of George Tyrrell be read with something of the wonder and delight with which they were hailed in the first years of this century, and certainly not least enthusiastically by men of other communions than his own. As a member of a religious order he had not the same opportunities of immediate personal contact with non-Catholics which easily and naturally presented themselves to a Catholic layman like von Hügel. And even after quitting his Order he did not go out of his road to seek such opportunities, though of course he never thought of refusing them where they came in his way. He did indeed rather shrink from making contact with Anglo-Catholics, whose interest in his own communion seemed to him unduly concerned with things he thought unimportant and even trivial. How often he used to say to me: ‘Please send us no more of your Gothic and Gregorian converts.’ He did not, alas! live to know how much he had influenced and would continue to influence the younger members of the Anglo-Catholic group, to correct throughout the whole movement the tendencies which he disliked and deplored, and to prepare many among them for taking an important, even leading, part in creating that inter-confessional English theology of which I have spoken. Without him the leading Anglo-Catholic theologians of to-day would not have been what they are, nor would they have accomplished the something more than they consciously aimed at which is at once the test and the seal of all fine human achievement.

I have spoken of just such an achievement of the two men whose correspondence over a critical period of the lives of both is the substance of this book. That achievement was a by-product, perhaps only one of the by-products, of their immense and fruitful activity. I record it as an act of commemorative gratitude for the close and affectionate friendship which they both bestowed upon me unworthy, and at the request of one whose friendship first came to me through them and has now so long survived them. Of them I think we both would say that ‘of all those of their time whom we have known they were the best and wisest and most righteous men.’

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A timely sermon

Posted on Friday, 7 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I received this only this morning, and find it so appropriate for the grave things we have had to consider. I acknowledge the authorship and ownership of this text.

It certainly rings true to someone who has been more badly hurt by religious people than by atheists or “spiritual but not religious” people. There are conditions under which Christianity could once again be made credible. With someone more solid than I am, perhaps this could be an impetus for the continuation of this blog – As the Sun in its Orb, these words being given a new meaning and not merely describing a liturgical tradition.

A hundred years ago, the Roman Catholic Church faced what it considered a threat, from Modernism personified in men like George Tyrrell. It was all about apologetics and what is credible for modern man. Man of the late nineteenth century was taken up by the maelstrom of progress and science, and Tyrrell accepted that fact. His attempt at making faith credible for modern man got called Modernism, and it was condemned as a heresy by the Pope – unjustly in my opinion based on reading a number of studies on the subject.

A hundred years later, externals have changed to an unimaginable extent, but the underlying crisis remains the same as in 1912 (although Tyrrell himself died in 1909). I think any future of this blog will be to promote a new Modernism in the spirit of the old for the sake of seeking to render the treasure of the Gospel clear, credible and beautiful for those hurt by the leaven of the Pharisees.

* * *

On true and false religion

St George’s Church, Paris
September 2, 2012

© Peter Bannister

Unless you have been living on another planet, you will almost certainly have noticed that institutional Religion has taken something of a pounding over recent months. Many of us are probably familiar with the strident anti-religious writing of the New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens, author of the delicately-titled God is not Great and Religion poisons everything ; their polemical attacks on Religion may not win any awards for subtlety, but they have clearly grasped the public imagination in many quarters on both sides of the Atlantic. In November 2011, a much-publicized debate for Intelligence Squared was held at New York University to consider the motion that ‘the world would be better off without religion’, pitting two British atheists (A.C. Grayling and Darwin’s greatgreat-grandson Matthew Chapman) against a leading Christian apologist (Dinesh D’Souza) and one of America’s best-known rabbis (David Wolpe), and, yes, the atheists carried the day.

Predictable, some might say, given the level of prejudice against religious faith in the secular mass media. But it not only the New Atheists who seem to have a problem with Religion. Alongside those who would deny the existence of a spiritual dimension altogether, there also seems to be a spectacular increase, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, in the number of those proclaiming themselves to be ‘spiritual but not religious’. People who are unimpressed by the idea that human beings are merely ‘machines controlled by our genes’, but who are equally repelled by religious institutions in an age when the ills of fundamentalism and the moral failings of the historical Church have undermined the credibility of the very notion of religious authority.

Most intriguing and thought-provoking of all, however, is the critique of Religion from within the Church. On January 10th the 22-year Christian rap poet Jefferson Bethke started a firestorm by uploading a video to the internet entitled ‘Why I hate religion, but love Jesus’ that has since received 20 million views on YouTube. Beginning with the words ‘What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion ?’, and claiming to voice the concerns of a generation sometimes called the ‘Millenials’ (18-29 year-olds), Bethke is nothing if not provocative . ‘One thing’, he proclaims, ‘is vital to mention’:

‘How Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrum
See one’s the work of God, but one’s a man-made invention
See one is the cure, but the other’s the infection’

What currently seems to be happening in many sectors of Western society is a rebellion against the all-too-obvious shortcomings of institutional ‘Religion’ in the bad sense. Abuses of power by the clergy, religious violence of many kinds (a problem not restricted to any one faith tradition), and righteous rhetoric as a smokescreen for human political agendas – all this is being ruthlessly unmasked as access to information is being democratized. This is in itself not necessarily a bad thing ; slogans such as ‘I love Jesus but hate the Church’ may be simplistic and polarized, but at their core is a justified cry from the heart against religious hypocrisy.

On the strength of today’s readings it should be acknowledged that this protest is itself rooted in the Scripture’s own critique of false religion (a critique which, if truth be told, actually influences Richard Dawkins more than he realizes). An important proviso is in order here, however – the Biblical passages we have just heard do not stop at deconstructing religious hypocrisy. Instead they offer us important pointers to the nature of true religion which cannot be deconstructed. This true religion is not a system of human regulations, but rather concerns the deepest orientation of the human being as expressed in thought, word and action.

This is plain in the reading from Mark’s Gospel, where Jesus contrasts ‘external’ and ‘internal’ religion. A potential misunderstanding needs clearing up here : Jesus is definitely NOT setting ‘faith’ against ‘works’, if what is meant is the idea that salvation (or wholeness) is primarily about intellectual BELIEF in God at the expense of deeds. As in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus rather contrasts adherence to a set of human rules with a concern for the inner life of the heart (which manifests itself in our behaviour). ‘Bad Religion’ comes about when ritual observance is no longer the expression of deeper underlying principles, but becomes an end in itself, a fixed religious system. History has shown us and continues to show us just how such systems go hand in hand with manipulation by human power structures which impose rigid rules as a method of control . These effectively exclude the working of the Holy Spirit which, as Jesus tells Nicodemus in the Fourth Gospel, ‘blows where it wills’. This is the inner dynamic of hypocritical religion throughout the ages ; it is not at all surprising that Christ, standing in the Jewish prophetic tradition, should quote from Isaiah 29 : ‘They worship me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’ The codification of religion, its transformation into a dead and oppressive structure in contradiction with God’s original intention, was Jesus’s essential bone of contention with the Pharisees (it should be said in passing that they were actually his natural peer group within Second Temple Judaism. As its most enlightened and Scripturally-literate representatives it is logical that Christ should have called them to accountability – to put it succintly, they were the ones who should have known better).

But where does acknowledging Jesus’s critique of false religion leave those of us, myself included, who are representatives of the Church that we still believe is Christ’s Body, however disfigured? Does it follow that for anyone who claims to be spiritual, the deconstruction of corporate religion is the only option? By gathering here, have we become the new Pharisees? If, as many say, we have reached the end of Christendom (on a societal level), does that mean the end of the historical Church ? Are we simply wasting our time meeting for communal worship, reciting the historic Creeds and celebrating the Eucharist? And is the Christian heritage of the last 2000 years merely dead human tradition? Are those of us who find ourselves deeply and strangely moved on entering Chartres Cathedral, seeing Michelangelo’s Pietà or hearing a Mozart Mass simply dinosaurs, hopeless traditionalists who are taking up precious space ?

Here let us turn to the Epistle of James, where we perhaps can find a clue to how we can indeed be both ‘spiritual and religious’, as the American Episcopal writer Diana Butler Bass puts it in her recent and extremely constructive book ‘Christianity After Religion’, which I highly recommend to you. James provides us with a definition of ‘true religion’ pleasing to God which may at first seem surprising, given that it has so little to do with how contemporary sociology might define the word.

James’s definition has two components, which might broadly be said to correspond to the two tablets of the Decalogue or the two commandments that Jesus offers as a summary of the Law : the love of God and the love of neighbour (specifically the outcast, the least). In James’s version, true religion is to be found in the care of widows and orphans, and in keeping oneself from being ‘polluted by the world’.

The first component should be crystal clear : our problem with it is not so much the understanding of the passage as its application. The widow and the orphan are very much still with us, and whenever we close our hearts to them, we inevitably close ourselves to the working of the Spirit. Caring for those at the margins of society is essential if we are to see the world as God sees it – if we read further, James’s epistle continues with a vigorous diatribe against an obsession with worldly wealth (reminiscent of Jesus’s ‘woe to you the rich’ in the sixth chapter of Luke’s Gospel). In no uncertain terms, James denounces the mentality which would use religious ‘faith’ as an excuse for disengagement from the needs of those around us. Probably addressing Christians who had distorted Paul’s emphasis on ‘justification by faith’ by setting it in a false opposition to action, James insists that for faith to have any meaning, it must have a practical outworking. All else is indeed hypocrisy. The second component is perhaps more difficult to comprehend, but just as essential for a balanced approach to ‘true religion’. What exactly does James mean by ‘keeping oneself from being polluted by the world’ ? Well, it is clear from what he has just said about care for the widow and the orphan that he is not advocating other-worldly escapism. But neither is he suggesting that religion should be reduced to social action. James’s message may be somewhat unfashionable, but his Epistle is insistent that there has to be a real difference between the values of the Church and the values of the ‘world’ in a negative sense. That sense becomes obvious if we read the remainder of the letter: there can be no compromise between serving the living God and the false gods of status, money and the pleasure principle (chapter 4). But we can safely say that making the choice to be ‘in the world but not of it’ is something that can only be done in community, where our common experience of Divine transcendence in worship, word and sacrament empowers us for service. This is why ultimately to say that ‘I love Jesus but hate Religion’ is a false dichotomy (and Jefferson Bethke, who has remained a regular churchgoer since publishing his famous YouTube video, knows this). Yes, we should be careful how we define ‘Church’ – we are not talking here about an institution with its power structures and temptation to social prestige. What we are talking about is discipleship in community. That community is not simply man-made because in shared worship and service we together discover a God who is the source of all genuine communion, who miraculously invites us into the Triune Divine life itself, the wonder of the inexhaustible and unfathomable mutual love of Father, Son and Spirit.

Risen Christ,
You who know us better than we can ever know ourselves,
Purify our hearts for humble service
By the fire of the eternal life-giving Spirit
Teach us to see and love You
In the last, the lost, the least of those around us,
That the world would know that we are your disciples
To the glory of God the Father

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Blogging – Why do it?

Posted on Friday, 7 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

As someone who is untrained in journalism, I took up blogging in about 2004 with a now forgotten section of my Civitas Dei website called Ramblings of an Unchurched Cleric. It was written on pages at the rate of one a month, and there was a simple archive. There was no provision for comments, but readers could send me e-mails as some did. I ceased to be unchurched in August 2005 when Archbishop Hepworth accepted me under his jurisdiction in the TAC. Accordingly, the “blog” column evolved and its name changed.

I experimented with a few blog sites, and settled with WordPress as giving the service that seemed the most user-friendly to me. It is said that a new blog goes up every minute or so. There are millions of them on one subject or another, or simply as a “daily diary” of someone who wants to share his or her life with the world. The word blog is a contraction of web log, like a ship’s log or the daily diary, a literary form immortalised by Anne Frank, the courageous Dutch Jewish girl and her family who hid out during World War II only to be caught, sent to a concentration camp and died just days before the camp was liberated in 1945 by the Allies. Life is short and written records abide, until they are thrown away, burned or published.

Nowadays, blogs are rarely used as personal diaries. Facebook and other similar kinds of sites provide platforms for personal expression. I have an account on Facebook, but I never write on it, and use it only to find people with whom I have lost contact. The blog is a place where readers can find a continuous stream of thought on a particular subject (with related topics) written by someone who knows his subject. That is certainly the way I have seen the blog, and have generally intended it as a tool of priestly ministry via teaching. Another aspect is whether the blogger (the blog owner, not the commenters) wants to “be followed”, or whether he wants to leave something that others will find useful (or not) without being interested in promoting his own personal prestige.

Most bloggers are amateurs, as I am, and some are professional journalists whose blogging is an extension of their career with the media they work for. Whether we are amateur or professional, the thing we have in common is that we love to write, and we write well. If we did not, blogging would be so much of a chore that we would lack the motivation to do it.

We need to choose our subjects well. This blog, as its predecessor the English Catholic, had tended to become dissipated. Too specialised, a blog will attract few readers, and it will never have dynamism. If you want to write about academic subjects, it is best to write books and articles for publication using the methodological rigour we were taught at university. If not, we write at a more popular level, and have to diversify a little. As the Sun in its Orb was primarily about a specific liturgical tradition in European Catholicism, but inevitably, it took on the more generalised characteristics of the former English Catholic. Indeed, every time it enters the polemical fray about continuing Anglicanism and the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus, it runs into trouble with the more hostile of the commenters. With the demise of the Anglo-Catholic, the only two blogs dealing with this matter are Fr Stephen Smuts’ blog and Foolishness to the world by the professional journalist Deborah Gyapong. The former is already battling with “troll contamination”.

It is certainly better to write sparingly but with real expertise in matters. That is if we want to engage our readers.

One style to avoid is that of what British journalism calls the Green Ink Brigade? Such writers rarely have blogs, interestingly, and “green ink” writers sometimes have the profile of internet trolls. One definition I have found is:

In British journalism, Green Ink is supposedly a major identifying characteristic of written correspondence from self-aggrandising, pedants, cranks, charlatans and eccentrics, or from the clearly mentally ills. Writers and correspondents who fit this general profile are referred to as Green Inkers or as members of the Green Ink Brigade (GIB).

I have on occasion been puzzled on receiving letters from people I had never heard of, typically more than ten pages of manuscript and in huge paragraphs or even a single paragraph. The style is unreadable and meandering, and the subject is number one, the writer. It must be fascinating to go into a study of human eccentricities involving the written word, the pathology of writing, or writing pathologies. The above description often fits commenters, even those who do not show the typical malicious intentions of trolls. As I like to define words rationally, I would add (in the light of the Wikipedia article) that a troll is someone who posts inflammatory messages into a forum or a blog with the primary intention of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. This article needs to be carefully read, since the term troll or trolling can be used by extension, not always appropriately, and often abusively. I have done it myself. I refer you also to my article of yesterday The Radioactive Waste of the Internet.

I often receive encouragement to continue blog writing by those who say that they appreciate my out-of-the-box thinking and my challenging certain soi-disant orthodoxies that in my opinion stifle the meaning of Christianity. Thus I continue as a service to those who seek that kind of expression. I therefore definitively discontinue discussion of the TAC and the Ordinariates, and these subjects are now off-topic. I must be as firm with myself as with commenters, and the temptations are often overwhelming. I therefore refer readers to the two sites I mentioned above or do things like in the 1970’s – go through the printed church magazine and call a priest by telephone or write him a letter. I believe post offices still sell stamps and do mail delivery services in most countries!

One thing I should add is that blogs are wonderful when they are new. They age very badly and rapidly run of energy as the blogger’s favourite subject is discussed. After a time, nothing undiscussed remains. Then what? Changing historical circumstances often removes a blog’s raison d’être, as happened with the Anglo-Catholic and my own English Catholic. Blogs run out of steam, and articles are so ephemeral that their lifespan is compared with that of a mayfly, a beautiful and delicate creature that lives for only one day. In my statistics page, I find that the blog is consulted maybe about six hundred times, and I might get six comments, which would make up one percent. I may have as many as twenty readers who use the search box to look up old posts, and the page tells me which posts are consulted and the number of times. It is for the sake of that tiny minority that I keep something going.

To be honest, I feel about through with it all, and I know this would please some of my critics, whose criticisms will be as ephemeral as what they criticise. I think it is a good exercise to look at blogs dealing with other subjects than our own and see what is lasting and truly useful. As religion leaves the public sphere, and probably rightly, it does itself a disservice on the Internet, and this fact challenges my assumption that the internet is a form of priestly ministry. It all colludes with many of my reflections on Christianity in general, namely that if Christianity is not to become a very nasty ideology and means of oppression, it must return to the catacombs and the contemplative life of the desert.

We are brought to a quandry, whether we react as Luddites and denounce the infernal machine. Beyond a certain age, technological progress overwhelms us. The joy of sailing is doing something that man has done for thousands of years, hauling up bits of cloth on strings and pieces of wood up a mast on a floating hull and having the wind propel the boat. But, the computer has evolved incredibly since I began to use it in the mid 1990’s. The blog itself will be superseded by something else, a new means of communication. Even Facebook is not without problems. What else is possible and where will all that evolve? I often wonder whether technological progress has not come to a point where it would collapse like a house of cards and leave us to pick up our lives without electrity or fuel, having to return to the middle-ages or the dark-ages to survive. Yet, there are new inventions all the time as technology resembles the science fiction fantasy of only ten years ago. Help I’m lost!

My emotional and spiritual life have been very adversely affected by blogging on controversial religious subjects, this I have to recognise. I don’t know if this happens with other bloggers. Funny things can happen! Reality can get distorted! Ultimately, we begin to understand the meaning of our mortality, when we think about the idea of going back in time to the middle-ages with a CD player running on batteries! We can only take so much.

Dixi: custodiam vias meas, ut non delinquam in lingua mea. Posui ori meo custodiam, obmutui et humiliatus sum et silui a bonis.

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The Radioactive Waste of the Internet

Posted on Thursday, 6 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This article is obviously about blogs written by professional journalists and often under the names of the mainstream newspapers they work for. Before reading the article, bear in mind the quotes I give here that particularly strike me.

Though there are obviously many intelligent and interesting people who take the time to express their views on articles (a lot of them on Telegraph Blogs), comment sections are actually frequented by a very small minority of readers. Industry averages suggest less than one per cent of the readership of any given article will comment.

Going by my blog statistics, that is about my average.

At their worst, comments are like toxic waste buried under the foundations of an article and irradiating all rational debate with ignorance and aggression. And, like radiation, the effect of the internet commenting culture is spreading. The degradation of discourse online is mirrored in real-world dialogue. Adults who would balk at bullying in school playgrounds are happy to fling snide and often extremely aggressive comments around.

We find an attempt at a psychological explanation, which is interesting:

In one sense, the source of the rage that flows through the comment sections is simply explained. Psychologists explored theories of deindividuation – the slaking off of self-awareness and responsibility through anonymity (…)

The problem in anonymity, dissociative anonymity.

It is relatively tricky for others to know who you are online, which allows you to feel your comments are unconnected to your real-world identity. While the unmasking and prosecution of particularly aggressive commenters has become more common, this is still the biggest source of security for ultra-negative commenters.

It is all a game for some of those people. They make a new identity for themselves and they feel absolved from morality found in reality. Some of the worst commenters can prove to be good-mannered people. It is not unknown for university graduates with good jobs to go and dress up as football hooligans and go round committing vandalism and beating people up! Perhaps the two are related in terms of psychology.

Websites keep comments open because, when the system works, each comment spawns responses and the article above survives past the minute-long mayfly lifespan of most internet writing.

How true!

There are various ways mainstream media sites deal with commenters. One is to have people pay for the right to send comments. If they get banned, they lose their money. I couldn’t do that here, and my blog just isn’t in the league of big newspapers and their blogs. Another way is not to allow comments at all.

Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.

How minds think alike! I believe in the importance of discussion and negotiating agreements when such are possible. But, no blog is obliged to host bad comments and have to weed out the bigoted and the loony fringe.

Has anyone here learned anything from a string of comments, or have they just had the effect of making us angry or depressed?

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Jules Verne and the Sea

Posted on Wednesday, 5 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have this quote from Jules Verne in one of my favourite dreams of all time – Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea – my own translation:

You love the sea, Captain [Nemo].

Yes, I love it! I love it! The sea is everything! It covers seven tenths of the earthly globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is the immense desert where man is never alone, for he feels life bubbling at his sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite, as one of your poets said. Indeed, Professor, nature is manifested by its three reigns, mineral, vegetable, animal. This latter is largely represented by the four groups of zoophytes, three classes of jointed species, five classes of molluscs, three classes of vertebrates, mammals, reptiles and innumerable legions of fish, an infinite order of animals counting more than thirteen thousand species, of which only a tenth live in fresh water. The sea is the vast reservoir of nature. It is by the sea that the globe began, and who knows whether it will end by the sea! This is where we find supreme tranquillity. The sea does not belong to dictators. On its surface, they can still claim wicked rights, fight, devour each other, bring all the horrors of the land. But at thirty feet below its level, their power ceases, their influence is extinguished, their might disappears! Ah! Sir, live, live in the bosom of the sea! Only there is independence! There I pay homage to no masters! There I am free!

Captain Nemo became suddenly quiet in the midst of this paean that overflowed from him. Did he allow himself to be drawn out of his usual reserve? Did he say too much? For a few moments, he walked around, very agitated. Then his nerves calmed, he re-assumed his usual self, and he turned towards me.

Now, Professor, if you would like to visit the Nautilus, your wishes are my orders.

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Mourad on Irregular Clergy and the Last Traces of Donatism

Posted on Wednesday, 5 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

It is always a mistake to close comments – for the sake of real pearls of wisdom a few people are able to write. In the ordinariate movement, most of the lay people involved have shown little concern for the clergy, especially those who fall under the category of having been Roman Catholics and wanting to return as part of a corporate reunion scheme.

The more critical of the commentators ascribed the failure of the TAC’s attempt to become a kind of “uniate” church to the fact that many of the clergy had been Roman Catholics whether they were originally in that Church or had converted at some point.

I have written several articles recently on As the sun in its orb and some have been picked up on Fr Smuts’ At the Start of a New Blogging Week… and This Blog…. The trolls went to work and I wrote Wind for my Sails in a similar vein to the lugubriously-named Three Steps to the Gallows.

From one of these postings, I will quote some comments by the (civil) lawyer posting under the pseudonym Mourad. He is a convinced Roman Catholic, but kind, courteous and charitable. His subtlety in the most recent comments has not gone unnoticed.

I think it is not irrelevant to point out that one of the complicating issues in this whole story is the position of [Roman] Catholic clergy who have received major orders in the Catholic Church and then excercised ministry in other churches.

Father Chadwick’s own account of his personal history on Introduction sets out with candour his own history and from the account he gives it is self-evident (i) that he received valid diaconal orders in the Catholic Church; (ii) that his priestly ordination may have been by a prelate in schism but nonetheless effective (iii) that he will have incurred automatic canonical penalties under Canon Law and therefore, like Hepworth, he would not have been able to return to communion with the Catholic Church and continue any ministry via the Anglicanorum Coetibus process.

As things stand, as with Hepworth, it is not likely that he or other priests in the like position would be able to return to communion with the See of Rome otherwise than on terms that they live in the lay state.

There are undoubtedly many former Catholic clergy in the same position and not a few of them exercise ministry in different parts of the Anglican Communion and in Churches claiming to be Anglican continuing bodies. Indeed, every time the newspapers print some story or other about CofE clergy joining the OLW ordinariate, some spokesman or other will pop up with a story about Catholic priests who are now ministering as Anglicans.

Comparatively few such former Catholics seem to gravitate to the extreme evangelical positions held by some in the very broad spectrum of Anglicanism. Most feel the need to be in communion with a bishop and many will be just as concerned about recent developments in the theological positions adopted by the CoE (not to mention the US Episcopal Church) as are the many priests and laity who have either switched from Anglican Communion churches to “continuing Anglican” jurisdictions or who are seeing communion with the Catholic Church by one of the different routes now open to them.

I think the time is fast coming when the Latin Church will have to revisit the whole question of universal priestly celibacy. It may not be in my lifetime but I think the time is coming when the Church in the West will have to adopt the discipline of the Eastern churches.

More importantly, I think the time has come for the Church to adopt a more pastoral approach to those former priests who are out of communion and make it easier for them to be reconciled. That is why I was interested in Father Chadwick’s notion of a solidarity or some other kind of support network. I think the Church has been over anxious to maintain clerical discipline as opposed to pastoral care and further, I believe that many of these priests had and still have a genuine ministerial vocation and ways and means should be sought to enable them to have a role in the life of the Church.

Naturally, some commentators sprang up to mention that there had been dispensations, notably for those who had left the Roman Catholic Church as children – but that there had also been a priest who left as a seminarian in the 1960’s and was ordained an Anglican. Does that not prove that those who do not receive the dispensation are truly guilty and deserving of the canonical equivalent of the death penalty?

Mourad pointed out:

I agree. The actual prohibition is contained in the Complementary Norms at 6.2 “Those who have been previously ordained in the Catholic Church and subsequently have become Anglicans, may not exercise sacred ministry in the Ordinariate.”

In this context “ordained” must refer to the conferral of major orders: diaconate or priesthood. The absolute prohibition is therefore quite limited.

But of course the complementary norms of Anglicanorum coetibus are only a small part of canonical legislation and jurisprudence. The most relevant canon of the 1983 Code is 1041 § 2:

The following are irregular for receiving orders: §2 a person who has committed the delict of apostasy, heresy, or schism;

Article 6.2 of the complementary norms only repeats the general canonical discipline, perhaps in view to the belief many of us entertained that there would be generous dispensations.

Another person, known for his intransigent attitude, called Wayfarer, comes in with his opinion, which I will resume rather than quote.

The only cause for leniency would be invincible ignorance, for example a Roman Catholic child being taken by his parents to an Anglican church. Adults are assumed to be perfectly free in their choices, so therefore in bad faith if they foul up. They incur the full weight of the law, commit scandal and cannot be allowed to return as clerics or priests.

These clerics are men who have not just been formed as Catholics in their formative years, but that they are men who have been to seminary, have studied for years, have discerned a vocation, and who are freely choosing to be ordained and public leaders of the Catholic community. They are entrusted with the most sacred of the Church’s gifts – that of its sacraments and its people. It is serious when a Catholic leaves the Church. For an ordained cleric to leave the Church, it is viewed as an act of self-excommunication, schism, a grave and profound breach of trust, and the cause of great scandal – done with full knowledge of the seriousness of the act. To subsequently join another community and function publicly as a cleric is seen as adding to the scandal.

He tempers his judgement, as any good Vatican bureaucrat would by sympathising. It’s sad and painful for you, but the bottom line is that you’re dead! The Church’s position is constant, and we need to retain this fact. However, constant doesn’t always mean right. The Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

I added a comment

This kind of argument does not wash. In civil society and the penal system, every attempt is made to rehabilitate prisoners and those to be released from jail. In the Church, there could be diocesan offices for helping to rehabilitate clerics either in clerical life or in some other fulfilling vocation.

I don’t want to sound bitter, but if civil courts and judges practised the law the way the Church does, we would be back to the days of hanging judges.

The law here in France, as in England and elsewhere, judges a penal case by examining mitigating circumstances and not simply applying a “flat rate” law to cover all cases without any examination. There are more guarantees of justice under civil law than under canon law, because judges and lawyers are accountable for malpractice. That is my point. Any offender has the possibility of rehabilitation after purging his sentence.

Wayfarer responded:

I would very respectfully disagree with you. In using your own analogy – it isn’t as if the the ones who would be rehabilitated are not able to be brought back into and welcomed back into society. It is just that once you have someone who has been convicted of embezzling funds from the bank, you don’t return that person to being bank manager. You welcome them back, but they have lost the trust that was placed in them when they initially took the position. In civil society, it would be unthinkable to return the bank manager to his former position.

The analogy is apt, because the Catholic Church would view the act of a cleric committing schism in the same way and with the same seriousness. A “felony” has been committed, and you do not put someone who has broken the trust of the community in a position where they could decide to or have the opportunity to do it again. They were entrusted with the most valuable assets the community possesses, and then profoundly broke that trust. So no “hanging judges” here to be found – I think when put in context the actions of the Church make sense, though I do not in any way deny that it would be very painful to be on the receiving end of Church discipline. It may seem like a harsh penalty, but the offense is comparatively grave, and in the eyes of the Church it is a fitting, fair, and sensible penalty for a cleric who with full knowledge committed the offense.

I think finding lay positions for clerics who find themselves in this positions would be a good thing – though I wonder how difficult it would be to be in such close proximity to the office they used to hold, but not to be able to hold it. Would it not be better and less painful for the person to do something else altogether?

Again, I do not post this to cause pain. But it is important to have the Church’s perspective on this. It is not that the Church is trying to be unnecessarily harsh, unjust, arbitrary, or punative and this “side of the story” needs to be explained.

Would it not be better and less painful for the person to do something else altogether? That is indeed a question to ask. There is no reason to stay in the Church. Often someone like the fraudulent bank manager who had done his time and is out of a job has one option – emigrate to another country. There he might find a new job involving what he is good at – administering money – but with less temptation to steal it. His punishment may have been enough to deter him from committing the same offence again, if his first motivation was one of desperation rather than a simple desire to get rich. Why not give the man a new chance if there is no recidivism? The best thing for a former Roman Catholic cleric in this logic of vindictive punishment would be to make his way definitively in another church not in communion with Rome or give up on churches altogether. After all, there is evidence that not all people who have given up church go to hell when they die. Many mediums affirm the contrary! The Roman Catholics cannot have it both ways. I remember a canon law professor at my alma mater saying that it is never legitimate to use the law to leave any person without hope of a solution.

Mourad returns with his sense of moderation:

While I accept that Wayfarer’s post represents the traditional justification for the approach the Church takes to schismatic clerics, I question some of the premises he puts forward.

For example, I can think of quite a number of priests of my generation where the issue of whether the choice was truly a “free” choice must be questionable. The Church has in recent years made some quite radical reforms in how it assesses the suitability of candidates for ordination including the use of psychological assessment to determine whether a candidate has the right temperament for the priestly life and is more ready to defer ordination to test a vocation than was formerly the case. Candidates are encouraged to take a “gap year” before their higher education. Precautions worth taking rather than trying to force square pegs into round holes. Likewise the Church has made it easier than once was the case for a priest to apply to be dispensed from his vows so as to be able to live in the lay state and perhaps marry. Not uncommonly, a sensible bishop will encourage a priest to take a sabbatical as part of the process of discerning what is the right personal solution.

I suspect many of the problems of schismatic priests were exacerbated when some bishops stopped regarding their priests as a spiritual extended family and running their dioceses as if they were corporations.

I do not doubt the need for discipline when a member of the clergy commits as grave an offense as schism. But while one should hate the sin one should love the sinner. Justice should be tempered with mercy. Just as it is the case that whole life sentences for murder are rare, a whole life deprivation from ministry should be equally rare. Why not the kind of graduated approach which is adopted in many penal systems ? As a rough example, (i) return to the Church and live a life as a layman for a period – with the guidance of a spiritual director; (ii) undertake a prescribed number of periods on retreat in a monastery or other house in the lay state – living in a community but benefiting from the daily group observance of the canononical hours; (iiI) be permitted to progresss to (say) assisting in a parish under the supervision of an experienced pastor mentor (iv) graduating to diaconal functions (v) eventually assistant priest under supervision or whatever might be prudent.

Some of the readers may remember “the Nun’s Story” with Audrey Hepburn. Remember the Belgian priest who had had an illicit carnal relationship and received an appropriate sanction – but who was permitted to resume his priestly function on terms that he went to minister to a leper colony. “Once a priest, always a priest” means what it says. I’m certainly not for making re-integration easy – but NEVER is too harsh. And very possibly a waste of a precious resource.

Wayfarer replied:

Mourad, I respect what you say, and think you likely have a point. Times and methods of seminarian evaluation have come a long way, and I think our seminarians are much better prepared these days for the ministry they undertake.

However, the only problem with questioning whether the priest was truly free in choosing his ordination is that if it really is the case that he was not free, then you have a case of invalid Catholic orders, in the same way that if you enter into marriage but it is not freely chosen, you have an invalid marriage. And if the cleric’s orders are invalid, then ever sacerdotal act that he ever performed that required the exercise of orders is equally invalid.

This leaves the Church with a bit of a quandary – with that reasoning you either have a case of invalid orders from the get-go, or you have a case of clerical schism with the penalties that go along with it. Both unfortunately lead to the same place.

Again, I don’t think that this has anything to do with “loving or hating the sinner.” It has to do with the gravity of the offense that leads to a very grave penalty. There may be extraordinary circumstances that would mitigate this permanent penalty, but given the gravity of the offense I can only think that Rome would exercise that option infrequently.

In another posting, Mourad affirms “We can agree to disagree about the need for a perpetual prohibition on ministry after schism”.

We have two convinced Roman Catholics of a mind to protect the integrity of the Church and the Sacraments. One is a rigorist, and the other calls for a pastoral reform of this position, especially in view to the Church’s general desire to minister in the modern world since Vatican II.

* * *

One unfortunate consequence of the notion of tradition is trying to use laws devised in another age and in different necessitating circumstances to apply principles to analogous situations today. In civil penal law, if that tradition were applied, the death penalty and transportation to penal colonies would still be on the books. The law adapts to the passing of time and to new circumstances. If I were to apply the principle church people often use, then I would myself compare this attitude to the historical heresy of Donatism.

The history of Donatism is situated at the demise of the Roman Empire in north Africa and could be compared to France in 1944 at the end of the Occupation. There were resistants and there were collaborators, and the vast majority of people just kept quiet, did what they could to help people in distress, and got on with life. In the summer of 1944, as the Allies arrived, those suspected or proven to have collaborated with the enemy were usually taken out and shot. Whose fault was it? Man’s history is bathed in blood vendettas.

The Church emerging from persecution was no exception. Some Christians had collaborated with the enemy, and some repented and wanted to return to the Church. I will not go into the history of Donatism here, because it can be found on:

The tradition of maintaining a perpetual bar from ministry on a cleric who has for some reason defected from his diocese seems to be based on little more than vengeance. The punishment is not medicinal but vindictive, like the penal colony and the gallows in civil law.

This is what needs to be reformed in the Church, along with the discipline of clerical celibacy and the whole concept of a distinction between clergy and laity rather than the sacramental character of ordination. Donatism is also widespread in the eastern Orthodox Churches, though they have the notion of oikonomia, a pastoral and merciful way of applying tradition and law.

The Catholic tradition remains torn between Augustinism and Donatism in the application of canon law and the notion of Tradition. Until something is done about this, defections will continue, and those who do not go to other churches will lose faith or adapt to an unchurched existence. The pastoral responsibility falls on the shoulders of Church authorities, especially when they preach forgiveness and the need to rehabilitate rather than crush under the weight of vindictive punishments.

I believe that such a cause for the reform of ecclesiastical discipline in this area and others correlates with the cause for the abolition of capital punishment where it is still legal. Logically, the only moral justification for killing a person is direct self-defence. There are other ways for society to defend itself against those who commit heinous crimes, namely the prison system or a humane revival of penal colonies from which escape is truly impossible. The only coherent argument for retaining capital punishment is vindictive.

Punishment by imprisonment protects society and deprives the convict of freedom, which can be a means for rehabilitation and finding redemption. If there are grounds for believing that the redemptive process is complete and the convict can be rehabilitated, the laws of most countries provide for parole or conditional freedom. The punishment serves its purpose but leaves the convict with hope.

Another purpose of punishment is deterrence. In the case of the Church and irregular clerics, the fear of opening the flood gates for thousands of priests who left and got married is tangible. Maintain the tight ban and priests will think twice about reneging on their commitments. Right? Then you don’t need lawyers – just a book of law and an executioner! There is a question of proportion. You can deter by hanging children for stealing a loaf of bread, which has been done in history within the last two hundred years. The Taliban kills children for no reason at all. Human beings have rights, even when they sin.

Yet another justification for punishment is to have the offender pay back for the damage he has committed. You kill the convict, and he can no longer pay back his victims because he is dead. In the case of the Church, it might be more of a punishment, and a redemptive one, to have a priest serve in the missions or a poor parish than be banished and unchurched.

For the Church to “kill” its wayward priests does not restore right. It only maintains the illusion of a “pure” and “undefiled” clergy.  Two wrongs do not make a right. Vengeance belongs to God, not to man.

Vos estis sal terræ. Quod si sal evanúerit, in quo saliétur ? Ad níhilum valet ultra, nisi ut mittátur foras, et conculcétur ab homínibus.

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Wind for my Sails

Posted on Tuesday, 4 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I didn’t go out in my boat today, and I talk of “sails” in a metaphorical way – though of course nothing would have given me greater pleasure on a lovely warm September afternoon, anticyclone conditions and a gentle wind from the north-east. I talk of the sails of my own spiritual life

I read a comment from someone who seemed to express himself with some understanding and courtesy. Those are characteristics I greatly appreciate even from someone who seeks to help correct my defects and unworthiness. What I cannot understand are the kind of criticisms I have discussed over the past day. I wrote and deleted an article which I finally decided would cause more harm than good.

You sup with the Devil with a very long spoon!

The comment said “I have sensed an ebbing away of Fr Chadwick’s faith in many of his posts, which is saddening“. That is not entirely wrong, but what is ebbing away is more my confidence in churches. As Nietzsche found, church people are no more redeemed than anyone else. If Christ has done anything for any of us, it is in spite of that spiritual prison run by men who are no more virtuous than politicians. Atheism does not tempt me any more than materialism, the idea that we are just biological machines and once we’re dead, that’s it. There is something alive in the sea, the trees, the good and beautiful things of life – and I have a great sympathy with a philosophy of life that resembles some aspects of Buddhism to an extent. I love reading about Christ and what he taught in the Gospels, and what seems to have disappeared today as much in churches as in secular life. Bishops and priests seem to care no more for their clients than bank managers and magistrates applying the law.

I see “Terry” has just added another spoonful. He is wrong in many of his facts, but he exposes and screeches to the world my screwed-up life and my regrets. I say it over and over again – I should have joined the Merchant Navy as a lad and worked my way up through the ranks. I dreamt of the sea as a boy – that is where God is, in the seething waves and the lashing wind. The Greeks called him Poseidon although they believed also in other gods for other things and aspects of life. The Red Indians lived with the spirits of nature and their deceased kin. God is a loving creator, even of strength that can kill men in the blink of an eye. Everything is alive

So our friend “Terry” sneers, ramps and rages. Supposedly, I became bitter because I didn’t get a position of authority in a “corporately-united” TAC under Archbishop Hepworth. I find it puzzling that I called myself Monsignor. He obviously knows me better than I know myself. I hate to disappoint him, but I am not wearing purple garb, just a tee shirt, a pair of Bermuda shorts and a pair of flip-flops. I last wore my battered black cassock and collar last March for a meeting of clergy in Nottinghamshire!

He probably knows I was consecrated an episcopus vagans, a bishop without a church. That was until I joined the TAC in 2005 when I considered it a matter of course that I put aside the episcopate and continue as a simple priest. Perhaps I have not sufficiently paid for such foolishness! But since I joined the TAC and to this day, I am a simple priest and have tried to live it honestly. Perhaps that is no longer possible.

Supposedly I “lost face” and was made to look a fool and that went against my “pride and arrogance”. He couldn’t realise how little I care about these things, and the fact that if “Terry” ‘ s kind of religion is the true one, then I will be the first member of what Oscar Wilde called the church of the unfaithful. I don’t know who “Terry” is. Some research indicated that he is of English origin and lives in Japan and works in a bank. He is probably a rich family man with a big powerful car, and one who makes sure everyone gets out of the way when he hoots his horn and tailgates. I certainly wouldn’t open an account with him! Strength is holiness and weakness is sin, and adversity is its punishment. Wonderful!

The only thing that gives me reassurance is that I have absolutely no desire to do evil, get vengeance, get even, render evil for evil. I am just flat out. All I can do is wait, perhaps another couple of months, and try to make a decision according to the best rules of discernment – above all never making a decision when one is upset. And I am upset right now.

* * *

Perhaps he is right, but then I would prefer not to be a Christian, but rather cast off the moorings and pray for something to give me a sense of wonder and ineffable beauty. I am prepared for a hard life of self-denial and a quest for redemption through all the suffering that comes my way. This is what I meant when I expressed the intolerable idea that one could be more Christian outside churches.

Have I lost my faith? I honestly don’t know. All I know is that I am not an atheist. The demon would shriek out to all and sundry that I have thrown the toys out of the pram in an infantile tantrum. No, it is all profoundly depressed me and there will be no more relief from churches than from psychiatrists.

However, God doesn’t work in a vacuum and there is a whole theology of the icon, not just beautiful pictures painted on wood by Greek and Russian monks, but God is shown in the beauty of nature and the souls of kind people. I received an e-mail from such a person this evening:

I would like to begin this mail by expressing my deep appreciation of your blogs. I have enjoyed your posts, your thought provoking remarks and, above all, your ability to think outside the box. What we really need in this day and age is unconventional new ways of living our faith, a radical approach in line with the teachings of our Lord.

He went on to say how he had once been a member of a Protestant church and became a Roman Catholic in reaction to liberalism. He is now lapsed and expressed a complete aversion to discussing the church he joined. The rising of the “ghouls”, “trolls”, “demons” or those who claim to be virtuous Christians and are dispensed from any compassion, kindness or even courtesy – has profoundly scandalised him. Their “truth” allows them to do things forbidden to others such as detraction and calumny.

If I ever again find anything like fervent devotion, I think it will be when I am far from the Internet. Perhaps I should become Orthodox, stay a layman and go to Liturgy once a month in Paris. Would that be the right thing? They don’t have “Sunday obligation” – just a generous invitation to taste of beautiful and merciful things. I believe that Bishop Flemestad of the Nordic Catholic Church is thinking about projects here and there, whilst keeping discreet about details until conditions are settled. I would like to refind my naive faith and be persevering to what seems to be my vocation given my priestly character – unless it is invalid, and then we can just pack up and go home!

I am not interested in continuing to be a priest for the sake of being a cleric, a Monsignor or anything really. A priest offers Mass with or without a congregation, depending on whether he has a pastoral charge or is consecrated to the monastic life. It is all about the sacramental and Eucharistic Christ and life offered to the sick and unworthy. The bankers and magistrates of this world would take all that away and have us pay their prices for what Christ gave free of charge. The price can be in different currencies – pieces of silver or a broken heart.

I have always felt duty-bound, as one having received a priestly character, to persevere and put it to noble use, namely the worship of God through the Mass and the Office. Perhaps I should solidarise with the immense majority of humanity in this country who are far from churches: some resort to materialism, that is until the money runs out, and others continue to seek and live a life governed by compassion, kindness and a quest for spiritual life in some way. I find more spirituality among rough English Channel (or French Manche) fishermen than most people in churches or on the Internet!

Father, you seem to be in a vulnerable position right now.

Exactly, and in many ways that I will not discuss. I made the mistake of trying to take on the ghouls, in spite of the warnings of exorcists like the late Fr Malachy Martin wrote in his books. The evil spirits take advantage of every weakness and they always get their own back for any victory. An exorcist loses a part of his soul and often dies in great suffering and ignominy. The servant is not greater than his master. Good sense would tell me not to feed the trolls and be emotionally detached. I have been unable to.

The best thing is just leave everything as it is and just go away. The good person who wrote to me suggested I could get in touch by Skype. I’ll take him up on it. I certainly need to see someone who sees life and the world in a way most of us cannot, but most of those claiming to have special gifts are in reality charlatans who just make money out of other people’s suffering. But the Real McCoy exists somewhere. I’ll get advice.

I look forward to my next time out on the sea. Thursday promises good weather and moderate winds and I don’t seem to have too much work. The boat is a great help. Off to Veules with a heart dancing like the sea!

So, in the end, what’s the point of all this? Self-pity? I am beyond self-pity. I protest against the corruption of the beauty of Christ’s message by exactly the things poets and prophets have denounced right from the beginning. All that is left of Christ now is a forgotten and caricatured written message and an increasingly rare Sacrament of his presence. The way of Christ is overgrown, not by rites and traditions, but by the very line of parasites who made heaven into hell, crucified the Saviour and made the Church into a den of thieves to this very day.

I have certainly converged with a correspondent who lives in southern England and has a blog, and is a keen reader of Tolkien. He is a lot younger than I and often intemperate in his expression, but he is profoundly scandalised by men of the Church who think they are dispensed from the things they impose on others. Nothing new! One thing I admire about this young friend is his love of myth, symbolism, beauty and wonder – and as such he has not lost faith or the knowledge of God. That brings hope for the silent majority.

The point is that I will occasionally write articles in an academic vein, unemotional and detached. The stuff that attracts the flies is no longer my business and I must eschew it for my own mental and spiritual health. As an epitaph of this subject, it all continues on Fr Smuts’ blog, and he is a man made of tougher stuff than I… He will need to be!

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Blogs have their limits…

Posted on Monday, 3 September, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

… as everything has.

I have given a considerable amount of thought to the demise of the Anglo-Catholic and the article written by Fr Christopher Phillips to fill in the gaps. That blog died (or went into hibernation) because it had no further purpose. Its purpose evolved in a way with which I could not agree, so I was the first significant contributor to take the exit door. There was a Cistercian monk who wrote frequently, and he seems to have disappeared. With the decisions by Fr Phillips and Deborah Gyapong to go, that was it. Christian Campbell himself set up a new and unrelated blog in which he discusses the things that interest him. I can only applaud this effort and wish him well.

I have often reached “crisis” points in my time as a blogger, and have had to learn the causes and, in a general way, the warning signs. One thing to learn is to be impervious to the frequently malicious souls who write comments. They are so caught in their certitudes that they have nothing to learn in life. Their mind is fixed and no dialogue is possible. It is the leaven of the Scribe and the Pharisee. Mediums often say that this is the kind of person who would find the greatest difficulty on the day of their transitus, as they would remain locked in the purgatory of their own cast-iron certitudes, prisoners. Those who have the best prospects are kind and open-minded souls, ready to learn and receive with humility and modesty. We will all find surprises to confront our certitudes and also great beauty where we least expect it. Our Beatific Vision will have very little to do with which doctrines we accepted as true or which earthly church we belonged to. Jesus himself affirmed that the little people and sinners would precede the Pharisees into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Journalism is a trade one learns by special training and hands-on experience. Scoops are widely read, but then they are forgotten within days. The news on the TV saturates us with bad news to such an extent as we no longer feel the horror of people who have their throats slit by Muslim fanatics or the thousands of people killed or made homeless by a hurricane. We watch the news – and eat popcorn like when we used to go to the cinema as kids. Blogging is amateur journalism, unless done by someone who happens to be a professional journalist. I am not, simply a reasonably educated person able to express myself in English and publishing ideas that some people say they appreciate. But I find it difficult to manage conflict, so there’s my limit as a blogger.

According to the rules of fair play, you say something, and it is only expected that others will answer positively or negatively. If you don’t want comments, you turn off the combox or simply put up a “static” website like Civitas Dei that has been going for some time. The older parts, dealing with the liturgy, would be as old as ten years. You write something and you’re fair game to those who want an interesting discussion, and those who want to heckle like the party bores who spend their Sunday afternoons at Speakers Corner if they live in London. It is a game of cut-and-thrust, annihilating the other person’s integrity in order to win, dominate and gain profit. There are two places where man is at his rudest: driving a motor vehicle on the road and blogging.

Haven’t we better things to do?

I am aware that I have allowed myself to get “trapped” in an extremely narrow field of interest, that of religion -> Christianity -> Anglicanism -> Anglicanorum coetibus and the Ordinariate -> what happens to those who are unsatisfied with the implementation or who are convinced confessional Anglicans. It is a discussion of convinced conservative hard-core Christians. Other Christians get on with other things in life. Of course, there are the hard-core “liberals” also looking for a fight. The more I go on in life, the more I have to take stock of the fact that I do not fit into the convinced “conservative” category. I am realistic enough to understand that atheists are fuelled by anything negative they see coming from forms of Christianity that are in their death throes. Simply put, ideologies claiming to be Christian and which do more harm than good are not Christian. I am of the school of thought that concludes that most people who call themselves atheists have not rejected Christianity but a caricature of Christianity, a parasite ideology. So-called “liberalism” and “conservatism” collude in the same way as Nazism and Communism did at the time of the infamous Molotov Ribbentrop pact for the purpose of rearming Germany in preparation for the total war of 1939. The snake eats its own tail, a very ancient symbol of the conjunctio oppositorum.

Until now, I have been prepared to take a lot of flak out of a sense of human solidarity. I joined the TAC in 2005 by writing to Archbishop Hepworth, and he had the kindness to believe that irregularities and difficulties could be redeemed and corrected. I was staunchly loyal to him for nearly seven years. He was a respected Archbishop and Primate until September 2011. Another thing not to be forgotten is that we are both sailors – other people’s lives come first. You always go to the assistance of someone in difficulty or danger. Incivility exists at sea, but I have only found that with one professional fisherman who despised people who mess about in boats for pleasure. The man was tragically lost at sea last May! I believe in the law of Karma. You get what you gave – cause and effect.

I have to admit that some things just don’t add up, but I am still grateful to him for having given me an ecclesial vocation to my priesthood for seven years. Now I have only to ask for moderation in our way of talking about him, and I am hated and shot with venom. At best I pass for someone as “deceitful” as the Archbishop, guilt by association. I have read a number of comments on Fr Smuts’ blog to that effect. We are in France in 1944 – resistants getting even with collaborators. Woe betide the young girl who had an affair with a German soldier! Where is the forgiveness and desire to put the past behind us and rebuild?

Archbishop Hepworth has never done anything bad to me personally, and I have no way of being able to pronounce on the soundness of his decision to allow harrowing events in his personal life to hit the news. I might suspect this or that, but I have no evidence. From my own point of view, I followed him as far as possible, but can no longer do so. That has caused me a considerable amount of pain, but life has to go on. You can only leave the drowned sailor in the sea and make your own way to survival!

In early 2012, Archbishop Prakash wrote a kind letter to me saying that I was not forgotten, and that I was still under proper jurisdiction as a priest. The TAC is only the shadow of what it was in October 2007, because it engaged on an illusory trajectory of asking Rome for something already requested in the 1990’s by Church of England clergy. The remnant is difficult to quantify apart from the bishops who participated in a meeting last March in South Africa. Communications are rare, Canada being the least taciturn with the monthly bulletins. The Australians merely have a directory of clergy and parishes, and we still await a new English website to give news and inform the world what’s left.

I express my own position clearly. I am not (and have not been) involved in any conspiracies, but at the same time I am not sure about staying indefinitely in the TAC if I know next to nothing about whether it amounts to very much in any part of the world anything like near where I live. I am still dismayed about the US bishops and how they handled the old Patrimony of the Primate, not to speak of the debacle of that neo-baroque church in California. At the same time, if the TAC is a “feeding tank” of stragglers for the Ordinariate, no stable consolidation is possible for those who are opposed to the RC Church for doctrinal reasons or are unsatisfied with the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus, notably the rigorist application of the principle that on one who has ever been a Roman Catholic will be admitted to the clergy, and without any consideration of any mitigating circumstances. There must be a parting of the ways, but in a Christian way, not like angry people killing each other just after the Armistice.

The obvious solution would be for the TAC to continue in Africa and India and be folded up elsewhere, asking bishops of other churches to have the kindness to take in the shipwrecked by recognising some validity of their previous Christian lives or priestly ministry.

At this point, I am forced to recognise the total sterility of any further discussion of the TAC and the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus – not only on my own blog, but also in Fr Smuts’ postings and the comments on these subjects. It is unhealthy, even addictive in a certain sense, and can lead only to loss of faith, if not in God, at least in the institutional church.

Unlike previous times, I am not making a dramatic announcement of a more or less permanent hiatus, and I see no reason to close down this blog. I might feel inclined to write something tomorrow, but I must apply ascetic means to resist the temptation to perpetuate this poison killing our spiritual life and candid belief in the Absolute. Many questions in my own life remain unanswered, but I will not discuss them with anyone other than my own family. It hurts, and I limp on…

I have questioned my own vocation for a considerable length of time, and am increasingly alienated by the Church every time I am physically confronted with its reality. I have found the same thing in my experience of stays in the guest house of a monastery. Am I under the influence of evil spirits or someone having almost achieved what Jung called individuation? I won’t find the answers on the Internet. My real vocation was the sea – I can probably do something about it to a very limited extent. The contemplative life at sea is not without precedent – St Brendan!

What conclusion can I offer? Perhaps I can offer a little advice. Don’t look for relief to our spiritual agony on the Internet any more than in our mailboxes. Don’t wait for Godot, because Godot will never come. We have to go to Godot and our destiny is in our own hands. Many of us will never find resolution in this life and death will come all too soon, the loose ends remaining loose. Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and Whither O mocking life? – as I quoted in another context. We are at the same time our own best friends and worst enemies. We are full of the same contradictions as we find in others, and this is why we often over-react by “projection”. I see that with the “trolls” who are as rude and callous on the Internet as they are in their cars blasting their horns and tail-gating.

And when we hit rock-bottom, and all the rubble gets cleared away, we may discover the meaning of Original Sin, the Redemption and the real Christ. That is our faith and hope in the darkness and the desert. Let us pray for each other. That is the least we can do.

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