Posting from the old English Catholic blog.

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There is a striking article in New Directions – An Anglo-Catholic future by John D. Alexander and Phoebe Pettingell. To this posting I have given the three keywords these authors used in their article to describe three possible approaches to living the Catholic way in the Church of England, or for that matter, other Churches of the Anglican Communion. The big question, as we all know is discerning whether the Church we belong to is not radically incompatible with what we believe. One does not join the Muslims to be a good Buddhist! It might at times seem to be as simple as that.

Is any kind of accommodation possible for the sake of belonging to the established Church and thus having access to most believers rather than going the way of “enthusiasm” and a disproportionate role of religion in our lives? We are surely not all and every one of us called to choose between three categories: going somewhere else, staying and putting up with everything, or digging in and witnessing to Christ’s love.

It is when we have entirely given up on the official establishment that we begin to look for “vehicles” in which we can continue as we were brought up. Thus we have the Anglican Use, the Ordinariate, Western Rite Orthodoxy, the TAC, the ACC, the ACA and every other combination of letters to designate an independent Continuing Anglican Church. There are many reasons to join them – but also to keep away from them all. We can also consider stripping our Christian life and aspirations back to “mere Christianity” and then substituting the “trappings” of the Church we are considering joining to what we had before. Thus an Anglican becomes a Roman Catholic – there is something different about the convert, but the outward observances are identical to those of cradle Catholics. We do need to look things squarely in the face.

Is some kind of neutral “mere Christianity” possible, by which someone can slough off his own experience to adopt that of others in other cultures and Churches? Thus we find English converts to Orthodoxy growing beards and adopting eastern baptismal names. Perhaps it is something that might be good for some, perhaps via a “desert” period of not belonging to any church at all.

The conversion of Anglo-Catholics to Rome seemed the best way in a paradigm of organic development as Newman formulated it. Indeed, this theory was the clincher for Newman, and I believed in it for a long time, but see too much evidence against it. I personally have tended to make this assumption, but I am increasingly of the opinion that the history of the Roman Catholic Church, as all other Churches, is one of a hermeneutic of rupture. Old things are replaced by new things and people get used to them. History is changed at a whim, and after twenty centuries, Christianity itself is increasingly difficult to discern under the layers and layers of ecclesiastical and cultural accretions. Both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation were ruptures, as is “conservatism” and “liberalism” (for want of better labels) in the present scene. I sometimes see Christianity as an hourglass, for its time is running out. But, perhaps the hourglass can once again be turned upside down and the process begun again…

In my experience of life, if we look for a Church that perfectly corresponds with the vision of another period of history, when Christianity seemed to be more real, we are likely to be chasing after an illusion. For every problem in the Anglican Church, we will find its equivalent in Roman Catholicism if we face reality and avoid being seduced by romantic idealism and illusions.

Is Catholicism itself an illusion? I sometimes have the impression, though it depends on how you define Catholicism. I suppose it is some kind of sacramentally expressed incarnational way of living and believing that appeals to more than the intellectual faculties to which biblical teaching is addressed. Perhaps as many Anglicans, faced with the ubiquitous cognitive dissonance, become Roman Catholics as abandon what some term as “orthodox” Christianity. Perhaps the “middle way” is accommodation – accepting the status quo.

Such an approach may fill us with bitterness and loathing, but we also know that a larger “mainstream” is of those who are not churchgoers or even Christians. Accommodation can go a very long way. In times past, accommodation might have meant conformity with the Prayer Book and avoiding ritualistic idiosyncrasies, an approach like Roman Catholic priests saying the black and doing the red, and nothing more. Going further, it is the Vicar of Bray syndrome that makes an absolute of the Establishment, and you adjust your belief to fit. That hardly seems very sincere to me. A priest working like that seems to be no more than a mercenary, a functionary – in it for the job, the rent-free house, the car and the perks.

In Victorian England, some Anglo-Catholics managed to find a position between getting out (usually going to the Roman Catholic Church) or accommodating with Liberalism or the Low Church. They lived in a kind of “dialectical tension”. Do not some Roman Catholic clergy also do so in an analogous position? There are many priests resisting the ideologies of their “accommodationist” bishops and doing the best they can – and that is clearly both sides of the Tiber, if you like that ghastly metaphor which I cannot stomach!

The way of witness is what I have seen in some French parishes where the priest stuck it out for forty or fifty years until he died, against the hostility of diocesan bishops, diocesan bureaucracy and so many other crosses. The priest’s lot is to suffer from the lack of care from his Bishop, or even from his faithful. Being a priest these days is about as gruelling as anything else. It was certainly the case for Keble and Pusey.

The way we live with disappointment and disillusionment will depend largely on the kind of spiritual life we have. We will certainly suffer less if we stay put than if we go chasing after illusions. Remember, other people would never put their money where their mouth is in terms of dispensing advice. Join the Ordinariate! Join the Western Rite Orthodox! Join anything – the mask only falls off when you have made the move and cannot go back. It is interesting to see that Keble had low expectations, because the world does not vindicate movements of the spirit. Likewise, Pusey’s “own deep sense of unworthiness, which welcomed personal humiliation, protected him from the sense of hurt and rejection that afflicted Newman”.

I find this article close to home, though I would express its ideas in a very different way. Some of us who read this blog are priests of an “official” Church and witness to Christ’s love through the ministry they have received. Others are scrabbling through the wreckage of our ships wondering whether we should go elsewhere or dig down deep and wait it out, knowing that the wait may be longer than our life expectancy. Would giving up be a witness to our faith? I doubt it, but that is not impossible if you understand your Christianity according to something like the ideas of Bonhöffer as I have discussed before. We are quick to judge those who say they are spiritual but not religious. Sometimes, spirituality is a mere euphemism for anything that is not material or utilitarian like going to work, checking the bank statement or bringing the children home from school. Sometimes, it is a real cri de coeur from those who are alienated from churches by the fault of bad clergy and hyopcritical laity! The Churches may be broken up and the pieces sucked back into the sea by the waves, but Christ will somehow remain. The notion of the ecclesia would have to be understood in a new way – or simply lived without being understood.

When all is said and done, most of us should have stayed in our Churches of origin and quietly witnessed as priests or lay folk, not by accommodation but by a constant game of cat-and-mouse, cut-and-thrust, Scarlet Pimpernel, call it as you will, but working to harmonise human authorities in the Church with notions of Truth and Tradition. The ability to do this is called the priestly vocation and that compromise that resembles sailing close to the wind – course and speed. Fall off the wind and you get more speed, but you will have to travel further by tacking to make the same distance upwind. Life is made of these paradoxes that just have to be lived with.

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Comment from C. David Burt: