Monastic spirituality in parishes

Posted on Thursday, 5 July, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Doing my daily rounds of the blogs (perhaps when I should be in prayer), I came across On Silence and Sundays. It is a frequent observation that there doesn’t seem to be the slightest trace of spiritual life in most parishes, even where the liturgy is conservative. I have discussed the subject of monastic silence already on this blog.

Derek Olsen, the Anglican blogger in the US I referred to above, gives his journalistic sources in their reflections about silence and spiritual life. There is of course the old saying by the French Jansenist writer Blaise Pascal Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. Loosely rendered, those who play at being holier than thou are often the vilest sorts of people.

People putting on a display of holiness in a parish or an Anglican boys’ school are seen with suspicion, and rightly so, for Jesus tells us to retire to our secret chamber to pray and not be seen to be doing so. This is a question of discretion and intimacy – and authenticity. This is obviously the limit to the idea of importing monastic spirituality into ordinary parish life.

It is still fashionable to talk of Orthodox folk being more spiritual than Roman Catholics, Anglicans or Christians of other confessions and traditions. I have no experience of Orthodox parish life, and perhaps our Orthodox readers can enlighten us with theirs, but I suspect that there are enthusiasts who go lighting candles and jabbering on about their favourite devotions and saints. There are people who go on retreats, spend time with the priest, go to confession and daily Mass. Most keep their contact with church to a minimum.

We often discuss the finer points of apophatic theology and suchlike, but is this not a matter for clerics and enthusiasts? How do we go about promoting the interior life so that religious observance does not become mechanical and soul-less?

It is always disconcerting to go into a church before Mass and hear the same level of talk and hubbub as at the local market. We are surrounded by noise and it is very difficult to get away from it. People can no longer tolerate silence and stillness.

Something extraordinary happened in nineteenth-century France, as many things did. A parish priest sought to convert his flock, as did the Curé d’Ars before him and many other holy priests. This was the Abbé Ernest André of Mesnil Saint-Loup in the Champagne area. This priest founded a monastery and took the name Père Emmanuel by which he is better known. In 1886, his community was affiliated to the Olivetan congregation, and monks from his community in 1940 re-founded the Abbey of Bec Hellouin, so well-known to Anglicans and English Roman Catholics.

To this day in France, many lay Christians go to Mass and Office in monastic churches, preferring the silence and a place impregnated with prayer. It suffices to have a car and not too many miles to travel. One can also spend a few days as a guest for a retreat in most communities. That is certainly what I would do if I were a lay Christian seeking a place to worship God.

My “archdeacon” and parish priest of Bouloire was very influenced by the French monastic revival and the liturgical movement. The church would be sober and stripped from many of the uglier devotional trappings from the nineteenth century. He used the 1965 version of the Roman missal with many simplifications, and I have a lot of sympathy with this approach. The earlier forms of the Roman liturgy can be very finicky with the priest effectively celebrating a low Mass simultaneously with doing a high Mass with deacon and subdeacon. Medieval rites did not have the degree of rubricist rigidity as the Tridentine reform between 1570 and the 1950’s. Priests from that tradition tended to go so far in the reform movement before refusing the “hermeneutic of rupture” of the new liturgy under Pope Paul VI. Many mistakes were committed through “pastoralism” and imperfect liturgical scholarship. Mass facing the people was one of them as were some of the new bits and pieces in the 1950’s Holy Week rites.

There is the liturgy, but that is not all. At the same time, a parish priest trying to make his parish into a “lay monastery” is likely to make people “switch off”. You can only go so far. The spiritual life is of its essence personal and out of church. However, there is no opposition between the mystical life and the ways of the institutional church. Our spiritual freedom is bound to our practice of the Church’s liturgy, particular in the Mass and Office. The liturgy of the monasteries, cathedrals and parishes is the ground that nurtures our spiritual freedom.

No priest will succeed in making a parish of saints, but two things are essential – the celebration of a liturgy that invites souls to contemplation and doing everything to get people to be quiet in church, turning from profane conversation to prayer, switching off mobile phones and i-pods, making a transition from one world to another. It is not easy for any of us, as I can easily arrive at the altar with my vestments on thinking about things like shopping, work and daily business. The essential is to take just a few seconds before putting on vestments to shut up and remember what we are about to do.

This is something that increasingly strikes me when I go to weddings, first communions and the like. I often forget how noisy people are, both with other people and their electronic gadgets. I went sailing yesterday as the Tour de France took the coast road. Megaphones blaring, loud pop “music”, sirens of police cars and ambulances getting ready for any emergency. Like a scene from Apocalypse Now, six television helicopters flew over my frail mast and red sails. The engines thumped so loudly that I could feel the vibration though the tiller of my rudder. The vibrations were transmitted through the air to the water, and then through incompressible water to the nethermost parts of the earth. Imagine what it must be like for the whales and dolphins! The sea dampened out some of the noise, but the contrast between the silence of the sea and cliffs and the blare of the sporting event was quite surreal. Admittedly, I could not go out very far because there was little wind and a strong current and I had to think of safety at sea! Of course, we have to be real and tolerate people at their sporting events. But this level of noise has become so normal.

The transition from the profane to the sacred is not easy for any of us, but some of us are less attracted to limitless noise and hubbub than others.

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Happy Independence Day

Posted on Wednesday, 4 July, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I wish my American readers a happy Independence Day. May your great nation be truly free!

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Of your charity…

Posted on Tuesday, 3 July, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Please pray for my church history professor who taught at my alma mater, Fribourg University.

Father Guy Thomas Bedouelle OP (1940-2012)

Fr Bedouelle died last 22nd May aged 71 years from a long illness at the Albertinum in Fribourg, Switzerland.

He was born in Lisieux, Normandie in 1940. After studies in law and political sciences, he joined the Dominicans in 1965. He studied at the Saulchoir in Paris, and at the theological faculties of Geneva and Fribourg. With doctorates in theology, law and history, Fr Bedouelle was professor of church history at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, from 1977 until 2007. In that latter year, he was appointed Rector of the Catholic University at Angers, and retired through ill health in 2011.

I particularly remember his fascinating and extremely well-organised lectures, not only in the core of the church history curriculum in which we were examined, but also in his cours spéciaux in nineteenth-century liberalism, the Inquisition, the conflicts between Modernists and anti-modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century and so much more. He was fair but rigorous at examinations and did not hesitate to tell me on one occasion to come back in October having done my revision properly! We are certainly hundreds of alumni to remember this great man.

Many of my present attitudes has come from the church history I learned from Fr Bedouelle, churning it over and processing it in my mind. He not only taught us but stimulated us to read from as many sources as possible to build an objective picture, and to become passionate in our study of history. History enables us to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, so goes the old slogan.

This brilliant man had a particular interest in questions concerning the relations between Church and State, questions of secularism and culture. Naturally, he had written a hefty number of books.

Rest in peace, Father.

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Traditionalist Disappointments

Posted on Monday, 2 July, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

As soon as I finish writing this posting, I will leave the subject I approached in the previous article. I note that faithful of the SSPX (cf. Le Forum Catholique and Rorate Caeli) are disappointed by the nomination of Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller of Regensburg as the new Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This bishop is alleged not to be very orthodox about certain aspects of dogmatic theology and to be sympathetic to liberation theology.

More importantly, Bishop Müller has expressed his position in regard to the Society of St Pius X, that it should be dismantled, the clergy processed individually and for the four bishops to lay down their episcopate. Quite frankly, I could see this coming. For years, the SSPX has played cat and mouse with Rome, hoping to bring Pope Benedict XVI and his advisers into line with Archbishop Lefebvre’s refusal of the Vatican II teaching on religious freedom, ecumenism and the line in regard to the Jewish people exonerating them of guilt for the Passion of Christ.

I do believe the Pope did all he could by issuing Summorum Pontificum to lift all restrictions from the celebration of the pre-conciliar Roman liturgy, and lifting the excommunications from the four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer – excommunication imposed for illicit episcopal consecrations – only to be gobsmacked a day or two later by Bishop Williamson speaking as he did to Swedish television on German territory on the subject of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Since then, Bishops Tissier de Mallerais and Galaretta have expressed their opposition to the plan of bringing the SSPX into full communion with Rome, perhaps by compromising on religious liberty, ecumenism and the Jewish question. I now hardly see how Rome can accept them whole and entire!

There are many internal problems, and I have known the SSPX for more than thirty years – having been received by them in 1981 and having disassociated myself from them two years later without ever having been to any of their seminaries. I met many men in France, Switzerland and Germany who had been to their seminaries, been ordained by their bishops, and many of the tales they told in the 1980’s were the same. They were stories of sectarian abuse and totalitarianism insofar as such is possible on a “micro” scale.

Thus I have no drum to bang on their behalf, but all the same I think that things would have been better had they not been dealt with in such a heavy-handed way by Paul VI, the French bishops and the Germans in the 1970’s.

The SSPX now has a choice of going through with a dismantling operation and trusting men they have not trusted until now – or to say “Thanks but no thanks” and run the risk of many of their praying, paying and obeying faithful leaving them for something in union with the Holy Father. Turning to overt sedevacantism as they search to affirm a still-credible “foundational myth” would surely discredit them with many of their own, and fragmentation worse than what we have seen in the Continuing Anglican world would ensue. Can they afford the risk?

I usually refrain from commenting on Roman Catholic affairs, but it seems pretty obvious why the Pope has chosen Bishop Müller. As when he chose the then Archbishop Levada, he was concerned with the discrediting effect of priests who abused children by paedophile acts or excessive punishment. The scandal spread to Germany, and much of the rot was in the Pope’s own diocese – Regensburg.

There is another threat, Austria. That is a powder keg waiting to go off, and Bishop Müller is German-speaking, located near the Austrian border, and with considerable knowledge of deconstructionist and Marxist-based theories of Christian interpretation. How do you deal with large numbers of clergy and laity who want all the things that are monnaie courante in the American Episcopal Church under the present presiding bishop? Perhaps by going to meet them half-way… Another cause of the “progressive” discontent is the perceived extent to which Benedict XVI would go to meeting conservative Anglicans and the SSPX.

Between a rock and a hard place? Between Scylla and Charybdis?

At the same time, they must be aware how few people still go to church and the fact that the recent Vatileaks scandal is seen as some surreal and ridiculous game at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

They all bring it upon themselves!

* * *

Coda: Here is an opinion by Professor Luc Perrin of Strasbourg University, someone I esteem for his historical knowledge and analytical mind. From the Forum Catholique: en cuisine même à Rome rien n’est absurde – In the kitchen, even in Rome – nothing is absurd. My translation from French.

It is even very Italian and ultra-clerical: it’s called la combinazione.

In fact, the Pope replaces an American Levada by an identical copy in German version. In the recipe for the Curial minestrone, all sorts of ingredients are put into the pot, and you stir it and let it simmer gently over a low fire.

Sometime, that produces something tasty with various harmonised flavours, but sometimes, it gives an indigestible mixture of stews.

The arrival of Messrs Roche (Bugninist with a vengeance and anti-traditionalist), Paglia (Sant’Egido and inter-religious) then now Müller (neo-conservative not as liberal as some say exactly like Cardinal Levada but more openly hostile to traditionalists than him), all that indicates either a 180° about-turn of the Pontificate: Benedict XVI would be denying J. Ratzinger. Alternatively the Secretariat of State wants to engage in clerical politics, la combinazione to “balance” the return to full communion of the SSPX.

The choice of Archbishop di Noia for the re-created post of vice-president of the C.E.D. seems to be a screen between the SSPX and the new Prefect Bishop Müller, who otherwise could want to throw the bathwater away with the baby by his detesting the SSPX and the traditionalists in general.

Are this balancing trick of Benedict XVI and this unstable Curia a good omen to advance towards reconciliation or intended to make it fail? Each of us will judge and we will find out quickly enough.

The long interview of Archbishop di Noia shows he is full of good will, wanting to succeed, that the Pope still wants this outcome, but who seems to be discovering the case and the problems, and which he has perhaps not understood, and is reading about them and deepening his understanding.

(…)

Also see Fr Zuhlsdorf’s take – New Prefect at CDF: Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Bishop of Regensburg.

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First the TAC, then the SSPX

Posted on Saturday, 30 June, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Update from 2nd July 2012 – The choice of the Pope is Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller for the CDF. It’s now official.

* * *

I had a look at a traditionalist RC site this morning that said in effect that Cardinal Levada’s successor at the head of the CDF was going to carve up the Society of St Pius X. Given the source, I concluded that the man writing the site was off his rocker and had no credibility. All the same, I copied some key words into Google, and found more “respectable” sites and blogs saying the same thing.

Regensburg Bishop- All four SSPX bishops should resign and the SSPX seminary should close

Personally, I have no sympathy for the Society of St Pius X, even though I had a great deal of admiration for Archbishop Lefebvre and his stand against the whims and arbitrariness of Paul VI. It has hit me in the face that even Bishop Fellay, the one who has been negotiating the deal with Rome, would get the chop like Archbishop Hepworth. Admittedly, the bishops would be allowed to function as priests. How kind!

The TAC had a problem with canonically irregular clergy, and the SSPX has a problem with  – – – anti-Semitic clergy, notably Bishop Williamson. Another question the Bishop of Regensburg asks is whether the priests even meet the requirements, which the Catholic Church places on its priests.

Jaw drop!

Bishop Müller also recommends that the SSPX seminary in Germany should close and the students should go to seminaries in their home countries – if they are suitable for this purpose.

Even the Constitution of the SSPX should be critically considered by canon lawyers.

He is not wrong when he says that the SSPX should disassociate itself from extreme right-wing political movements (one reason for my own distance from this movement).

It could be that, unless the SSPX withdraws from the dialogue with Rome and constitutes itself as an Old Catholic Church, Rome would cherry-pick the clergy, put the bishops out to grass, collect the assets and real estate – and tie up the loose ends much as Paul VI wanted to do in the 1970’s.

My own view of the SSPX is that it has many of the characteristics of a cult or sect in the meaning given by the legislation of most European countries. This situation isn’t all Rome’s fault, as the SSPX seems to move the goalposts every time there is a dialogue, but the slitheriness is not all one-sided. I don’t see what Rome can do as an alternative to proceeding as for the TAC – get rid of the bad eggs and buy the car for parts. Such pragmatism is seen only in the Vatican and the City of London!

Rome keeps squeaky clean – or more or less so – with the world of diplomacy. For how long until some secular authority decides to have the Church for breakfast and buy the Vatican for a derisory price – for parts?

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Nietzsche, Christianity and Weakness

Posted on Friday, 29 June, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is best known for having said that God is dead. Our literalist minds would take him as meaning that God had been a living being and had ceased to live. Did he not mean that the idea of God was dead in the minds of people living in the nineteenth century? The point could be debated, and I have not gone into any real study of Nietzsche’s writings.

Nietzsche found a world that was very much like our own. The industrial revolution brought secularism and wealth despite the various revivals of reactionary Christianity. For Nietzsche, it was no longer possible to believe in God. Therefore in a way, God died. But, what Nietzsche was most known for was his influence on the Nazi ideology with his idea of the Ubermensch – the super man or Hitler’s Aryan “master race”. This ideology is very deeply rooted in our culture and we are not even aware of it. We admire strength and hyper-masculinity, achievements and conquest. Our culture is built on admiration on the great heroes of history, the great sportsmen of our day and celebrities. It all falls in with Darwin’s survival of the fittest and the notion of evolution. Yet, this worship of strength reveals a lack of compassion. Christianity is a religion of a man who failed, and died by being executed at the behest of his own people by the occupying Roman military dictatorship. Since those far off days, Christ has been made into a King, who through the Church conquers and succeeds in the world.

Dostoyevsky found in compassion and pity the bedrock of Christianity, but Nietzsche could not abide the notion of pity because it depressed him. I read somewhere that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf words to the effect of saying that pity for the weak makes us weak ourselves, and this is bad. Strength is right, and there can be no pity. The SS followed these words to the letter as they gassed, shot and worked to death millions of European men, women and children. Only one thing mattered for Nietzsche, the will to power. The will is everything, as we would also find in Nazism. Empathy was to be despised as weakness.

Jesus preached disinterested and altruistic love, compassion and pity, sympathy for the weak and self-sacrifice for those who need help. Nietzsche refused this notion. Instead of serving the weak, we have to cultivate our strength through will power.

There is a Christian theology of strength, recapitulatio as it was called by some of the Church Fathers. Redemption in Christ is the recapitulation or restoration of the weak in this world. The victory of Christ over death is the key to Christianity. The ultimate empathy of Christ is the source of life and new creation.

Nietzsche was not all wrong or diabolical. He was sensitive to the incoherence of “church” Christianity. The Gospel speaks of good news, whilst Christians are preoccupied with judgement and hell. The faces of Christians did not have the appearance of the Redeemed. This man was hailed as a forerunner of postmodernism in his saying “there is no truth, only interpretation”, and I notice many reactionary Christians following this same thought. Christianity cannot be weak but strong to fight against its enemies and hostile ideologies. Round up the heretics and burn the lot of them! Many comments in the blogs reveal this fundamental attitude.

Now seems to be the time of the kenosis of Christianity, its humiliation and humbling, so that we can begin to empathise with the weak and the “screwed-up” of this life – as a priest who sometimes contributes comments here would say. Perhaps I go through a phase of life not unlike European Christians in the wake of World War II and Vatican II, seeking to express our faith in weakness and poverty. I have criticised “modernism” and “progressivism”, and indeed much of it is a dissimulated form of reactionary ideologies – itself using and worshipping strength. There were some wonderful intuitions in the 1960’s that got crushed out by new forms of the superman ideology!

Let us think about these things carefully. We are not going to eradicate atheism or heresy or immorality. Perhaps we can fight against crime by joining the police or becoming judges or public prosecutors. If you are American, you can apply for the job of the man who kills people by pushing a button to send a deadly current of electricity or doses of poisonous drugs! Those are the people public authorities put into place to put checks and balances in the way of the more anti-social abuses of human freedom. The Church no longer has the support of the secular arm to repress atheism and heresy in the same way as thieves and murderers. So therefore, the Church shares the human weakness and self-emptying of Christ. And so, the Church suffers its passion.

The more I go on in life, the more I realise that the Church will not be rebuilt by Popes, Crusades, Inquisitions, right-wing political juntas or the like – but by the invisible prayers of the poor, the sick, the screwed-up, the marginalised, the bereaved and so many more of that suffering humanity that goes to Jesus, “Let me see”, Let me walk”, “Let me be rid of that demon that torments me day and night”. And he says to each of us “Go and sin no more, your faith has healed you”. Then our healing only brings us to greater humility and an inner strength we have not sought for ourselves…

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Eliminating Atheism by Force

Posted on Tuesday, 26 June, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Several blogs have come up with the tragic story of an Orthodox priest who had to bury his own son. This was Aaron Kimel, the son of Fr Alvin F. Kimel, an American priest who was originally Anglican, became Roman Catholic through the Pastoral Provision, and finally became Russian Orthodox. He is known for his blog Pontifications (which has not been updated since August 2009). Going by the comments on the article Farewell to Pontifications, Fr Kimel may have been unhappy with his decision to become a Roman Catholic priest and to become Russian Orthodox. Here is another posting on this subject – An Eastern Orthodox Priest Delivers Homily For Agnostic Son that Committed Suicide. We can make guesses and conjectures, but we will never know, and it is not for us to know. Tempting as it would be to judge Father Kimel for church-hopping, suspecting that this might have contributed to his son’s unbelief, I will refrain – as I have never met the persons concerned. The sermon itself gives the probable reason for Aaron’s atheism, his philosophical and intellectual outlook.

Frequently, children of the manse react against over-authoritarian parents, and I have met a number of children of priests who are atheists or agnostics. My wife and I have been unable to have children, but I gave the question a lot of thought. Children have consciences, even if they are less formed. Crush the freedom of a child at your peril and his! I have no idea whether that was the case in this particular family, and it is none of my business.

A comment to the posting to which I linked begins:

This is why atheism must be fought, marginalized, and eradicated, and those who espouse it must be corrected, educated, and saved. Atheism kills people, from the millions of people killed by an atheist regime, to the single suicide.

This is the real purpose of this article.

I was deeply shocked by this, especially that word “eradicate” with its sinister associations with twentieth-century ideologies. Corrected and educated, though they are neutral words in themselves, seem to suggest those ominous “re-education” camps and centres in China established in the 1960’s to bring people around to the ideology of the Little Red Book. Some of us must have seen The Last Emperor. I have no sympathy with atheism, and I have my faith, but I can understand why people do lose the Faith. The trouble is knowing what weapons to use against atheism – or more precisely atheists. Laws? Imprisonment? Banishment and exile? Whipping? Drawing & Quartering? Breaking on the wheel or burning at the stake? The possibilities are endless. All of a sudden, it is faith and believers who are doing the evil, and the argument for atheism is all the more fuelled. You can’t legislate against atheism any more than illness or accidents. This is the drama of exaggerating safety rules to the extent that human enterprise is crippled and stunted. Some of us have heard of the absurd story of fire extinguishers being removed from a building because untrained users might hurt themselves.

We are faced with the terrifying mystery of human freedom, liberty to believe or not to believe, to adhere to one religion or another or none at all. I often return to Nicholas Berdyaev’s philosophy. His central idea is that God is present only in freedom and acts only through freedom. No act of faith is possible without freedom, which is the central theme of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Taking away freedom in the name of truth was ultimately an act of atheism, something the Russian author makes clear in his parable. When Marxist Communism arrived on the scene, Berdyaev was intellectually equipped enough to reject it, and emigrated to France. He saw that socialism could develop into different forms. It could bring liberation, but it could also create a totalitarian society.

Some Christians advocate the kind of government in countries like medieval Spain (and as recently as the early nineteenth century) and the various “two-bit” dictatorships of South American countries. At the level of a country as well as the individual person, atheism is often the reaction against absolutism, authoritarian religion, the crushing of freedom in the name of truth. Many children of the manse have been brought up by authoritarian piety, and their only way to seek freedom is to reject faith.

To combat atheism, it would be counter-productive to seek to ride piggy-back on the authority of men like Mussolini or Pinochet. Instead, faith needs to be made credible through the spiritual transformation of believers. We remain humans. Grace does not destroy nature and we remain sinners, but Christianity should make some difference. If it makes no difference, or no discernible difference, what is the point of faith and religion? That is the question our contemporaries ask, and the onus is on Christians to answer that question. It is no good blaming consumerism or people “having it too good” for the defects of religious people and churches. The problem for many atheists is Christians taking credibility away from their faith through incoherence and hypocrisy.

The “hot-house” atmosphere in strict religious families, monasteries, seminaries, religious schools is often extremely destructive. The longer I live, the more I am convinced of the good brought about by what the French call laïcité, the separation of Church and State, the free church in a free state. No country should have to live under the heavy hand of churches or anyone who would make religion compulsory on pain of punishment. How many children educated in convent schools are still Christians? Secularism has its downside, but people who live in secular countries have the opportunity to discover faith and spirituality, which will certainly be lived more authentically. It is a double-edged sword – make or break. Those who are brought up without religion cannot adhere to what they do not know, and those who are raised religiously can react against the authority they felt oppressed them.

We will never have a perfect system of politics or institutional religion. Man is fickle and sinful. I am an anarchist at heart, but with enough experience of life to know that it cannot be the basis of a political system. Government, politics and authority are necessary evils, but the freedom of the spirit is higher. As described by men like Berdyaev and many more who emigrated from Russia from 1917, freedom is interior and spiritual.

Atheism cannot be eradicated without destroying the credibility of Christian faith, and the onus is on Christians to give faith and hope through love and beauty. Perhaps, then, there will be fewer suicides!

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The Sun sets on the Priesthood

Posted on Monday, 25 June, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This interesting article has appeared – An age of disarray and shifting allegiances.

The content is harrowing, but has been matched by the French Roman Catholic dioceses for decades. Under the former Bishop of Poitiers, Mgr Albert Rouet, replacing the clergy with teams of “committed” laity became the ideal rather than a practical solution in a time of crisis.

I won’t bore you with articles in French, but it is not uninteresting to know that large parts of the European Church are going the same way as the Anglican Communion. Maybe a scale might fall from an eye or two.

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Apostates and Excluded Clergy

Posted on Monday, 25 June, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have not written anything on the Anglo-Catholic since the end of August 2010, and I simply have not gone along with what some might term as “ordinariate fever”. Deborah Gyapong has written a sensitive (albeit timid) posting about priests refused for ordination in the Ordinariates for reasons that were dispensed in others. I was rather inclined to pass over this subject. Perhaps I have written everything I have to say and can only offer permutations on the same theme. Or, can a difference be made in relation to a certain “orthodoxy”.

Have we not been fighting the wrong war? This is a question I have asked before, and which will continue to haunt many of us.

The article in question is A Matter of Consistency. Naturally I refrain from “preaching to my own parish” or any kind of “self-serving”, because I sent no application of any kind to Rome and I suspect my former Ordinary has not done so either – and I have received no communication from Rome or any Roman Catholic authority. I am as indifferent about the question as whether it is raining in Peking.

Deborah has written sensitively and with consideration, and we still talk from time to time on Skype. What I would have found heart-wrenching a year or two ago is some of the comments. It is now more like water off a duck’s back.

As the argument goes, a converting priest has no right to anything as he (returns) to the Roman Catholic Church. He has to throw everything to the winds for the sake of the truth. No one can have any expectations or rights, but has to give up everything. The priestly vocation is not a right for anyone, nor is it something individual or personal. Its sole purpose is to be of service to the people of God at the discretion of the Church. Many have reconciled with their Church at the cost of their vocation and lived as laymen. They accepted the suffering and the harsh judgements, and took it all like the Gospel narrative of the rich young man. Conversion is unconditional submission.

The person expressing this way of thinking, actually, is not wrong – in his perspective of a conservative Roman Catholic. One converts to the Roman Catholic Church because one is convinced that it is the true Church (extra ecclesiam nulla salus), one has a conservative mindset and accepts that being a Roman Catholic is being part of a totalitarian system in which one has no say. It is a point of view, and if that is what one believes, then one should act in consequence.

As some in the blogosphere have observed, there is a difference between pre-Christians and post-Christians. One cannot undo the experience of life. Fresh ex-Anglican converts find something fulfilling their expectations and desires for perfection. Someone who has been there is burned out. I suspect that many of the conservative-minded people writing their pieces have not had the experience of human nature at its worst in the institutional Church. They have not hit the hard reality. They were too young or were not around during the worst of the Paul VI and John Paul II years. They were not psychologically or physically abused by clergy or victims of the ecclesiastical equivalent of omertà.

Those of us who are less convinced by the claims of conservative Roman Catholics see through this stuff like clear glass. Indeed, the leadership of the TAC, not just Archbishop Hepworth, but the whole TAC episcopate, made a big mistake in assuming that Rome would do anything other than filter each and every priest and apply the same mechanical criteria. Invite your garage mechanic to dismantle your car, and he will gladly do so – and send you the bill! Anyway, this is not time for recriminations.

Some have nowhere to go in ecclesiastical terms. There are alternatives to conservative Roman Catholicism – living a perpetual contradiction between the claims of the conservative apologists and the reality of the local parish, between the way the ordinariates were established in three countries and the ongoing ecumenical dialogue between Rome (or rather local RC dioceses and provinces) and the Anglican Communion. This cognitive dissonance is something that dogs many converts, and sooner or later, a resolution has to be found or the whole belief system can only be rejected for the sake of a person’s mental health.

We live in a very critical time for Catholicism and indeed any kind of Christianity. Modernity and democracy, the movement tracing its roots to the Enlightenment, have made us more critical, as has the experience of totalitarianism (or at least the experience of our parents and grandparents) in the twentieth century. Prelates in Rome assume that all the “little” scandals about sex abuse and financial delinquency will just blow away and their institution will still be there in a thousand years. Complacency reigns supreme.

The truth is that this kind of Catholicism will not triumph, any more than it did in the nineteenth century faced with modernity, democracy and increasing criticism of clerical obscurantism. Churches are empty and there is no sign of a reversal of this trend. There is still some life in city churches in places like Paris or London, with Eastern Europeans and Africans, with the new charismatic communities and a European form of the American mega church complete with “praise band” and projection screen. The traditionalists seem to be a “creative minority”, but their ideology is triumphalist and totalitarian.

The problem with Churches is that they depended too much on political power and coercion. When the power and influence was lost over the people, the truth could be observed. People did not believe in what the Church was teaching them. If force and coercion are the only ways to keep the praying, paying and obeying faithful – then there is something intrinsically wrong with the message itself. That is what the atheists concluded, and also those who do believe in a higher and transcendent reality, who are not materialists, but who belong to what Nicholas Berdyaev termed as the aristocracy of the spirit.

I could react to the apologists with a “sour grapes” argument, but I am genuinely happy for those who have found their fulfilment and happiness (even though these terms are taboo).

My thought has developed along the lines of reading the signs of the times. People generally stick with the Church they were brought up in – or leave institutional Christianity for atheism or an “alternative spirituality”. Those who “convert” from one Church to another are definitely in the minority, extremely zealous – perhaps fanatical – to begin with, and then the disillusionment sets in. Enthusiasm is a fleeting phenomenon.

Some of us may have to make the sacrifice of our priestly vocation, if no institutional church will have us and the existence of “vagante” clergy is found to be futile and illusory. Some of us would do well to take some time away from the hubbub and reconnect to reality – the modern world with its warts, its sins and its pains. We would do well to listen to those who are scandalised by the Church and who find it so difficult to believe in a personal God. I think this whole experience will teach some of us to appreciate our Anglicanism better and seek the ideal of moderation and kindness, a true liberalism and primacy of the spirit over the more dubious ideas of truth.

The bottom line is that I would agree with what those people say in that being a priest or a deacon or a bishop is of much less importance than following what we really believe in. Themselves, they would say that being a discontented Anglican is not enough to become a Roman Catholic – you become a Roman Catholic because you believe in it. If we accept and believe the claims of Roman Catholics (and I put it this way deliberately), then that is what we should do.

I became a Roman Catholic just over thirty years ago, converting to an image of Roman Catholicism proposed by conservative and traditionalist apologists. The reality just did not correspond with the ideology. I don’t think it did in the nineteenth century either. With a study of church history and experience, it all became hollower and hollower. To be sure, there is a high ideal and many beautiful words and texts come from that source – but we still confront human evil and weakness, and a message that is too incoherent and full of contradictions. The experience burned me out after about fifteen years of excessive perseverance, and I just cannot return for more…

There are alternatives that are just as honourable and which may also demand the sacrifice of our vocation – but which can bring peace and a “high” view of life and the world. The tendency of the conservative apologists is to say that you have to be convinced to make the step of conversion to Roman Catholicism, and then in the next breath to trash those who are not so convinced. There is no other honourable way out. Except, paradoxically, returning to one’s Church of origin, even if it ordains women! Then, of course, we can be accused of adjusting our intimate convictions for the sake of pragmatism and opportunity. The shadow of the Inquisition dies hard!

Perfection will never be found anywhere, and we will still have to accommodate the weaknesses and sinfulness of others as for ourselves. Things have to be weighed against each other, and other things need to be grown out of…

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Nativity of Saint John the Baptist and Anniversary of Priestly Ordination

Posted on Friday, 22 June, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I was ordained a priest on the 24th June 1998 by Bishop Raymond Terrasson, an independent bishop consecrated in the Ngô-Dinh-Thuc succession. Fourteen years have elapsed since that day at which clergy and friends were present.

My ordination took place near the Bishop’s home, at an abandoned chapel near the village of Coussac-Bonneval near Limoges. This chapel was built in 1946 in thanksgiving for the village having spared Nazi atrocities in 1944 like the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glâne. It is a simple stone and concrete building, dedicated to Our Lady of Biaugeas. Two Roman Catholic parish priests were present and participated in the ordination: Fr Jacques Pecha (1920-2002) of the parish of Bouloire (Diocese of Le Mans) and Fr Noël Tibur (1918-2010) of the parish of Clermont (Diocese of Dax). Another priest was present, previously ordained by Bishop Terrasson. Fr Pecha, a priest who had a tremendous influence in my life, had the role of Archdeacon and Assistant Priest.

My ordination was conferred using the pre-Vatican II Roman Pontifical. Here are some photos – scanned from prints as I had no digital camera in those days! The comments are under each photo.

Bishop Terrasson accompanied by Fr Pecha, Fr Tibur behind in surplice and pastoral stole

Litany of the Saints, a subdeacon was ordained in the same ceremony.

Close-up of well-worn town shoes!

Imposition of hands by the Bishop.

Imposition of hands by the Archdeacon.

The deacon’s stole becomes a priest’s stole.

Anointing of the hands.

Bound hands (I still have the cloth) and the porrection of the instruments. That is the chalice I use each day for Mass.

A shot outside the chapel after the ceremony. Only one person other than myself in this photo is still alive!

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