Tradition and Progress

Posted on Monday, 4 November, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My brush with pope Boniface X has been quite thought-provoking in an odd sort of way. There always has been tension between religion – any religion – being essentially a book containing precepts and teachings, compliance with which being the condition for salvation (a pleasant afterlife rather than the traditional image of eternal hell) – that, or an incarnate and mystical life based on symbols and sacraments making eternal realities present in time. Reading authors like Dom Casel, Louis Bouyer, Josef Ratzinger, Jean Hani, René Guénon and others brought me to condense a staggering amount of knowledge and experience in these terms.

In the history of Roman Catholicism, or simply the Western Church before the Reformation, and Orthodoxy, there were schisms at various times caused largely by the corruption of the clergy. There was a number of sects that arose in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that rejected the sacramental system and the priesthood, or sought to bring about a new kind of priesthood. Many were based on the message of St Francis of Assisi. There were also Gnostic based groups like the Cathars. One of the most informative books I have read about them is the psychiatrist Dr Arthur Guirdham, The Great Heresy, St Helier 1977. Guirdham sets his subject in the historical context of the Lollards and Hussites who were the progenitors of the Protestant Reformation. The one common idea was to reject the tyranny of the clergy, bishops and the Pope and return to the practice of a Christian life based on individual and common prayer, nourished by the reading of the Scriptures.

However, not all the reactions from clericalism rejected the sacramental life and the liturgy. In this category we find the Raskol or Old Believers in Russia who refused the reforms of Czar Peter the Great and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666. In France, there was the Petite Eglise that split off from the mainstream French Church in 1801 because of the Concordat between Pope Pius VII and Napoleon Bonaparte. They were both traditionalist reactions against changes they deemed to be unacceptable. They became “time capsules” of their Churches at a particular moment of history. The Amish in America came from the Reformed tradition and also set themselves in the period of time from when they emigrated from Europe to the USA. In the early Church, at the time of Saint Augustine, the Donatists showed their fierce rigour faced with Christians who had compromised in any way with the Roman Empire and the persecutors.

In more recent times, in the Roman Catholic world, there was the traditionalist reaction of Archbishop Lefevbre against the reforms of Paul VI following Vatican II in the liturgy and questions of religious freedom. However, the Society of St Pius X took a more pragmatic attitude and was prepared for certain compromises with Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. They kept the 1962 version of the Roman liturgy, remained in the scholastic mould for theology and Aristotelian philosophy and continued to complain about religious freedom as the enemy of “integral Catholicism”, meaning rule by the clergy and a king or a Franco or Pinochet style dictator. In the 1980’s and at some other times, there were dissidences from the Society in the form of sedevacantism or the position of Bishop Richard Williamson objecting to too much compromise with Rome. Sedevacantism itself divided into several “positions”, sometimes combined with Feeneyism, a modern form of Donatism.

The most prevalent form of sedevacantism was the most pragmatic. Most of the founders were ordained before the changes or left the SSPX. As priests with a vocation to training new priests, they needed bishops. The solution was being consecrated by a small number of “respectable” bishops in the Ngô Đình Thục succession or former clandestine prelates found in the old Soviet bloc. They justify their ministry in terms similar to those used by the SSPX: in a situation where literal observance of canon law opposes its intended purpose, the letter of the law can be broken and otherwise illegitimate ministry becomes legitimate. This principle is called epikeia (ἐπιείκεια) roughly corresponding with the notion of οἰκονομία in the Orthodox Churches. However, Roman Catholics have always had a problem with private interpretation and the risk of abuse.

Within this “liberal” branch of sedevacantism, Fr Louis-Michel Guérard des Lauriers OP, a former professor at the Angelicum in Rome, formulated his Cassiciacum Thesis based on the notion of hylomorphism, Aristotle’s theory of matter and form. Matter and form would then be applied to the person occupying the Papacy: the Holy See being materially (materialiter) occupied but formally (formaliter) vacant. The theory is clever, but few follow it. One priestly institute following it is the Istituto Mater Consilii near Turin in Italy. The priests who founded this institute are also dissidents from the SSPX.

We then go a step further and find the conclavists. In the 1990’s certain prominent sedevacantist laity like Elizabeth Gerstner and priests seriously undertook the possibility of electing a Pope by extraordinary means and producing the situation in which that Pope would be legitimate. Here is an explanation of the theory by a fairly articulate lay author. The best known, distinguished from those who believed themselves to be appointed directly by God, are:

Pope Michael (1990). Teresa Stanfill-Benns and David Bawden of Kansas in the US, called for a conclave to elect an alternative pope. They publicised their request around the world, but only six people participated in the election. On 16 July 1990, they elected Bawden who took the name Pope Michael.

Pope Linus II (1994). Another conclave, this time held in Assisi, Italy, elected the South African Victor von Pentz, an ex-seminarian of the Society of St Pius X, as Pope Linus II in 1994. Linus took up residence in Hertfordshire, England. Nothing is known about his present ministry, if any.

Pope Pius XIII (1998–2009). In October 1998, the U.S.-based “true Catholic Church” elected Friar Lucian Pulvermacher as Pope Pius XIII. He died on 30 November 2009. No successor has been named since his death.

Pope Leo XIV (2006–2007). It is not known whether this group is a spoof or an existing group. It is claimed that on 24 March 2006, a group of 34 independent bishops elected the Argentine Oscar Michaelli as Pope Leo XIV. On his death on 14 February 2007, he was succeeded by Juan Bautista Bonetti, who took the name of Pope Innocent XIV, but resigned on 29 May 2007. He was succeeded by Alejandro Tomás Greico, who took the name of –

Pope Alexander IX (2008 – present day). Alejandro Greico was born in 1983, in Buenos Aires. This group claims bishops and churches all over the world. One of my principles is to take a step back and what “What seems to be too good to be true is not true”. No radical traditionalist group could have survived for so long without being known, suffering from splits and fraught with scandal. Pope Alexander is always represented by a photo of a man’s head photoshopped onto the cassock and body of Benedict XVI. This is clear skulduggery.

Alongside that, there are well-known characters like Clemente Dominguez y Gomez who claimed to be appointed directly by God. These are clearly cult gurus and are known for abusive practices. Magnus Lundberg has extensively studied the cult of Palmar de Troya in Spain, now led by a Swiss man going by the name of Peter III.

Going further down the hole of sedevacantism, we find a phenomenon akin to the priestless (Безпоповцы) Old Believers and the French Petite Eglise. These are the Home Aloners (description given by a priest of the first category of sedevacantists mentioned above). These are lay people for whom no mainstream Catholic bishops or priests are legitimate or even valid, and nor are the various priests and bishops deriving from illicit ordinations like those of Archbishop Ngô Đình Thục. Everything is stripped away in terms of liturgical observance or access to the Sacraments other than Baptism and Marriage. Perhaps some of these people say the Office. They will pray the Rosary and other standard devotions, and they will read the Scriptures, apologetics and a certain level of philosophy and theology. The circle is closed when I hark back to my definition of Protestantism: “The one common idea was to reject the tyranny of the clergy, bishops and the Pope and return to the practice of a Christian life based on individual and common prayer, nourished by the reading of the Scriptures“. The reasons might be different in theory, but the result is the same. However, I know of no “Home-Alone” church like the Old Believers and the Petite Eglise. How long will a person persevere in such conditions before lapsing into modern life like the rest of his family and friends?

Outside Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, there is Continuing Anglicanism, in which I serve as a priest. Frankly, there is no comparison with the radical ideologies described above. Our bishops and their predecessors simply broke away from the Anglican Communion because of matters like the ordination of women – and formed new Churches with their proprietary names. There has been a lot of trouble in the past between quarrelling bishops, but I am happy to relate that the difficulties of the past are being repaired through the “G4”: the primates of the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Province of America, the Anglican Church of America, and the Diocese of the Holy Cross signing an agreement pledging to seek “full, institutional and organic union with each other”. This grouping of the more mainstream Continuing Anglican Churches is also in dialogue with the Polish National Catholic Church and the Nordic Catholic Church led by Bishop Flemestad in Norway.

The lesson to be learned from all this is balancing the notion of Tradition with life, growth and progress. I have approached this subject from various points of view, my most recent being Ecclesial Cosmopolitanism. There is the paradoxical posting “Catholicism made me Protestant” discussing Newman’s conundrum at trying to find Papal Infallibility more coherent than Anglican Liberalism in the early nineteenth century.

There is tension between Tradition and life as there is between faith and reason. It is not by accident that John Paul II and Benedict XVI spent so much time on this question which was at the heart of the Modernist “crisis” in the 1900’s.

Newman tried a distinction between homogenous or organic growth, a hermeneutic of continuity, and changes that involved rupture and contradiction. It is a good base, not perfect, but something. I discuss many issues of continuity and change in Nostalgia and Hope. Static traditionalism is compared with the changelessness of Parmenides – “all reality is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, and necessary” – and the semper idem of Bossuet.

The way ahead is accepting a via media between tradition and organic change whilst resisting rupture and contradiction. In medio stat virtus. The churches of the Reformation other than the glitzy American mega churches are declining. The Old Believers have happily gone back into communion with the Russian Orthodox Church, and they are allowed to keep their liturgical particularities. The Petite Eglise is declining as the children of those families marry Roman Catholics or embrace modern secularism. Anything can flourish in America, and there are some “moderate” sedevacantist communities in France. Palmar de Troya will end up as an exotic theme park or something that makes money. The other alternative popes will die lonely deaths. Continuing Anglicanism seems to have pulled itself together, and needs more time to be more firmly established without falling into the same traps as the mainstream churches.

Wisdom is sometimes found in the most unlikely places and the deepest of man’s folly!

* * *

I have just discovered the site of a man called John C. Pontrello, an American. I haven’t been through his writings yet, but I have the impression that he on the right track and coming to a state of self-awareness and critical mind. If he ever sees what I write here, I advise him to embark on a study of serious philosophy and theology, not merely the use of proof texts for the purposes of argumentation and refutation. I have just bought the Kindle version of his book The Sedevacantist Delusion. He has obviously chosen his title based on the God Delusion of Richard Dawkins and the Science Delusion of Rupert Sheldrake which I am presently reading. Interestingly, Dawkins writes from a point of view of mechanistic and materialist science, and Sheldrake also writes from a scientific point of view but with the notion of consciousness being the intrinsic principle of both energy and matter.

I will need to read Pontrello’s book so that I can ascertain the premisses on which he bases his arguments and critical thinking, and above all where he is going. I have already read some of the short articles on his site which indicate that he recognises some psychological aspects of religious memes as viruses of the mind and complete bunk. Two reactions are then possible on emerging from Plato’s Cave: denying everything except matter like Dawkins, or finding a higher dimension of Christianity that reveals the profound message of Christ. The enquirer might then be inclined to align with the contemporary Roman Catholic Church and Pope Francis, become Orthodox, Old Catholic or Anglican – or seek among the other religious and philosophical traditions of the world.

Do I still have an axe to grind after so many years? Honestly, à chacun sa merde, let each of us find our own way and deal with our own problems. We will never sort out the problems of the world, change people’s minds or get everyone to adhere to the best and truest message. Our truth is found in our own experience of life and above all our Sehnsucht. Sedevacantism is not a problem in my Church. My Archbishop is called Mark Haverland and my Bishop is Damien Mead. We do not speculate about whether Archbishop Justin Welby truly occupies the See of Canterbury or not. The Anglican Catholic Church is a distinct Church in the same way as the Orthodox Churches are distinct from each other and fully Catholic by virtue of their faith and their episcopate.

John Pontrello does not need to worry about the pathetic psychotic claiming the papacy any more than I do. In our age, we are not used to such violent and vile language. Some of us, like Magnus Lundberg, are collectors of curiosities and exhibit these creatures for the enquiring public. I think Mr Pontrello needs to sort out his own mind and soul, decide what he feels he is called to do, and then adopt a critical attitude without trying to convince others. There, there is Wisdom!

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Enigma Variations

Posted on Tuesday, 29 October, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

No, this is not the beautiful music of Elgar, but another set of variations on the mystery of why so many men want to assume the role of the Pope, or find a solution to the contradiction between their belief and the observable reality.

Boniface X represents an anonymous man on the internet who obviously wants to gather a little credibility before going public. Putting it simply, he is self-styled, just like the “most Catholic” emperor.

This time, the story is different. This is the Byzantine Catholic Patriarchate based in the Czech Republic. It all looks above board: Byzantine rite and coming from Ukrainian Orthodoxy, but we need to exercise our critical minds. In the site, they say:

The Byzantine Catholic Patriarchate was established by seven bishops of the Ukrainian orthodox Greek-Catholic Church on 5 April 2011.

Elsewhere, they affirm:

It became an independent religious structure which exercises prophetic ministry in matters of faith and morals for both the Western and Eastern Churches. Archbishop Elijah OSBMr was elected Patriarch and Bishops Methodius OSBMr and Timothy OSBMr were appointed Secretary Bishops.

It seems that their primary objective is the anathematising and excommunication of the present Roman Catholic hierarchy. For some reason, they adopted Roman Catholic ecclesiology rather than continue in an Eastern Orthodox paradigm. Patriarch Elijah seems to believe this to be his prophetic mission to save Byzantine Orthodoxy by adopting a sedevacantist position. I seem to be missing something here.

This October, these Czech and Ukrainian bishops held a synod and condemned the present incumbent of the Roman See and declared it to be vacant. Patriarch Elijah then took it upon himself to elect Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò to the Papacy.

He then wrote an open letter to Archbishop Viganò to ask him to elect election to the Papacy. The text can be found on the church website or heard on the video.

The big problem is that Archbishop Viganò is unlikely to accept this honour. Perhaps those Byzantines, a church looking for a Pope, might consider Boniface X who is looking for a church! So in these variations, we have among others Dorabella and the cathedral organist’s dog having a vigorous walk by the river in Worcester – and finally, that  fourteenth variation of triumph –

In this enigma of Catholics looking for a Pope, Popes looking for a Church and the unholy mess of the dying embers of the Empire, we look elsewhere for a sign of sanity and Christianity.

Господи, помилуй

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Ecclesial Cosmopolitanism

Posted on Monday, 28 October, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The older I grow, the more I see a convergence of issues and thoughts. I began to read an article by Pauline Kleingeld, who wrote another work on Novalis and his puzzling fragment Die Christenheit oder Europa. This article is Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany. The article was written as a response to nationalist feelings in many parts of the world, by appealing to Kant and a number of German Idealist philosophers. Conventionally, cosmopolitanism is divided between its moral and political dimensions. In late eighteenth century Germany, its few proponents competed against the mounting nationalism which came to prevail in various forms.

Typically the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism expresses the priority we give to our country, tribe, parish, whatever we have experienced and know – or to humanity as a whole without distinctions. Kleingeld expresses her desire to escape the tendency to put all the eggs into a single basket. She distinguishes six types of cosmopolitanism: moral, political and legal, cultural, economic – and Romantic, expressed in faith and love. Certainly there will be overlapping and grey areas.

Writing the articles of the past couple of days on some unusual aspects of Roman Catholicism, it occurred to me that there can be an ecclesial cosmopolitanism linked with thought about the moral, cultural and romantic dimensions. When considering the various tendencies in Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, crudely called traditionalism and liberalism, I see exactly the same lines drawn in the political world between liberal or conservative democracy and populism of the extreme left and right.

The so-called liberals seemed to have come up with the idea of ecumenism as an expression of religious cosmopolitanism: the abolition of all differences by mixing everything up into a homogenous and bland paste. The traditionalists would react by claiming to represent the “one true church” outside of which there is no grace, no salvation or spiritual reality. My article on pope Boniface X shows the ultimate caricature of “true church” parochialism in an institution which cannot be identified or recognised as real outside the anonymous person making the claim.

I have already written on Sedevacantism which is a system designed to find an intellectual solution to the contradiction between the Counter-Reformation understanding of the Papacy and the current reality. Ultimately, there are few choices if the logic is taken to its conclusion: abandon Christianity, abandon Papalism or attempt to restore the papacy as they understand it. As someone who spent a few years as a convert to Roman Catholicism, my option was the second one, one that is held by the Orthodox, Old Catholics, Anglicans and the churches of the Reformation. Compared with politics, it marks a populist reaction to the liberalism of the mainstream institutions in Rome and the local dioceses.

Over its entire history, the Church has struggled between its witness to the teachings of Christ and the temptation to political power. I was particularly marked by the parable of the Grand Inquisitor in the Karamazov Brothers of Dostoevsky, especially that outrageous justification of the Inquisitor “correcting” Christ. Like so many others I was faced with the choice of abandoning Christianity as something corrupted to the core and looking to religious and philosophical alternatives, or separating faith and spiritual / liturgical life from politics and coercive power. I heard so much criticism of the teaching by Vatican II on religious freedom by the traditionalists that I began to be convinced that this very freedom constituted the basis of Christ’s teaching. Some wish to make Christ a king, but when Pontius Pilate asked that very question, Christ answered that his kingdom was not of this world, above all not a political or aristocratic kingdom.

When I looked at so-called liberalism in the mainstream church institutions, I found that only the appearances were different, but everything depended on a political ideology. This time it would be based on cultural Marxism and a different form of coercion and policing. These very problems were faced by Enlightenment philosophers in the changing world of the Renaissance and the late Baroque and Rococo periods. I found the key in the Romantic reaction: accept the rationalism of the Enlightenment but restore the place of the whole human being through imagination, emotions and feelings alongside the rigours of reason. The pieces fitted into place though various providential catalysts during my university days.

Cosmopolitanism sees humanity as essentially a single moral community notwithstanding the differences of culture, language and religion. In such a perspective, all humans are worthy of rights, impartiality and tolerance. Many ideas in the late eighteenth century came from the Cynics and Stoics of the ancient world. The moral variant did not seek to bring about political reforms or revolutions, but rather a qualitative movement of human souls. The Enlightenment and cosmopolitanism worked together.

The Church is not a closed and exclusive institution, but a communion of those who are citizens of something much greater than their immediate surroundings. It was in that same period that men like Captain Cook set out to discover new cultures in depth. Some reflections from that time are remarkably modern in our twenty-first century terms.

What man [der Mensch] could become, he has everywhere become in accordance with the local conditions. Climate, location of towns, height of mountains, direction of rivers,… have sometimes favoured him from one side, sometimes limited him from another and influenced his physique as well as his moral behaviour. In this way, he has nowhere become everything, but everywhere become something different.

The one who wrote this was the naturalist and anthropologist Georg Forster (1754-94) who sailed with Cook on the Endeavour. He opposed the notion of one superior culture acting as a standard for all but rather advocated diversity, pluralism and complementarity – equality. He did, however, blame cultures that practised slavery or cruelty, and praised those that allowed individual persons to flourish. Were his own standards not hypocritical, ie. judging from the standard of western culture? Complete freedom from prejudice is an ideal more than a reality.

Kleingeld’s final category is Romantic cosmopolitanism, the aspect that emphasises the elements that make us human: “love, emotional bonds, beauty, shared faith, and mutual trust“. They had to be restored to humanity on top of reason that was emphasised by the Enlightenment. The Church is no exception to the whole of human experience. One thing that has to be understood about Novalis’ vision of a medieval world was not the desire to retreat into obscurantism but its “Parousia, the cosmopolitan ideal of a global spiritual community“. Christenheit oder Europa is a parable, not a historical rendering, and we will find this same thought in Dom Guéranger, Viollet le Duc, Pugin, Newman, Pusey, the entire Oxford Movement, the slum priests, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and the entire movement as survives to this very day.

Novalis and the other Romantics cultivated this rosy notion  of the middle ages to convey a religious form of cosmopolitanism in unity, beauty, sensuality and mystery. It is a desire for return to childlike innocence and the sense of wonder. This dream contrasts with competition and the power of money and brute strength. Materialism destroys the sense of the transcendent, and out of it came the persecution of Christians and anti-clericalism. This conflicts would cause oppositions between religion and politics, religion being locked into the confines of states. Europe ended up in crisis and perpetual warfare.

Novalis looked to a new world, the cosmopolitan ideal of a global spiritual community. I do believe that Romanticism can bring about an understanding of Christianity exactly as it did in that brief moment of the 1790’s in Saxony. Again we face nationalism and new forms of populism, new challenges to humanity and peace. I am also fascinated to see huge changes in science from materialism and mechanistic determinism to quantum physics and a notion of consciousness preceding matter and energy. The changes are bringing us to a new future as we live and breathe.

I hope that Romantic cosmopolitanism will play a role in emancipating Christianity from nationalism and populism, from prejudice and hatred. The horror of two world wars in the twentieth century saw the rise of the League of Nations, United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Union. Nationalism and populism may be on the rise, but so is cosmopolitanism. Ecclesial cosmopolitanism isn’t about mixing religions, apostasy, idolatry, unlimited hedonism and all the things traditionalists complain about. It is a search for something much higher and deeper within ourselves, the icons of God’s love that are love, emotional bonds, beauty, shared faith, and mutual trust.

I can but do my best along this lonely path.

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The Name of the Rose

Posted on Friday, 25 October, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I open this brief posting with the title of Umberto Eco’s famous novel about an extremely corrupt abbey in the early fourteenth century where monks were ready to kill to preserve the secret of the legitimacy of humour according to Aristotle. I find it hard to believe that all or even most monastic communities were so deeply mired in sin, even then. Fast forward to modern times…

Someone left a comment on my earlier posting of today on other aspects of ecclesial sin and corruption. I decided to allow his opinion about an abbot I met last summer, in the name of free speech. I hesitated because I wondered whether I might be liable for libel. Therefore, if someone judges this to be the case, I am prepared to take that comment down with this posting. I will try to be objective and careful about what I write. What happens when you sail too close to the wind? The boat stops and ceases to respond to the helm, caught “in irons”. You have to push the boom forward with one hand and let the wind reverse the boat by pushing the helm over into the direction of the sail. When the boat is sufficiently to lee, it suffices to sheet in, get a bit of speed up, and then compensate with the rudder to keep on the new tack. So much for sailing close to the wind in its literal meaning. Figuratively, it means taking a risk, being at the limits. For this reason I reserve my judgement on the persons discussed here or in the web sites I link to. I wondered whether I should leave this subject altogether, but I believe that different opinions need to be heard.

What is this about. I opened the blog Another Abbot Extraordinary. This thing has been up for two years, and had the law been broken, it would have had to be taken down, so I express myself in good faith. I can make no comment about the various accusations this blog expresses. I met the Abbot of Farnborough for a short conversation one Sunday morning. I know Dom Alcuin Reid who is now in a community in southern France. I occasionally correspond with him about the liturgy, but I haven’t seen him for more than twenty years. I have been on a retreat at Fontgombault (1985) and spent six months as a working guest at Triors in 1996-97. At neither of those houses did I see the least problem or irregularity. I had a great deal of esteem and respect for Dom Hervé Courau, the Abbot of Triors. He is known to be stern and austere, but that is the nature of monastic life. It is the ultimate Communism, the subjection of the person to the collective. Thought of in those terms, monastic life is truly shocking. However, men join it freely and their commitment is made difficult by the novitiate and simple profession process, rightly so.

About the English communities mentioned in the blog, the problem seems to be one of sexual manipulation and carnal lust. Perhaps this is a consequence of sexual repression that is an intrinsic condition of monastic commitment. Whether monks in themselves are homosexuals or heterosexuals, the community is single sex like an English public school, the armed forces or a prison – so homosexuality is the only option a man has when he has poor control over his desires and feelings – and finds another who feels the same way or is weak under manipulation. I have great esteem for the monastic ideal, but I find it difficult to know how the circle can be squared. What is holiness? It is certainly a notion that goes far beyond the trite Catholic slogans we usually read in Counter-Reformation spiritual books.

This blog on the English abbots made me feel quite sick, though I have actually kept my food down today! Does such stuff belong on the Internet? Without public exposure, is the institutional Church able to reform itself? I think also of the priests who have been found guilty of child abuse and those diocesan bishops who covered up. In my article Clericalism and Priesthood, I commented on the big scandal in France involving Cardinal Barbarin, Archbishop of Lyon and Primate of the French Church.

It is perhaps in consideration of such turpitudes and lassitude that I am more sympathetic to a few of the independent clergy whose visions and ideas are devout and noble. It was said that the Church in the early sixteenth century was extremely corrupt. There were the Borgias, prostitutes in the Vatican, executions by the most barbaric and sadistic means possible, simony and fraud, something like the old regime of Caligula or Nero. It was the primary cause of the Reformation, the French Revolution and the death of institutional Christianity in our days. It is not a subject I enjoy writing about! Because of these lassitudes, my own Church has been forced to implement procedures of screening, background checks and every other possible means of ensuring that one corrupt priest cannot destroy our entire work and modest resources.

I understand Mr Wood’s bitterness from his experience of a devout Catholic seeking his vocation. This is something that takes away a part of our soul and innocence, making us cynical. It’s all very well being told to forgive and forget, but the screaming wounds in a man’s soul cannot be consoled. Whether the Internet is a place for this kind of thing, I don’t know. I have been through a lot myself, but not sexual abuse. The closest I came was a parish priest stroking my thigh as I played the organ at age 18, but he stopped when I told him to. Self-control is more difficult for some men than others. It probably comes from self-knowledge, having come to terms with oneself, and especially having empathy for others. There are simply things we may not do, as a human being, let alone as a Christian.

I have written on the question before. I am not a psychologist, but I do have some knowledge in this field from reading. The kind of people who need to be rooted out of churches, politics, teaching, medicine or anything to do with people are the most successful and ruthless. I speak of sociopathy and narcissistic personality disorder. You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to recognise the symptoms. Any observant person can tell when they are dealing with someone who is toxic or manipulative. What narcissistic people stand for is the antithesis of the Christian Gospel of empathy, compassion for the weak and respect for children, women, vulnerable souls and other men. If a whole community becomes infected, then (if Karma is served) you get the ending of the Name of the Rose. The whole place goes up in smoke, the community is dispersed and those who have been wronged find justice by scavenging in the ruins.

I would hate to be a Bishop or an abbot!

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La Nausée

Posted on Friday, 25 October, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Yes, from the very author who wrote “Hell is other people” – L’enfer c’est les autres in his play Huis clos. Jean-Paul Sartre was unfamiliar with the various grotesque parodies of churches and bishops one occasionally sees on the Internet. This is certainly the only place you will see them.

I have already been familiar with one Anglican Rite Catholic Church with Cardinal Rutherford Johnson – see Rod Dreher’s Behold, the patriarch, which is an old article. One would almost imagine that this fellow has simply put up a parody, a spoof, but he seems to take himself seriously (see comment below). There is already a Pope Alexander IX who uses photos of American Anglican clergy and churches – with a liberal use of Photoshop. Some years ago, I came across a fake prelature (Prelature Personnelle de l’Institut Sacerdotal International Mater Ecclesiae) claiming to have secret approval from Rome (then it wouldn’t be secret any more…). The prelate’s name was that of a bishop who lived a couple of hundred years ago. That also was a spoof and its website disappeared many years ago.

This new one seems to be one of many taking themselves seriously – the Anglocatholic Church, which for once is not American! Its chief bishop, His Beatitude, The Most Reverend Dr. Heigo Ritsbek, MA, MDiv, DMin, LittD, DD comes from the little Baltic country of Estonia. There are bishops in the USA, Australia, Africa (several countries), Brazil (ex. ICAB), Costa Rica, the Philippines, France, Poland, Italy, Germany. The site is interesting to look at. Their liturgy is disappointingly modern Roman in style, and almost seems to be for the sole purpose of consecrating bishops! There is the old jibe about one of the old English Mathew succession bishops: Bishop Lines of many lines. In some of the African and South American countries, there seem to be small numbers of lay faithful.

Old Atkinson-Wake is still going in his Catholic Church of England and Wales, as grandiose as ever with some of his “wooden leg” bishops like whisky-breath Philip French in Whitby. See two old blog posts Philip James French: the Fake Catholic Bishop of Whitby and The Reckoning of the Fake Catholic Bishop of Whitby? What is incredible is that few ordinary people these days are going to be impressed with men dressing to the nines and living a lie.

My immediate reaction is that people with physical abnormalities used to be exhibited to the public in “freak shows” in return for being housed and fed, usually in appalling conditions. Perhaps this kind of show could be brought back for men who are physically healthy but suffering from conditions like narcissistic personality disorder! Prod them with sticks and shout at them…

I have written a few postings about this subject, which is close to my own life. I too went through the logic of independent clergy, trying to maintain the ideal of the Church and the priestly vocation outside the “system” of the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Communion. Some men like the dressing up, others feel that it confers status or power, and others have a higher notion of their calling. I recommend John P. Plummer’s The Many Paths of the Independent Sacramental Movement. The term “independent sacramental” was coined in an attempt to give a common title to an extremely diverse movement of single-issues and an idea of a church of the future composed of small independent communities and house churches. Given the free-fall of church attendance in the mainstream churches, it can appear to be an alternative to being resigned to the death of Christianity in the western world.

Many of these reflections have helped to form my own mind. I belong to a “mainstream” Continuing Anglican Church, which has gained pignon sur rue and is in serious dialogue with three other Continuum churches and the Polish National Catholic Church. I can claim a degree of canonical seriousness and respectability, but living in rural France, I am unlikely ever to find myself as a parish priest. One cannot make a norm from an exceptional situation like mine, but it does make one think.

One thing I have learned in life is that priesthood and liturgy alone do not create the Church or even ecclesiastical institutions. Every Church has been responsible for schisms and disputes in history, and none can before God make an honest claim to be unilaterally the “one true church”. There are still institutions that own ancient buildings and have influence over the “secular arm” and the politics of their countries – and still have plenty of money and visibility. There have always been conservative and radical breaks, and the fracturing process accelerates as the central notion of Christianity is questioned.

Increasingly, Christian commitment is a personal and individual approach, no longer the tradition of the tribe, community, parish, village or whatever. When I arrived in the village where I live, in 2006, there was a monthly Mass in the church. One Sunday, I my wife and I went, and I was in lay dress. It was dead, with a few elderly people without the slightest concern to take interest in potential newcomers. The liturgy, celebrated by a priest without a server, was deadpan. If I were a layman, my Christian life would be better without such a charade – and that is the “official Church”. A French friend of mine pointed out that there has never been a time when there were so many priests for so few laity. What is the justification for ordaining priests, and what becomes of the notion of “vocation”? Around the same year, Sophie and I attended a service in southern Rouen celebrated by an independent bishop and a bit more “show”. Blessed roses were on offer, at one price if blessed collectively and another price if “done” individually. Perhaps I was in the fifteenth century in some English country parish where – As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. I may be an enthusiast for the Use of Sarum, but I can imagine the reality of some sleazy dump of a parish in the 1490’s! I have to be a Romantic to keep sane. What is reality? I had about fifteen years experience of traditionalist Roman Catholicism. For most of them, it boils down to politics and forcing people to belong to the tribe for the sake of self-justification of the rich and powerful. The same old story repeats in history as the Church craves its Caudillo and its Inquisition to enforce the rule of “Christ the King”. Perhaps some might feel at home at Palmar de Troya in southern Spain, considerado por los especialistas un monumento a la demencia humana, with its businesslike Swiss pope Peter III. I feel quite cold within about the future of Christianity in an increasingly hostile and polarised world. We live in a world that is devoid of culture and education in essential philosophical principles.

My own experience has taken me beyond that question many people ask about who “is the Church” and who “is playing Church as an impostor”. The distinction for me has become highly blurred, at least with any real objectivity. This posting began with obvious shenanigans of dishonest or challenged individuals. But I see this whole thing as one who lives a private life without any desire to traipse around dressed as a baroque cardinal and attract ridicule both on myself and what I would be claiming to represent! Life has been both kind and unkind to me. I try to see the essential and go all the way.

I think there can be some opportunity to rethink Christianity beyond the failure of clericalism and the nausea of the population. My own intuitions have often been expressed in this blog. No one becomes a Christian without asking the right questions and without a certain culture that makes the soul seek something beyond our world of competition, status, power, money and mass fashion.

I look at the Church, at the lowness of politics in many countries including my own. I feel like Wordsworth at the cusp of revolution, wanting to rejoice in change and renewal, but knowing that there will only be more violence and death. The darkness is overwhelming, but the Ungrund itself contains grace and light. We need to have faith and hope, but above all, knowledge of ourselves and true humility. Perhaps this is fertile earth on which the priesthood of Christ may flourish and find new meaning.

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Why We Fight…

Posted on Tuesday, 22 October, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Anyone who reads the news will have some idea of the gravity of the situation in England. Unfortunately, journalists nearly always have a partial and narrow understanding of the situation. Of course, I speak of the British Government and the Brexit issue. Naturally this thing goes far beyond a simple question of the UK’s membership of a group of countries. I won’t go into the political ins and outs, which I can only understand partially with the help of political pundits and commentators on the internet.

I believe that the issue, shared between a number of European countries and elsewhere, is a transition from a more humanist and liberal paradigm to authoritarianism, from personalism to collectivism and a vision for which many have died. Nazism and Fascism in the 1920’s to 40’s were only manifestations of a same anti-humanism. The poisonous roots remain even if the outward appearance is so different as no longer to be recognisable. I live in the country, and am extremely fortunate to be protected from the loudest noises of various protest movements and their irrational ideologies. Indeed, I was lucky to have come to Europe when things were still going quite well. It was towards the end of the Thatcher era, and I was in France just after the end of the Falklands War. I sought my way in life and made many mistakes and followed illusions. I was fluent in French quite quickly and I ended up studying theology in that language. My time in Switzerland brought me into contact with a Germanic culture and my two stays in Italy brought me another dimension. I suppose it all made me quite rootless, and an attempt to settle back in England in 1995 was inconclusive.

Two experiences of life are clashing: those who have money and are settled, and those for whom the goalposts are too high. The polarisation between capitalism and socialism is widening, and the more they oppose each other, they more they resemble each other. We have to go deeper if we want to come to self-knowledge and thereby to empathy towards others. Alone, I cannot rebuild anything or even recognise what is broken. One issue I now face is not being able to identify with the idea that civilisation can be restored through authority and the State above the Person. It has challenged my entire feeling and understanding of Christianity, abused as it has been by men with ulterior motives throughout history. Talk of evangelisation has for me become extremely shallow, to the extent that I constantly question my calling to the priesthood. I have come to understand the Christian way as not flogging the dead horse of street-corner evangelists, but a quiet and interior life hidden from the world – something that can be transmitted to those who ask for it. It is the way of the Catacombs and the hermit’s cell of Charles de Foucault in Algeria. Priests are not only parish pastors but also contemplatives and teachers.

It is true that Europe is greater than the political institution called the European Union, but the latter has helped in many ways to solve the causes of the two world wars in the twentieth century and to promote cultural values. Nothing is ever perfect, and politicians are known for playing fast and loose with truth. However, the UK has hardly taken the moral high road! The old British Empire was established and / or maintained by theft, rape, pillage and murder – no better than the Nazis! I too have left the House of the Blind.

I have already written about the problems of nationalism, not only in our country but in Poland, Hungary, Italy and some other countries. Nationalism or patriotism can be a fine sentiment, akin to our attachment pro aris et focis to our homes, hearths and families, as the old Romans used to say. It can be a wonderful catalyst of the highest and best of human aspirations, but are we not enriched by diversity and the input of those who come from elsewhere? Going to England for me is very hard. Materially, I have my passport and places to go, with my family and my Church, and friends dotted around here and there, but I no longer feel a part of it. It seems to be a feeling I share with many of the younger generations who were unable to keep the aspidistra flying. When I last lived in England, in 1996, my nostalgia for the life I had known in France and Italy was inconsolable. I did not find what I sought on returning to the Continent, but I was looking for the wrong things. I needed to know myself and come to terms with what I would find.

If those who want the UK to stay on the way of cosmopolitanism can hope not to have our dreams shattered by the “reality” of other people’s big money, we have to have a positive desire instead of hating those who believe in the opposite and contradictory “truth”. It is something I have learned from Romanticism. I quote from Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil) (quoted in Rob Riemen, To Fight Against This Age, New York 2018, p. 97):

Thanks to the morbid estrangement which the lunacy of nationality has produced and continues to produce between the peoples of Europe, thanks likewise to the short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians who are with its aid on top today and have not the slightest notion to what extent the politics of disintegration they pursue must necessarily be only entr’acte, an interlude—thanks to all this, and to much else that is altogether unmentionable today, the most unambiguous signs are now being overlooked, or arbitrarily and lyingly misinterpreted, that declare that Europe wants to become one. … I think of men such as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer. . . . They are related, fundamentally related, in all the heights and depths of their needs: it is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul forces its way longingly up and out.

Indeed Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstand thinkers of modern times. The Nazis misrepresented him, to say the least! Sehnsucht, nostalgia, call it what you will. When you have experienced Europe, it is not something you can put back into its box. Novalis centred his vision on an idealised notion of the Papacy, but we must look higher. If there is no future in Europe, then none of its countries can survive. Maybe they are all up for sale to the highest bidder – the USA, Russia, China… The Europe of which I dream is not so much a bygone historical era, but the light of what Christ gave us. The visible signs can only be icons of a higher reality. There can be no no cherries without the cake!

Europe is not the Kingdom of Heaven, but a place of humanism that brought truth and justice. Rob Riemen comes up with the sober point: “Truth can be known only because of the meaning of words, for what are love, friendship, freedom, and justice if we don’t know what the words mean? Where language has become meaningless, no truth can exist, and the lie rules“. When words become debased and perverted by evil men, they become meaningless. The very words we use to convey the message of Christ have also become meaningless for many people, because they become kitsch euphemisms for something else. Thus, Dietrich Bonhöffer tried to find Christ elsewhere from the churches. Our gift of language is indeed horribly abused, where words mean different things to different people. We need to develop different ways of expressing ourselves to protect insights from being banalised and abused. We are brought to think of Jesus’ teaching through parables and their secret meaning. This is why Nietzsche came up with such outrageous ideas like the “death” of God and the annihilation of all that is good. All that remains is lust for money and power. The liturgical world of symbols alone has conserved the Mystery of Christ in spite of the lamentable corruption of ecclesial institutions. There is a conservatism that seeks timelessness, truth and justice – but also a conservatism that crosses over to obscurantism and reactionary politics.

In a way, I sympathise with some of the feelings against the European Union, which as a political organisation has its own problems, and is hardly more outstanding in moral virtue than any other. The true Europe is the soul. Politics will never defend the spiritual, but only power and money. One thing that repels me from Brexiteer orthodoxy is the mendaciousness of its proponents – the contradictory propositions that cannot all be true at the same time. I have called some pseudo-ecclesiastical charlatans wooden legs because of the lying, but it is nothing compared to Westminster or Washington DC!

The quest of Europe must be philosophy, love of wisdom. This has to be the positive and transcendent aspect of our combat. For me and many others, the essence of Europe is a quest for the human being and our immortal soul which enables us to know the absolute and eternal, truth, goodness, beauty, love and justice. These transcendentals are not what concerns the men and women now running the British Government! Without the soul, all is chatter and dross. To this end, we need to fight for a truly humanist society via a new generation of schools and universities, though mystery schools that form the eternal Church. The EU has neglected this spiritual dimension in order to concentrate on money, technology and national interests, and the movement for its destruction can only lead to a return to the 1930’s! The media and the universities have become places of stupidity. Perhaps the desperate message of the Brexiteers in part is  the need for something new. Novalis – clearer of new land.

Es wird so lange Blut über Europa strömen, bis die Nationen ihren fürchterlichen Wahnsinn gewahr werden, der sie im Kreise herumtreibt, und von heiliger Musik getroffen und besänftigt zu ehemaligen Altären in bunter Vermischung treten, Werke des Friedens vornehmen und ein großes Liebesmahl als Friedenfest auf den rauchenden Walstätten mit heißen Tränen gefeiert wird. Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799)

– Blood will continue to flow in Europe until the nations recognize their terrible madness. This will continue to drive them into circles until, moved and calmed by sacred music, they step before their past altars in a motley throng. Then they will undertake works of peace, celebrating with hot tears a great banquet of love as a festival of peace on the smoking battlefields.

I would like to see the European Union reformed and renewed, ordained to man’s highest realities regardless of our different religious faiths and ways of life.

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Romanticising Aspergers

Posted on Thursday, 10 October, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

That title might strike the reader as insane or as odd as the stereotype English eccentric. It is a while since I have written anything about Aspergers or what modern specialists call high-functioning autism. The condition has been studied for a while from a scientific point of view, and I have the most esteem for Tony Attwood and Dr Laurent Mottron. Psychologists, psychiatrists and educators rightly turn most of their attention to helping young children. In most of the western world, adults can obtain a diagnosis as I did. It establishes a scientific basis of understanding why we often feel that we come from a “different planet” from most people.

I have been quite frustrated at finding little at a philosophical level. The autism centre in Rouen I consulted has a fine library, but nearly all the works available are scientific or dealing with special teaching methods for children. A philosophical examination would require a totally different methodology, and I am not sure I would ever be up to such a task. Perhaps we need an autistic person who is both a qualified psychiatrist and a philosopher. Does he or she exist? Laurent Mottron and Tony Attwood are the nearest to this ideal I know of.

We continue to be hampered by the usual stereotypes of being obsessed about things that just don’t matter to others and having no empathy or understanding about other people’s emotions and feelings. Some would call us extremely masculine (mentally and psychologically) or something like a computer devoid of empathy and emotion. The problem usually arises from our being studied in relation to what “neurotypical” people call “normal”.

In some ways, it is a disability and something that marginalises us from a “successful” life in society. We can also see it as a gift. In particular, it enhances originality and innovation and courage to resist fashions, conformity, the bandwagon. Aspergers / high-functioning autism affects our experience of life, our way of understanding other humans and life in general.

No two persons are alike, and this is why it is difficult to make a scientific diagnosis of Aspergers. This is not the place to go into Dr Mottron’s methodology, but I could give one or two key ideas. This Canadian psychiatrist is above all interested in the autistic person who is not inhibited intellectually, and who does express himself in language. He especially makes a break from comparisons with “normal” standards. There are many characteristics like sensorial hypersensitivity and extreme attention to detail and concentration, but which are not present to the same degree or proportion in any one person. Indeed, he calls this condition another intelligence, an alternative mode of being human. His flagship work is L’autisme: une autre intelligence, Sprimont 2006.

Without being able as yet to find a methodology to bring out the philosophical aspects, I can try a simpler approach: how I feel about it myself and what I have read from others, things we have in common from a human rather than a scientific point of view.

Why my odd title? I have been intuitively drawn to Romanticism in its essential characteristics rather than any particular historical period or cultural aspect. I was drawn to early German Romantics like Novalis because of his notion of truth being something that was dynamic, on the move, full of desire – rather than being the property of a “tribe” and something used to judge and condemn others. Just look at traditionalist Roman Catholic groups on Facebook, and some Continuing Anglican ones too. My immediate reaction is to think “What a wonderful apologia for atheism“! Sometimes, autistic people become obsessed about foundational truth and are quite fanatical. The exceptions would break the rule in scientific terms. In my mind, this new notion of truth has changed the way I think, and has enabled me to come to terms with myself at a mature age. Above all, whatever truth is (think of the Sceptics of ancient times – Pontius Pilate was one) it is what we seek rather than sham, appearance and kitsch. Autistic people are generally limpid, devoid of hidden agendas and are not slaves of fashions and groupthink.

We tend to see patterns and details, and it is often hard to see the big picture or the Universal Idea. Through studying philosophy, I have learned to abstract from the particular to the Universal Idea. We like to follow through on things, when “normal” people expect these “unimportant” things to be abandoned or unfinished in favour of what they think is important. I may not be always right, but I do like to finish a job.

In my life, I have always given high priority to loyalty. My broken relationship with the TAC and Archbishop Hepworth in 2012 caused me deep interior pain, because I had to face the fact that I was being loyal to a sham, a lie, an illusion. It is harder to break away, but it was the only thing to do. There are still bits and pieces of the TAC in the world, and I am sure they are doing God’s work, but I no longer related to them. This is just an example. The situation in England is horrifying by the depth of self-interest and lack of moral principle of those who are supposed to be leading. I have to limit my time looking at the news each day, because it is oppressive and causes anxiety. Many are worse off than I am and need medical and / or spiritual help.

Another thing I experience is how my senses relate to the world and how I find meanings in things. I notice things that most people pass by and ignore. I can’t imagine people who have a dull sense of smell, taste, touch, sight and sound. I always thought most people had the same sensations but didn’t talk about them! Now I wonder what they do experience. I suppose it is like my different experience of social relationships, non-verbal and body language and seemingly irrational emotions. Sometimes, my wife plays mind games that take a lot of working out.

Another thing is explaining something to someone, perhaps the way a machine works. For example, something is wrong with my van, and my wife asks “what?”. I then attempt to explain the functioning of a universal joint transmission – what comes between the engine / gearbox assembly and the front wheels. How else do I explain it to someone who freaks out when they hear technical explanations? That is another difference. I like to know the reason for everything. For most people, it is “just so”. At least I can help the mechanic in his diagnosis, and he saves a lot of time and money knowing which part to replace. However, it is not always easy to distinguish between what is relevant to a conversation or not. How do I organise my mind to say just what is necessary, whilst sparing the person a barrage of information that would cause more confusion than rational understanding? Frustration quickly enters the picture.

Most human relations are competitive. The first past the post wins, and the others “suck it up”. To succeed in life, we have to be assertive. I do better nowadays, but I have spent most of my life “fobbed off” by what other people think what might be appropriate. They don’t know our lives as we do! In the end, we have to learn to be “scarlet pimpernels” and keep under the radar.

Dislike of fashion, assumptions and narrow-mindedness is another characteristic among many “aspies”. We want to be able to use our minds and rational faculties, not systematically conform to orthodoxies and narrow agendas. These are some of the gifts an autistic person can have.

Many “aspies” eschew religion. I have learned to distinguish between the Christian spiritual life and the usually inadequate way of “parish religion” or the querelle des chapelles as it is expressed in French. I was still at seminary when I discovered the need to go beyond exoteric religion to find the esoteric. I no longer judged the “modernist” Fr George Tyrrell as a “heretic”, but as a seeker of a more profound and fulfilling faith in Christ and all he taught. Anglicanism, even its traditionalist and conservative version, is more conducive to the free spirit than some of the totalitarian Catholicism I have known in my life. We are more likely to be cosmopolitan than nationalist in our way of relating to our origins and loyalties. I have never felt revolted by humans of other races or cultures or religions. Diversity is essentially, if I expect to be respected in my own difference.

I found resonance in many of these questions in Romantic writers and thinkers, whether or not they were autistic. You can’t diagnose someone who has been dead for two hundred years! Perhaps a reader or two might have some ideas about developing these thoughts at a philosophical level rather than one of empirical science.

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J’accuse

Posted on Wednesday, 25 September, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

“J’Accuse…!” was an open letter published on 13th January 1898 in the newspaper L’Aurore by the writer Émile Zola. His issue was what came to be known in France as L’Affaire Dreyfus. Dreyfus was a Jewish artillery captain in the French army who was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans. He was degraded and sent to Devil’s Island, and his public humiliation was an expression of the ambient anti-Semitism of the time. This issue deeply divided France. It was not simply a matter of injustice to a man but also touched national identity, politics and religion in the anti-clerical era.

Two events are now widely known in the news surrounding the Brexit issue: the Supreme Court ruling that the PM didn’t have the right to prorogue Parliament in these circumstances (again, read the news) and the sickening rant of Geoffrey Cox (Attorney General) in today’s reassembly of the House of Commons. I have no idea what Mr Johnson is going to do, though I have been reading and watching commentaries by those who know a lot more about politics than I do.

The whole thing is a diabolical web with no way out. I will refrain from comparing it to Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933 in Germany, even though I see a lot of parallels. There is no effective opposition by Corbyn’s party. It seems to be that the majority of English people still want Brexit and the hardest one possible, believing that there will be no adverse consequences. England now seems to be as divided as France was in the 1890’s.

The Dreyfus Affair still has its effects here and there, even though anti-Semitism is no longer acceptable. The issues are similar, just what made the twentieth century and its political instability. England was the country of my birth, and now I mourn as for a deceased loved one. The coffin lid has to be closed and life must go on. My time of anxiety is over and yields place to grief.

I must think more about my life in France and turn the page as the UK either crashes out at the end of October (whether the PM is Johnson or someone else) or remains in the EU as a toxic and divisive thorn. The time is past, as far as I am concerned, for political activism or protest. I see nothing good or noble, only the beginnings of a revolution in the UK (or two opposing revolutions), the end of the Monarchy and very dark times.

We have to raise ourselves to God, what is good in humanity and the wisdom we seek and to which we aspire. Today we mourn, and tomorrow we will see destruction, and maybe a true sunlit upland will come in ways we cannot expect.

Teach us the strength that cannot seek,
By deed, or thought, to hurt the weak;
That, under thee, we may possess
Man’s strength to comfort man’s distress.
Teach us delight in simple things,
The mirth that has no bitter springs;
Forgiveness free of evil done,
And love to all men ‘neath the sun.
Land of our birth, our faith, our pride,
For whose dear sake our fathers died;
O Motherland, we pledge to thee,
Head, heart and hand through the years to be.
The Lord shall be thine everlasting light,
And the days of thy mourning shall be ended.

Rudyard Kipling

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Science and Faith, a Warning

Posted on Saturday, 21 September, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have been haunted all day by the article Darwinism Is Dead, Now What? Towards A Rational Spirituality. We seem to have a compare-and-contrast exercise between materialistic atheism – Dawkins style – and the kinds of Christianity we sometimes encounter that are reduced to the levels of ideology. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI wrote considerable volumes on faith and reason, both in their books and official teachings as bishops. It is time for these questions to be tackled, and I am myself fascinated by them. They are one of the dimensions of human thought and experience that brought me to the same Romanticism that pops up again and again as the challenges come in its way.

The author of this article, Luke Baier, knocks materialism (everything is dead matter and at best some magically-produced kind of consciousness from biological machines) for six. This is very encouraging in light of my presently reading Dr Rupert Sheldrake. Science hasn’t to be built on ideology or unproven assumptions, but rather on repeatable evidence. You can’t have “science” built on belief-based assumptions and then attack belief!

Darwinism, one of the foundations of atheistic materialism, is crumbling.

If Darwinism is wrong, which it is without a shred of a doubt, should we all go back to the bible? Should we ‘accept the Lord Jesus’?

If materialism falls, do we have to return to irrational faith and doctrine? Baier goes much further than I would ever go (which is a good thing since I am a priest!), by dismissing that vital distinction I learned at university – between what is above reason and what is against reason. What can materialist science say about love or loyalty, which are metaphysical categories, not “material things”? Many Christians feel challenged by atheism to answer the criticism on its own terms. This is the art of apologetics and the approach of the “modernist” Fr George Tyrrell. Scholastic theology has little to say in response to Darwin and Dawkins. The modern apologist has to have knowledge, an unconventional knowledge, of disciplines like quantum mechanics and the theories of knowledge and truth that began to emerge from Idealist Germany in the 1790’s.

I will not enter into any polemics concerning the credibility of mysteries of faith. They come under the category of mystical experience and imagination rather than pure reason in the Kantian understanding of that word. Christianity remains fair game for atheists until it shifts to a higher ground than seemingly irrational beliefs both in terms of rationality and spirituality. The interesting thing about this article is that it hammers atheism and materialism, like Sheldrake is doing – but leaves the challenge to Christian teaching and belief. Atheism can only be attacked on account of its irrational and unscientific basis, its hypocrisy. But, beware, Christians can be hypocrites too!

Perhaps we will overcome “bad” (relying on ideology more than free enquiry and prayer) Christianity in the same way as giving the coup de grâce to atheism. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – as Shakespeare famously wrote in Hamlet. There are more things in existence that what meets the eyes of the materialist or the Christian. Many things, presently hypotheses and possibilities, surpass the canonical Scriptures or the teachings of churches. One is the multiverse, the alternative reality that might contain an exact duplicate of each of us living a life according to different combinations of possibilities. There might be an infinity of such universes existing like radio wavelengths to which a radio can tune one at a time. Something suggests this possibility, dismissed by materialist scientists – the existence of para-psychological phenomena like guardian angels, demons, near-death experiences, communication with the dead through mediums, telepathy, prophecy, visions and so much more. Quantum physics studies sub-atomic particles that seem to be made of pure energy. Some experiments have shown such quanta of energy to be conscious – not simply subject to some outside deterministic law from an unknown source.

The science of the future is one that postulates a big likelihood of conscious life beyond bodily death. I often wonder if I might be “absorbed” by my “other me” in another universe – a prisoner languishing in a dungeon, a monk in a community of prayer, a sailor circumnavigating the globe, a doctor healing the sick, a country priest, doing and being what I would never do here. Perhaps… We are our own heaven, hell and purgatory. Would I go at light speed down a “wormhole” as portrayed in films like Stargate? That film was certainly based on some of these ideas of parallel universes and the possibility of existence outside time and space – thus the possibility of going “places” too far away for our present NASA technology. The imagination runs wild and the reason follows, trying to understand and distinguish true possibility from nonsense.

Our author seems to reject orthodox Christianity. I don’t, but I see it as only a skeleton to which so much more is added as it is discovered. The Roman Catholic Church in the person of Pope Pius X made so much ado about Revelation being frozen by the death of the last Apostle, presumably replaced by the authority of those who set out to “correct” the work of Christ in that wonderful pact with the Roman Empire. If believing in the possibility of this Revelation continuing to evolve in our consciousness makes me a Modernist – so be it. Times have moved. The Modernism that was so shocking in the 1900’s has taken on a whole new meaning to those who see the dissolution of Christianity in the minds of those who need more than milk-sops in their journey of faith and spirit. We are called to discover for ourselves and to take risks.

One way to make our journey is to become “open” as opposed to “closed”, cosmopolitan rather than nationalist or parochial. These ideas obsessed me as a child, even though I did not understand all the philosophical implications. I do think we need to seek wisdom wherever it is found. We can find many things in the Jewish Kabbala, esoteric Christianity – Gnosticism in particular, Sufi Islam, the gurus of India, the light from the Buddhist east. I don’t mean that all that has to be mixed up to produce a new religion but rather that we should be enriched by so many colours, traditions, ways of life and thinking.

We need to learn about freedom and how it will enrich us, rather than destroy those who are not ready for it. Our author gives practical advice about how we can evolve into better human beings on something along the lines of Jesus’s teachings in the Gospel and a fuller understanding of the old law and commandments. Above all, we need to cultivate our freedom to think and feel. No knowledge must be forbidden.

Our author seems to advocate an approach to religion like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, making reason trump everything. That seems to be his limit. Mysteries cannot be denied simply because we don’t understand them completely. However, they can be questioned when they become tools of the rich, powerful and authoritarian.

I find this idea fascinating:

Our material world is constructed in a certain way. We can’t just teleport somewhere if we wish, and we can’t walk through walls. Similarly, maybe there is a higher world, in which our material world is embedded, that is also constructed in a certain way, although we usually can’t see it. Part of its fabric is of an ethical nature. If you transgress its laws, you may not physically feel it, but the effects – subtle as they are – are very real and can accumulate rapidly. This leads to a spiritual abyss from which it is hard to recover. Just think about all those people you know, or have heard of, who have sunk into a sorry state of self-pity, resentment and constant blaming of others; those poor souls who seem forever unable to lift themselves out of their self-created misery. As Jordan Peterson would say: hell can be very real here on earth. Navigating this elusive, yet very real world of objective morality, while constantly learning more about it, seems to be a major goal of, or meaning for, our existence.

This is the moral order, Karma, the law of cause and effect. We are responsible beings in our freedom to think and ask questions. No, not anything goes! We will find it more morally and spiritually challenging to make our own way of discovery than to obey an authority or an ideology. As we read in Berdyaev, the way of the Spirit is harder, but more real and true.

Indeed we are called to move ahead, to evolve…

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“The old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church”

Posted on Wednesday, 18 September, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My attention was drawn to Fr Hunwicke’s article The Anglican Patrimony. I find most of what this priest writes as irrelevant to my life as mine would be to him, but there is something here that provokes me to comment. He is an Ordinariate priest. I am not, and as a result, my perspective is totally different.

Fr Hunwicke refers to a whole movement of scholars from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. It is such a long time since I was at university (and a Swiss one) that I have no pretence at “scholarship sublime”, but rather the quest for a new paradigm in which Christianity might survive in the future. Some of the scholars Fr Hunwicke mentions were influenced by the Romantic movement, and therefore the need to uphold the heritage of the Enlightenment whilst promoting the whole human experience, including the spiritual life. He highlights the critical sense, including criticism of criticism. I am not surprised to find the expression Hermeneutic of Continuity, which is neither Anglican nor English, but from the pen of Benedict XVI with a thought for Newman’s theory of organic development.

It is significant that the ultra-ultramontanist Cardinal Manning criticised Newman in these terms:

“I see much danger of an English Catholicism of which Newman is the highest type. It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church”.

Isn’ t that the so-called Anglican Patrimony of Ordinariate clergy? I couldn’t answer this question other than remembering that conference I attended at Pusey House in April 2018. I came away inspired by the talk given by Monsignor Burnham, but with the interior knowledge that I had very little Englishness left in me, but rather a feeling of utter rootlessness.

Fr Hunwicke and I are working from different angles, he from having been a teacher and an Anglican parish priest and now in the Ordinariate as a Roman Catholic, myself from having been virtually broken by my experiences and still limping to contribute a flickering light to Christianity in general, regardless of which institutional church it belongs to. My own thought is known by those who read this blog.

I was a cradle Anglican, but more involved with music than academia. I didn’t go to university until long after I left England. The Fathers need to be read through the eyes of a historical critic, in the knowledge that the harsh condemnations render their otherwise valuable work irrelevant for people of this age used to liberal humanism.

The ever-elusive Anglican Patrimony is also an issue in the Continuum, between the kind of Anglo-Catholicism that almost imitates post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism and those who refer to “Classical Anglicanism” or something like a romanticised version of the pre-Reformation status quo. Christianity itself is in question, and with it the basis of humanism and compassion for the weak and the poor.

I share Fr Hunwicke’s concern for the current situation under the pontificate of Pope Francis. Since 2013, I have largely banished Roman Catholicism from my mind and allowed bits and pieces of information to reach me. I have become more critical of right-wing and conservative populism as I am of the Tweedledee in the combat – identity politics and nihilism. Francis seems to be almost a “Jeremy Corbyn” of his Church and encouraging a return to an obsolete form of socialism and collectivism, but there is a spiritual foundation that doesn’t leave me indifferent.

Whether we become Roman Catholics or remain in the various Anglican churches that give us a canonical mission for our priesthood, an important antidote to sentimentalism, populism and being swept along by fashions and the masses is our study, reading and crystallising our thought into something both original and solid, the product of both mind and heart.

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