Benedict Option

Posted on Monday, 19 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The idea has been around for some time. I will read Rod Dreher’s book, but it seems from what I have read on the Internet to be closely tied to Roman Catholic constraints and the situation in America. Some Europeans have looked into the possibility of taking at least the general idea and adapting it for the situation here.

Setting up some kind of community in England or Europe with a priest who is not Roman Catholic or at least not bound to the system and its bureaucracy and regulations would depend on a number of things in the practical order. That seems to be the general idea.

For the theory, the Romantic world view paints a picture of pessimism in regard to the modern world, the continuation of the Enlightenment and The Struggle, and the need to make a commitment to alternative living. I have discussed the notion of alternative “intentional” communities: some are more “romantic” than I am in their advocacy of hard-line environmentalism and veganism, and others seem little different from the modern world in their new forms of the old class system of those with money and power and those without. Here is the Diggers and Dreamers site about communities in England. They exist, and need to be discovered to find out what they are like. There are some Christian communities, but perhaps following some idea other than what attracts me.

This site might help to give some idea of what is involved in practical terms. Perhaps it is possible to take over an old Air Force airfield and grow crops and take a crash course in farming! Otherwise we have to go into the real-estate business, which in England is prohibitively expensive. It’s a bit cheaper over here in France, but there are many official regulations that make autonomy from the modern world difficult.

What I could imagine is some small remote farm with the possibility of modern communications like internet and 4G mobile phone coverage. That allows modern work like translation and computer programming from a distance – the advantage of being in town whilst being out of town. For as long as the system works… Some people can do small crafts, but they don’t make much money. The whole thing depends on money. to buy the buildings and land, do the necessary work of renovations and adaptation, eat and pay the utility bills, land tax and so forth. That would leave the persons interested in such a project with a “plant” already in someone’s ownership. My own house would house 3 persons at most, but someone would have to “buy out” my wife so that she could go and live in town. A tiny amount of development would be possible, but there isn’t much land. Farming would be out of the question. I have a small translating business, but the two others would have to have a means of income. Yeah….

A building or group of buildings with a lot of land permits farming, so less dependence on cashflow. But are any of us competent in farming? It’s a highly skilled job – and full time, and very hard work. I can’t imagine this with cosmopolitan intellectuals who haven’t held anything more than a bar of soap in their hands. There is the compromise of earning a living with modern technology and leading some kind of common life.

What would we want to do together? I assume that most of us appreciate privacy and some alone time, of which I got plenty in seminary, but precious little in marriage, which has improved somewhat in recent times with reorganisation of living space upstairs. There can be daily Mass and some Offices – assuming that we are not too taken up with work and working to client’s needs and timetables. There would be meals, cooking, cleaning and maintenance and some kind of interface with the outside world. The community would need a central theme, say, Romantic Christianity, but that needs to be expressed outside through writings and lectures. Otherwise we would be self-absorbed, narcissistic and would break up as a result of the first dispute. How would steam be let off? Monasteries have the Chapter of Faults which is more or less psychologically healthy.

For earning the community’s living, is there any kind of common business activity that can be envisaged? Publishing for example? That would be a part of the ministry of teaching and the written word. Who could put up the capital and get together some mechanism so that no one is the boss and no one is the underdog? There would have to be some kind of democratic system to rule the community and deal with conflict between persons. The principles could certainly be found in Diggers & Dreamers communities.

Future members would be initiated by some kind of “trial period”, but the real deal is that of the founders. I have had a bit of correspondence here and there, and I would have to meet these people and see if they and I get on in terms of building friendships. Friendship is the only way to build trust, and it’s twice the haul for someone like me who is “socially challenged” by needing people to be clear and straight when communicating what they want me to understand. I’m no leader and detest alpha dogs (I love canine dogs, not human ones).

I would love to share the things I have like my library, chapel and workshop. Different members would have assets to share. Would we be single people, married people without children, or married people with children? If the latter, it’s really going to be difficult and expensive. Homeschooling is a lot more complicated here than in America, so there is the link with the system. Medicine too from the moment someone has an accident or a health problem. I see little more than a compromise solution where the system is held at arm’s length but used to answer these issues.

The basic “ideology” has to be agreed, the Romantic world view, love of culture, the Catholic faith and liturgical life, the intellectual life, dialogue and writing. Very few will be interested and able to attempt such a thing. The vegan environmentalists have other priorities and are likely to prefer another style of music and reject any kind of structured religion or spirituality. What compromises are possible?

In my own experience, I spent about four years alone in a ropey old house in the Vendée countryside, and it taught me many things. It wasn’t always rosy, especially in winter! The money problems are always there. I married a woman from Rouen and moved up to Normandy. We live in a village and she works in town, and has no driving licence. So I have to take her to the station every day and go and fetch her each evening. Her philosophy of life isn’t quite modern, but not quite mine either. But, we live in the country and escape many of the less pleasant aspects of modern civilisation. It is still there all the same, and we can’t pretend to have only known what Novalis experienced in his family home in eighteenth-century Saxony! We can’t “un-experience” what we have experienced, and that is the limit of the community. Novalis died at 29 from TB. I’m vaccinated against it and can get hospital treatment and be cured if ever I catch it. Our world is different, both more difficult and easier.

If anyone would like to comment, they would be most welcome, or they can write to me privately (send a comment to get my e-mail address). Also, if you own a massive property and would like to donate it to a worthy cause, this might be it – if the little group can agree and get together. I’m not exactly holding my breath, but my Bishop received a hefty legacy to help buy his new pro-cathedral in Kent. Miracles do happen…

So, a few reflections on Benedict Options from a very un-romantic point of view, but still with the Sehnsucht and hope that I might reach something worthwhile in this life before passing on to greater pastures.

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Fr Tony Fry

Posted on Monday, 19 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

In the annals of my memory, I recall Fr Tony Fry who was ordained in 1996 by Bishop Hamlett. I was present at the ceremony at the church in Madeley Heath. I have just been informed of his death and asked for my prayers.

Fr Tony was a professional journalist and lived in or near Derby if I remember rightly. He produced our diocesan journal called The Clarion. It was nicely presented in columns using a desktop publishing programme. This photo is far from clear, but he was functioning as deacon for the Holy Week ceremonies at Madeley Heath in 1996. I was the subdeacon on the Bishop’s left.

At some point, he joined the Traditional Anglican Church (UK member of the TAC) and served as a priest. I never had any contact with him during my time in the TAC and he was not at either of the two Diocesan Synods I attended in Portsmouth, presumably due to illness and distance.

For many years, Fr Tony suffered from having had his vocal cords removed (and the condition that made this operation necessary), and speaking was a big effort for him.

I ask your prayers for him and his family.

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Cosmopolitanism

Posted on Monday, 19 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Pauline Kleingeld’s article about Novalis’ cosmopolitanism has struck a note with me. It left me a little frustrated in asking myself the question – What’s the use? Will philosophy change anything? Will our personal world views change anything? Does it make any difference whether we have travelled the world, gone into space or never left the town or village where we were born?

Globalism, the “global village” and “citizenship of the world” are hot button subjects and as relevant to us today as in the 1790’s. We have technology, aeroplanes, internet, faster and faster communication of ever-increasing amounts of information. We are even presented with the possibility of doing away with human communication and all being linked to a central computer that would combine all our memories into a single artificial “person”. Naturally, this idea would be relevant to a tiny proportion of very rich individuals. Billions would have to die, if we believe some of the conspiracy theories – if they are theories.

What we face today is the full development of ideas that were produced by reactions against the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and fuelled the revolutionary fervour of France and other parts of Europe. Present-day globalism looks like bringing about the dystopian visions of Orwell or Huxley. In the 1960’s, philosophers like Ivan Illich were identifying the means through which humanity was being assimilated into one vast anonymous machine and deterministic existence, through modern education, technology and medicine. To what degree Illich’s ideas are scientifically valid is anyone’s guess, but the idea seems cogent.

As a small boy, I felt suffocated in family life and the routine of daily school. I too was a product of the 1960’s and felt degraded by attitudes of the older people who had lived through the hardship of the Depression and World War II. We children and youngsters should have nothing to expect without suffering for it as “they” did. Should we have an economic depression and a world war every generation so that we learn to stay in our “place”? I yearned to get away from my lovely little Lakeland town which was Kendal, and be with people with more open attitudes. My father, an educated man from a distinguished Yorkshire family, sympathised and did what he could to encourage interests, hobbies and a more suitable education. I am grateful to him. At 17, I believed that my “vocation” was to be an organ builder. I joined the Durham firm of Harrison & Harrison and found some of the most bigoted and narrow parochialism among the brave men who worked there as craftsmen. After a couple of years, I went to London to do a course in harpsichord making. I would have preferred organ building in a less bigoted and narrow “working class” environment, but that was not available outside the various firms of organ builders in England. I got it all wrong.

I was alienating myself from my roots, but I needed a more open and universal word view. I certainly got it over the years as I finished the course in London. Instead of settling down and setting up a workshop, I got involved in a process of converting to Roman Catholicism and decided to go for the priesthood – through the traditionalists. Again, I was caught between the Scylla of parochialism and the Charybdis of yearning for something unattainable. On arriving in France in 1982 with a few belongings on a bicycle, I headed for my first address on my list, the parish of Fr Montgomery Wright at le Chamblac. I stopped off in the villages on the way and visited the rare unlocked churches – “pre-reformation” churches just across the Channel. They all smelled of damp and had altars facing the people. I wondered if just one diocese in the Massif Central had “survived”, like Ray Winch’s canonry. There was none. There was the possibility of monastic life, but that was another kind of closed parochialism. I tried to stick it out with a stint in one of the Society of St Pius X’s schools to learn enough French to go to Ecône. I think that it was my Aspergers (I didn’t know about it then) that prevented me from understanding people as they are in their zones of comfort, their certitudes and way of life. Who was I to expect anything else?

Normally, in life, someone is born into a given family in a given social class. His or her life is planned and determined from the beginning and you go along with it without thinking. You go to school, learn a trade or do a university course, get a job, get married and make sure your kids do the same thing. Life has no purpose other than our social life and conversations. These certitudes were broken by the two world wars and the cultural changes of the 1960’s. Up north, it took a little longer. My upbringing in the 1960’s was like the 1950’s down south.

I lived through an alternation of fresh air and closed parochialism. University was perhaps my best experience, though the Swiss leave a lot to be desired. I was best with my German friends whose faultless English compensated for my lack of German. Seminary life left me mostly in peace, just as long as I did all the things I was supposed to do. Sometimes the various prefects had a wider attitude, mellowed by their military experience, and others were butt-heads. Humans are humans – and I am one of them.

I have lived this dilemma for years: belonging somewhere yet being free to soar and experience. The only way was and is inwards, because we cannot change the world. Romanticism has helped to understand these notions better, and my old philosophical education in Rome and in my books at Fribourg stood me in good stead. Some of the things of this life utterly repelled me: competition, struggle against others for the highest places of status and power, bureaucracy, legalism, determinism, rational management, all the hallmarks of the modern workplace. English Public School was designed for this, for the Kampf and bitter struggle of being the best and the most powerful – the British Empire and the stiff upper lip. I came a little after that time, but the attitudes were still there among some of the creepy characters around me in the dorm and common room at St Peter’s. What was civic religion in all this, the pious cant of the parish vicar or school chaplain? It was just words. How can one wonder why so many lose all trace of faith and adopted materialism and nihilism?

Novalis suggested trying to build a society on Romantic and spiritual values, but it has never happened in this world. The only that did happen was that a few individual persons were prophets in a way, through philosophy and art. They tried to fly the flag even if it would be shot down by the mob.

What of the little community? What about the idea that has been coined as a “Benedict Option”, not the monastic life but a community of a priest and a few lay people inspired by that general idea? There are “intentional” communities that life according to a diversity of theme from Christianity, Tolstoy-style anarchism, hard-core environmentalism and veganism. Others exist in large houses with other buildings for the core community and paying guests, and are more or less restrictive as institutions. For each to choose his poison! What of a little community living according to Romantic ideas? There would have to be some ground rules to make it work, otherwise it would be all over from the first dispute! There has to be a point of balance somewhere. I am open to the idea.

Romanticism isn’t realistic! Nor is religion except as a moralising and controlling political ideology. Yet, the Church canonises saints all through history, and many of them were far from respectable like the beggar St Benoît Joseph Labre or “air-head” nuns like St Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus. Romanticism isn’t on the same plane as the “world”, and that is why any effect on the world is only a long shot, a little like killing a gigantic monster with thousands of pea shooters. Perhaps world leaders can be influenced by such ideas in such wise as they seek truth, beauty, the common good, justice, humility. There are sainted kings in history and inspired statesmen. If a sufficient number of persons with Romantic ideas can contribute to a common cause, then some change can come about and a little bit of heaven can be seen on earth. It might have been like this in America for the first years under the founding Fathers in the 1790’s. Even until World War II, anyone could make a good life for himself and his family in America. That being said, there was the great Depression and massive unemployment. It was the New World. This influence comes from imagination, creative writing, opposition to the “machine”, prophecy in its biblical meaning. There are no more new worlds, only beyond this earthly life beyond the grave.

I have no faith in politics or competitive struggle. If might is right, then we are no better than a pack of dogs fighting over a scrap of meat! Such humanity should not survive, and any number of things could bring it to an end: an asteroid from space, a really big volcano, a pandemic of a disease like Spanish Flu or something manufactured in an underground laboratory, a nuclear war, any number of things. I consider the planets around earth. Not one can support life from earth, and we are not sure that there is any life of any form on them. Other solar systems are too far away, and our present technology couldn’t get a human being anywhere near them in a single lifetime. The material universe is as bleak as those planets and bits of rock flying about around the sun. Only the earth, a tiny speck in the emptiness, shows any sign of life, and mankind is ungrateful.

Perhaps in parallel universes, Mars is the planet with life and Earth is a blackened waste. The Romantic looks to other worlds that are inaccessible to us in this universe. Do they really exist? There are elements of evidence or the ability of the human spirit to have some experience of another world. Perhaps, I am the pilgrim who has to go on through the unknown, recklessly and without knowing or belonging. Just pressing on…

Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating,
Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,
Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,
With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts,
With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and
Whither O mocking life?

Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?
Who justify these restless explorations?
Who speak the secret of impassive earth?
Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?
What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours,
Cold earth, the place of graves.)

Yet soul be sure the first intent remains, and shall be carried out,
Perhaps even now the time has arrived.

Walt Whitman

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I Knew It!

Posted on Sunday, 18 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

In the light of my most recent update of a comment on my Post-Enlightenment posting, I made a quick search for a relationship between Romanticism and the Scriptures, struck as I was when reading the Sehnsucht of German Idealism into a couple of psalms.

I found this blog posting on History and Spirituality by Alvin Petty.

Romanticism in Religion

Posted on November 25, 2011

What is romanticism in religion? It is relying as much on irrational mystery, mysticism, myth, intuition and the depth of the soul’s feelings as upon rational thought and explanation. The rational and irrational must be balanced in wholesome religion. The irrational romantic elements are missing in much of religion and life today and we are the poorer for it.

In the West we want a religion of knowing, explanation, thinking it is the best. (Protestants are especially bad about this.) The rational is very important but without the irrational elements of romanticism we live in an unstable house of cards. Religion is a balance of knowing and unknowing, even in the Bible. God may speak from the cloud clearly as to what we should do but we are never allowed to penetrate the cloud and fathom the mystery that is God. We just don’t know.

The great geniuses like Einstein seem to intuit the universe’s secrets with mystical feeling long before they discover the rational formulas that explain more of the universe. They feel the universe in their soul as a lover feels the approach of her beloved long before they ever see and touch each other.

Our religion desperately needs to cultivate this kind of romanticism. It will mean our enrichment and certify the validity of our lives. Neglecting the irrational of romanticism produces what we have today, a rash of Bible thumpers with a chapter and verse answer to every problem. These aristocrats of arrogance dismiss the deep feelings of the soul with a wave of their hand. They know everything. Thus, they cave in the well of joy.

In romantic religion, God is everywhere. He is found in nature and thus nature is loved and cared for by the worshiper. The awe and mystery of God is felt in sex which is a wonderful part of created nature and is to be guarded and nurtured with awe.

Romanticism does not demand an explanation of God nor rely upon dogmatic creeds about Her. God is and is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. This is enough for the romantic faith for no one could ever explain fully the Eternal Mystery. If one could, then God is too small for our worship. Romantic religion feels and experiences God. It focuses not on explanation but appreciation and thanksgiving.

In romanticism myth is abounding and necessary. All myth is not literal history but is meant to teach some great truth. The myth of the virgin birth of was a story form of proclaiming Jesus’ greatness as a master of men. Stories of virgin births can be found often in ancient religious and political literature. But always they are a literary device to introduce us to great personages who transformed history. This is important because unless the church learns to deal honestly with the framework of legend and myth that permeates all sacred literature, including the Bible, the Bible’s influence for this generation will be lost.

Romanticism mystically feels the inner truth of all miracle stories that seem supernatural without taking them as literal history. It draws the meaning from them and puts it into practice in everyday life. After all which is better, believing that Jesus walked on water as an article of faith or practicing Jesus’ faith and way of life that enables one to rise above the emotional storms of life and walk on towards good goals? Which, in the adversities of life, will do you and others around you the most good? Which do you think God would most prefer you to produce?

The real miracle of Christmas is that Christ, his attitudes of justice and love and all his teachings, can be reborn in us. We simply must trust the Mystery and yearn for Christ to live in us and through us. This is the true Christmas faith.

Someone contemporary seems to understand what I have been trying to get together in my “Blue Flower” theme. Fundamentalist Christianity really does seem to be a house of cards as does a lot of Roman Catholicism for children. Once something comes undone, everything comes tumbling down, and that would be a pity given the real message of Christ – exactly what drew me to Catholicism and the priesthood.

Miracles do happen and incurably sick people are healed, in the Gospel and in many documented cases at places like Lourdes. There are also the interior miracles, for which I am thankful because I have never knowingly seen a physical miracle like a blind person suddenly able to see or a cripple throwing away his crutches and walking like a healthy person. For me, I am more impressed by the spiritual meaning of being blind and being given my sight through faith. Such things will be criticised by rationalists and the scientifically-minded, which is only to be expected. Fair is fair.

I have discussed it many times: the balance between faith and reason on which Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI wrote and spoke copiously. There has to be as much use of our rational faculties as accepting the unknown and mysterious. We cannot all be mystics, like St Seraphim of Zarov or the Curé d’Ars shining with the light of the Transfiguration, but we can learn to be ourselves, human and contemplative. Most people in our time (or perhaps at any time) are not Romantics but are happy to have their place in the collectivity and give priority to human relationships. That is necessary. Some of us are intensely aware of a longing for something that is not of this world, like a romanticised idea of the middle ages as present in our entire Pre-Raphaelite movement in England as well as German philosophy.

This little article is music to the ears, a refreshing confirmation of my intuitions and desires. The Abbot of Triors once exhorted me to transcend the ideologies of both left and right in the Church – and do what monks do: seek God. I haven’t to listen to the rantings of Bible-thumpers claiming that the Romantics were heretics or sought to create a new religion to replace Christianity. I haven’t to listen to “true Church” devotees and converts to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. I haven’t to heed the “diversity” politics of sneering ideologues driving the world to our ruin. The bleakness of Judeo-Christian monotheism is warmed and quickened by this breath of the Holy Spirit of Romanticism and the quest for this particular Holy Grail (not the actual chalice Christ used, but what it symbolises – and not what Dan Brown thinks!).

The Romantic Christian will find God everywhere, even in the night, darkness, the indeterminate and the mysterious well of nature and humanity. Our author mentions sex. Being something of a British prude, I won’t go into that – but I have already written about sensuality and true ἔρως (I don’t know what is false eros other than perhaps the use and degradation of persons for the sake of lewd and selfish lust).

I have studied scholastic philosophy and theology, and have been shocked by its claim to understand and prove everything that is to be known about God and the doctrines of the Church. I come to believe that it is not important for everything to be literally true, or that we need to contain everything in our books, creeds and codes of law and living. As the Bible doesn’t contain everything (as St John himself says), the Church knows only a small segment of everything there is to be known and experienced, and which is still to be revealed. I think my approach to God should be like making a sea passage in a very small boat like the one I sail. From my time at university, I discovered the Russian philosophers and Jung, and now I connect the dots as I discover German Idealism and Romantic philosophy. I was also introduced to Dom Odo Casel (not the man, dead since 1948, but his work) by my liturgy professor and made the link with the liturgical theology of the Orthodox tradition. It all goes together in a vast Platonic universe of great beauty. Reams of pages are written, as Dom Casel did, to stress the unicity of Christianity in relation to the mystery religions of Greece, Rome, Persia and Egypt – which continued in Gnosticism and some modern mystery schools. There were other deities who were born of virgins and who rose to life after their cruel deaths as martyrs. These are myths. Were I to say that about Christianity, my Bishop would have to censure me for heresy! But, I would bring out the question of priority between historic and literal truth and the inner spiritual meaning. In Casel’s thought, the mystery religions were part of God’s way to prepare for Christ, the true Son of God and incarnate Word. Das Christliche Kultmysterium is a meditation of singular beauty. I recommend it to my readers, in German or in the English translation The Mystery of Christian Worship – as you can. My copy is in English.

I do believe that Romanticism will help us refine our notion of mythology, allegory and analogy. Stories don’t have to be literally true, but they convey deep meaning to us. This will be the case of the Brüder Grimm or the great works of Tolkein or C.S. Lewis. I am presently reading Lewis’ autobiographical Surprised by Joy, in which he discusses his own yearning for the Flos Caeruleum and its profound meaning.

Maybe the author of the article is playing fast and loose with the central dogmas of our faith like the Resurrection and the miracles of Christ, something I cannot approve as an (Anglican) Catholic priest. I am perhaps unjust in my suspicion. These dogmas have several layers of meaning for us baptised Christians. Their meaning is often excessively narrowed. The real Romanticism of the middle ages is certainly expressed in the lives of the Goliards and the poetry and ballads they wrote and sang up and down the land wherever they travelled. I am with Novalis as he sought to portray a myth that inspires the human spirit and imagination even whilst glossing over the Inquisition, human cruelty, short lives, war and disease among the many things all humans have to suffer in our lives.

The idea that a new Christian Romanticism is not merely my own pipe dream, but a vision shared by a number of people in our times, is an inspiration to pursue this work of my life and priestly vocation. I do believe that a few souls are with me in this work.

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Annunciation 2018

Posted on Sunday, 18 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have only just been asking myself the question about the entry of the Annunciation in Dr William Renwick’s Sarum calendar for 2018. The Annunciation (March 25th) clashes with Palm Sunday and is scheduled to be displaced to Monday of Holy Week. The Warren translation of the Sarum missal indicates:

If this feast shall occur on any Sunday in Lent it shall always be transferred to the next day ; if it shall fall on any other day than a Sunday in Passion-tide, it shall be solemnly celebrated on that day. But if it occur on Maundy Thursday, or on either of the two days following, or in Easter week, it shall be transferred to the first vacant weekday after the octave of Easter on which it can be conveniently celebrated.

The Roman rite does not allow the Annunciation to be celebrated during Holy Week (a part of Passiontide), so it is displaced to after the Easter Octave. Sarum allows the Annunciation on Monday, Tuesday or Spy Wednesday of Holy Week but not during the Triduum. So, Dr Renwick has not made a mistake as I had suspected. Otherwise I would have had to take up the matter with him by private e-mail. None of us is infallible! But, he is not wrong.

Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week (after Palm Sunday) give us the Passions from the Synoptic Gospels. The Passion is not read on Holy Monday, but we are all the same brought into the intensity of human wickedness and the suffering of Christ. A feast, even of Our Lady, seems displaced. I am inclined to take the liberty of transferring the Annunciation to April 9th, which is the Monday following Low Sunday.

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Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.

Posted on Sunday, 18 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This may seem to be one of the most enigmatic sayings of the Gospels, just at a time when the Pope wants to rid the Lord’s Prayer of the notion “et ne inducas pas in tentationem“. What of the temptations of Job? As I explore the philosophical writings of the Romantics, I also see another way to read the Gospels, like the Old Testament, through allegory and analogy, through a spiritual Ungrund to steal a word from Jakob Böhme. Without being too dualistic, I distinguish an inner and mystical way from the social and political understanding. After all, Christianity has to be incarnate – but how?

This first Sunday of Lent is the day to resume the central theme of Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, this very narrative of the three temptations. He saw them as different phases in human history from material needs to raw power. They can indeed be interpreted as describing how the Church became institutionalised and corrupted – and how our geo-political world increasingly enslaves us. Ivan Illich blamed the excesses of education, technology and medicine, and incurred the wrath of Rome under Paul VI. 

It is perhaps arguable that these temptations were not to sin (I’m hungry and see some food that belongs to someone else, so I am tempted to steal it). They are perhaps different ways of understanding one’s vocation and mission. Then the temptations would have been “I was called to enslave people through their need for food”, “I am called to bring people to God through performing magic tricks”. The possibilities of interpretation are endless. We feel the weight of the Welfare State on our finances to such an extent that we can no longer save for a rainy day or exercise our own responsibility. The century when I was born knew several examples of totalitarianism, all calling themselves “socialist” or evoking socialist themes to get votes. From enslaving us through our need for food, shelter and medical help, Jesus might have been tempted to see his mission as one of having political power to convert the masses by force. Christ seems to be forced into a dilemma of being uncaring whilst the institutional totalitarian pretends to be enslaving the population for its “own good”. What is this good? Material help and toleration of cultural diversity? The idea of offering a way of life that transforms from the inside and brings happiness? I often agonise about this notion of the Church’s mission. Do you remember the film The Mission, and how a single Jesuit priest climbed up the waterfall precipice to a jungle tribe in what is now Brazil – and played music by Händel on the oboe? Even Cardinal Altamirando asks himself at the beginning of the story whether it was the right thing to go to those lands in the first place. The result was that the Guarani were enslaved by the Spanish and the Portuguese for pure profit.

Even Jesus blamed the Pharisees for their proselytism:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.

Were not the lives of indigenous people in South America and Africa more human and civilised than we Europeans killing each other for wealth and power? The Christian missionary has to destroy their culture to sanctify it. Something is wrong here. Our own culture isn’t that of the Pharisees. Perhaps it would be “poetic justice” for us to be subject to the Islamic Caliphate and Sharia Law. Some people believe that!

Churches are now left without political power, that power having been transferred to the secular world of politics and business. The United States is now doing what the Church was doing three hundred years ago in Paraguay and Brazil – policing the world and waging interminable wars. It is no different from their involvement in World War II: “We get rid of the Nazis for you, but we also destroy your cities and lend you the money to rebuild them”. Something like that?

I find the same temptation in any expression of abdicating one’s conscience in the name of some magisterium that dictates for every case of human morality. I know that I am going to be accused of defending the man with a gun who believes that robbing a bank isn’t wrong! The capacity of choosing evil, our very freedom, is one of the most painful aspects of our human condition.

Jesus chose another way and the Temptor left him. What is this way? This is what I am presently studying and thinking about. It is the notion of the person’s desire for the object of love. This Sehnsucht is at the centre of the rejection of the excesses of the Enlightenment and the ceaseless wars following the French Revolution. The Kingdom of God is within, as we will understand through the many Gospel parables.

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

How frustrated they must have been, because only one who has suffered, loved and yearned may find the key to that elusive Kingdom:

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.

This is essentially the temptation we are all called to resist and reject. Our great institutions, beautiful churches and Christenheit are dying and being replaced by their moralising secular equivalents. We are not going to succeed by being door-to-door salesmen, gimmicky magicians and healers, even helping the poor and homeless wearing a cassock to say “we’re doing this in the name of Christinaity and the Church – hint, hint…”.

Is it time to give up and let it all go? Is no further influence on the godless of this earth possible? This is possibly an agony we will suffer until the day we die. I think we can work to enhance and purify our own cultures, putting love and beauty in the place of the struggle for status, class and power. The “old days” were no different. Human sin remains the same throughout history and only appearances change. One thing about Romanticism I love is that it is not made for this world. It is not “realistic”. There is so little we can do in this world, at least on a large scale. When we come to the help of a person is distress, it is Christ, it is the whole world, if that has come from love and pure concern – with no ulterior motive.

I am a priest without political power or the status given by a mainstream Church to claim the authority of the parish priest of the village. I am not prepared to engage in activities that have the ulterior purpose of getting people into my chapel. Thus the chapel will only last as long as I do or the furnishings will get moved elsewhere when I move away for whatever reason. That is the fragility of it all. But, at least I know in my heart that I will have not used the gift of the priesthood for any of these three perversions, temptations or sins, whatever you want to call them. Perhaps I will die with regrets, having left a person in distress without knowing that something was wrong. I pray to know the truth, and I know I will only find the answer within me, not from other people.

Something still isn’t right, and I share the condition of us all in this dilemma of Cardinal Altamirando and the little priest in the jungle playing his oboe. Ultimately, he was there in atonement for the previous priest who was tied to a cross and thrown over a waterfall in a parody of Christ’s crucifixion (the natives would have got the idea from their catechism). Is that not a parable of the entire history of the Church?

Altamirando:

So, your Holiness, now your priests are dead, and I am left alive. But in truth it is I who am dead, and they who live. For as always, your Holiness, the spirit of the dead will survive in the memory of the living.

The noble souls of these Indians incline towards music. Indeed, many a violin played in the academies of Rome itself has been made by their nimble and gifted hands. It was from these missions the Jesuit fathers carried the word of God to the high and undiscovered plateau to those Indians still existing in their natural state and received in return, martyrdom.

The priests in question were not martyred by the Guarani but by the Portuguese colonising armies (the king of Portugal at the time was anti-clerical and a Freemason, just interested in power and money).

Gabriel:

If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that.

Nor do I.

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A Fragment on the End of History

Posted on Tuesday, 13 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I tend to get into somewhat big subjects these days. It is mid February and I haven’t sailed since last October. That alone is no reason to “go off one’s rocker”. Apart from some nasty onsets of anxiety in the morning or late at night, my life seems to be quite calm. I have been dealing with these questions since I was a little boy gazing out of the window of the daily bus from Kendal to Ambleside imagining that I could fly like a bird. O for the wings of a dove! I often have recurring dreams of a little girl dancing in a garden in the kind of clothes children wore a hundred years ago. I have no idea of who the little girl would be.

Modern psychiatry has given me a term for people who have traits in common like hypersensitivity and a certain allergy to what most people would term real life, the world, our own times, the here and now – and deceitful sophistry. It is a certain reaction against a certain form of rationalism that removes the spiritual and emotive content of what it is to be human. The ultimate nightmare of this would be the large business corporation or any state bureaucracy. Psychiatry calls the condition high-functioning autism, or, a few years ago, Aspergers Syndrome. These traits are different from person to person, making an empirical diagnosis difficult – but they seem to point in another direction. I was predisposed to seeking a different understanding to life, an experience of life that would handicap me in many ways, like getting through school, seminary, being employed in jobs, marriage and relations with my family of origin. The scientific words are just that, words to help with understanding at a rational level. The rest of the human being I am has had to be sounded out, explored, made to understand at a deeper level. All this may sound like narcissism, but no more than the long work of C.J. Jung as he sought self-knowledge in order to help his patients. If such self-knowledge can help me be a better priest and more compassionate with others, then it can only be a good thing. This is a part of my blog, even when I produce texts from 219 years ago which convey another message to the different culture and humanity we are in 2018.

I have often thought about the concept of the end of history – not the Apocalypse involving the destruction of this earth, the death of us all and the final triumph of Christ – but a certain attitude that has grown since the end of World War II in 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This attitude seeks to find a definitive and immobile character in our own times like that of Napoleon’s victory in Saxony in 1806, the “world spirit” of Hegel represented by the triumph of France. This was to be a golden age of humanity. It didn’t last. Ours won’t either.

We heard the same cant in 1989 when I was a young student in Switzerland, the end of Communism and the final victory of capitalism. Now, several banking and financial crashes, we live in a world of increasing difference between billionnaires and the hopeless homeless. What is money? Most of us have lost any understanding of the concept since the end of the Gold Standard. I know just about zilch about economics, and the idea of the subject depresses me, but the world of money is hardly triumphant or for the common good of all. We are all on the edge, curbing our expenses and still struggling to keep our bank accounts straight.

Political debate is ever more polarised, puerile and concerned with self-interest than the common good. Finally, we are looking at radical Islam, terrorism and war, increasingly levels of surveillance with the use of modern technology. The nightmare far exceeds that of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – and indeed we are faced with the prospect of cloning and artificial life. Many of us have come to believe that mankind cannot survive these trends and developments. We would go out, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Another sign of our times is one of nostalgia and longing, and this is what fires my appeal to the Romantic movement of two hundred years ago. Then, there was Napoleon, and now we have Trump and Putin! We have not entered the last times or the end of history, but the beginning of a new cycle. About twenty years ago, I had a friend in Paris who introduced me to a remarkable man by the name of Jean Phaure. He had been born in Indo-China and only ate Vietnamese food. He was fascinated by eastern religions and Hinduism inparticular. He would certainly have enjoyed knowing Dom Bede Griffith who combined Benedictine monastic life with the way of gurus and wise men in India. Phaure’s central thesis was the cyclical notion of history like in sacred Hindou writings. He gave me a copy of Le Cycle de l’Humanité Adamique and Les Portes du IIIe Millénaire. Admittedly, there is some New Age influence, but also the moderating influence of philosophers like Nicholas Berdyaev and other visionary Russians, which took me down a road on which I have continued ever since. I occasionally pull Phaure’s books out and read through a chapter on a particular subject, and find that my own sensitivity and understanding of things has changed and evolved.

I do see history going round in circles. I see so many parallels of the early nineteenth century – little Chinese children working excessive hours in factories without proper safety precautions. Care for the poor was a characteristic of Romanticism. Globalism replaces the guillotined King and that Corsican Emperor beaten by the British at Waterloo. With the downfall of liberalism, we face a new expression of authoritarianism and restrictions of movements of people. We don’t find any parallel, at least not yet, of the totalitarianisms of the 1930’s, but many things are changing as they did before.

I am not so sure of the likelihood of a really serious war that would kill us all in a nuclear holocaust. The USA and North Korea continue to rattle their sabres, but there are no mushroom clouds – as yet. May that continue, as I believe that God has protected us before in the Cold War era… The Middle East is in a dreadful situation. I hardly see it as a symptom for some smug “end of history”. World War III could still happen, however.

Many men in positions of power and knowledge of what goes on foretell the end of the economy and what would happen to us without modern technology or even electricity. Might we envy those who lived in the 1790’s and knew nothing of what we know and have experienced? Might we return to Nazism or what China would do if they took over the world? The worst they can do is kill us. Did not Christ tell us not to fear those who can kill the body, but those who kill both soul and body? Death does not always come quickly and peacefully – torture still exists in this world!

Europe is a bloody mess. Brexit is more or less damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The only England I have left is my father in extreme old age, my brother and sisters, but above all my romanticised daydreams helped by listening to the more pastoral and impressionistic music of Vaughan Williams. My Bishop and fellow priests in the ACC give me something more of an England in which I arrive almost as an alien each time. I almost feel surprise with the ease at which my passport is checked by Immigration at the port and I am waved through. I was born in England and have the right to enter the country whenever I want, but I am as much an alien there as here in France. I suppose if Brexit goes through, the French would give me a residence and work permit, and I’ll ask for dual nationality. I suppose it would be like in the old days. Though I sympathise with British nationalism and our sovereignty, we cannot expect to leave the Mafia and not get shot in both knee caps and perhaps sent to the bottom of the sea with heavy chains and weights! Again, the EU might crumble and fall as the Soviet Union did in 1989, and someone will cash in on it. What a bloody world! Do you wonder why I dream and yearn like a Romantic?

The way things are going, it looks like the end of history, and Armageddon can happen if the earth gets hit by an asteroid or Yellowstone super-volcano blows, resulting in more than the glooom over Geneva in 1816. That’s an understatement. Again, the worst that can happen to us is that we die of something, probably of natural causes.

The “Enlightenment” we now face is an analogy of the old one that brought Robespierre and the guillotine. The thinkers are the first to lose their heads! We also face the worst nightmares of science fiction like combinations of humanity and machines. Atheists entertain the illusion that they can have their brains frozen at immense cost to overcome mortality! Their bodies will be dead and will remain dead. However, some of these developments may bring us to the worst dystopia ever imagined. Our species might destroy ourselves and God’s judgement may have very little to do with it.

That is “realism”. Delusion? Illusion? Madness? I think we can see and experience our life in a different way. What we see and experience is only a narrow part of the spectrum of reality outside our world. For this, I thank God and the intuitive consciousness. This is why my life is now dedicated to this new vision and a new reality, that of the Blue Flower, the other world, the Kingdom of God.

What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee? And he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight.

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Post-Enlightenment

Posted on Sunday, 11 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have discovered this text of Novalis that I would consider to be of capital importance in understanding our own times. We had the Reformation, the French Revolution and the Terror, and finally, Communism and Nazism, and now the spectre of Globalism and Islam.

Die Christenheit oder Europa translated into English. It was written in 1799, exactly two centuries before the Berlin Wall came down. In the language of the time (we are not reading it in German), it seems dreamy and emotional, the way I often feel in my final moments before sleep at night. Europe was definitely “post-Enlightenment” as we are now “post-Modern”. What a coincidence! Robespierre’s Revolution was a child of the Enlightenment and destroyed its progenitor.

In our own times, we have had the second World War, and since then peace has been enforced by the emergence of the modern European Union, which too will go the way of Louis XVI and the Kingdom of France. Peace has only been superficial with the Cold War and the Allied control over Germany until Nazism could no longer have a serious prospect of being revived. We look to a Catholic Europe, not one dominated by ideology and a Papal absolutism that no longer exists, but a higher vision of universality. Novalis’ nostalgia was not simply a yearning for childhood and the past.

The difference in Romanticism à la Novalis is that we mourn our dead and move on to a new future. If certain things from the past can be reinstated, there would be a basis to build a future which is impossible with current paradigms. Again, our world is being stripped of reason and feeling, imagination and love, and replaced by brute forces of power and money. How would Novalis react if he came back to this world of 2018? Probably as I would if I saw the twenty-third century, a charred ruin or a universe of inimaginable technology. Even the latter at what price? Mortality and a brief life are necessary, because there is only so much we can take. My father at nearly ninety is overtaken by everything even though his mind is as sound as a bell.

Modernity is passing away and we don’t know what is in store. Globalism is said to be on its way out. With Islam, humanity can take only so much fanaticism and cruelty like under the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II. I can understand Pius XI’s attempt at creating a new Christian order with the notion of Christ ruling us from within rather than our being bullied from without by Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. Were we to be spiritual and moral, we would have no need of external constraint and tyranny.

It all seems as impossible as the Orffyreus perpetual motion machine. We cannot turn the clock back, nor would such be desirable. We have the experience we have, technology, a different way of life and thought. Novalis saw evil in both Enlightenment and religion, but became a Roman Catholic shortly before the end of his life. He found fault with the RC Church for having become a corpse and that Rome’s rule had come to an end long before the violent insurrection. The Reformation destroyed what was already dead, and so did the French Revolution and Communism, and Islam is doing the same today, bringing the world round full circle. Even with his realism about the fall of the institution, the eternal and mystical Church remained. Restoring the old power of the Papacy would be impossible because we have experienced Protestantism and Enlightenment, and now the world we know but that Novalis never saw.

I have read many things on this theme by Josef Ratzinger, doubtlessly influenced by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Goethe and the other Idealists. We are held in a constant dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It is for us to discern the new synthesis and wisdom in the midst of the chaos. So many times, he spoke and wrote about faith and reason: one without the other brings evil.

I invite you to print out and read this piece by Novalis. It isn’t easy. If we make this effort, I am sure we will be rewarded by a refreshed vision and the capacity to dream and make our future.

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Questo Stronzo di Paolo Sesto

Posted on Friday, 9 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

In the light of the upcoming canonisation of Pope Paul VI, and my attention drawn to the Rad Trad blog, I find this posting on Fr Gregor Hesse Contra Mundum. I find a link to an earlier article on this eccentric Austrian priest who spent many years in America and Rome, and appealed to the more radical of conservative political opinions. I remember his exclamation – Questo stronzo di Paolo Sesto when referring to Paul VI and the reforms in the Roman Catholic Church. The word stronzo in Italian is extremely offensive, usually used by bad-tempered Roman motorists afflicted with road rage.

I think I have said all I know about this priest who died some years ago in his early fifties from diabetes. I spent some time with him in 1990, and he wasn’t always very kind. His stated opinions about politics and church politics were quite shocking insofar as he advocated returning to the days of the Papal States and public executions by guillotine in the Vatican.

As for Pope Paul VI, he died when I was nineteen years old, a loyal organist in an Anglican parish and working in a music shop. I had vaguely heard that he was against contraception, and it seemed to be the post important issue at the time. I also knew that he had approved a rite of Mass that was like our awful modern-language Series III. The impression we Anglicans had of Roman Catholics is that they were neurotic children in need of some authority to keep them from committing the usual sins. It seemed that Papa Montini was heavy-handed only with Archbishop Lefebvre in the hot summer of 1976 -when I was holding the notes for the organ tuner or sweltering in the workshop at Harrison’s!

My view of Paul VI was more than anything founded on reading August Bernard Hasler’s, How the Pope Became Infallible and all the juicy stories about the Vatican Bank and P2 in Yallop’s In God’s Name. There is enough to make people very angry and keep a very dim view of the Roman Catholic Church. On one side, keep the faithful like docile infants whilst having them buy cheap and not-so-cheap baubles in the bondieuserie shops in Rome and Lourdes – and have them turn a blind eye to organised crime and corruption of the kind that would have the bloated corpse of Alexander VI spinning in his triple coffin! It would seem that Paul VI in his divided Hamlet fashion between the Catholic citadel of Pius IX and Jacques Maritain’s “integral humanism” philosophy – all based on Charles Maurras in some way – was trying to run the Church like the infallible Pius IX with the mad staring eyes (nineteenth century photographs didn’t always do justice). Paul VI vacillated between the old Roman Ultramontanism and the more sophisticated French philosophical theories.

Doubtlessly, Montini was a pious priest, said Mass and Office each day and read the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church. The stuff about the miracle attributed to him is highly suspect. There is no evidence, only the claim of a person who prayed “Blessed Paul VI, heal my illness” and whose sickness went into remission. There is only a coincidence, no proven causal relationship. This whole project of canonising Paul VI smells of ideology and the policies of the present Pope.

Which twentieth century Popes have been canonised? The pattern is easy.

  • Pius X was canonised by Pius XII in 1950, doubtlessly on account of his aggressively anti-Modernist stance.
  • Benedict XV has not even been beatified, whilst he did all he could to bring the Church through World War I and soften the hard line repression of Modernism under Pius X.
  • Pius XI condemned Communism and Nazism and was highly critical of Mussolini’s Fascism. It is in this context that he formulated the cult to Christ the King. It is better to have Christ as our Leader and Führer than Hitler! He has not been beatified either.
  • Pius XII has also been passed over in spite of his efforts to save Jews and Allied servicemen from the Nazis whilst preventing the Vatican from being invaded and destroyed.
  • From John XIII onwards, all the deceased Popes are canonised or are in process of being canonised. The reason is manifestly the aggiornamento and the iconoclasm (“wreckovation”) in the Roman Catholic Church since the 1960’s and 70’s.

Why is Paul VI or John Paul II more holy than Pius XI or Benedict XV?

I swam the “river” to the traddies in 1981 and tried to live my ideals and desires, and knew that I had made a big mistake. Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum. My time with the monks, also to some extent at seminary, showed a more profound kind of religion, but all the same bound up with totalitarianism and collectivism. The best thing I did was to study theology at Fribourg University. Roman Catholicism earned for itself a reputation of needing people to be little children and brought to salvation through treats and punishment. Some individuals through history became saints and heroes in spite of the institution – though their nobility of spirit and sublime vision and experience of life. They were only Roman Catholics in the way J.S. Bach, Göthe and Novalis were Germans. Beauty and transcendence come from the person, not from the surroundings.

There is Catholicism in spite of the institution, and that applies to all institutional Churches, including my own – in differing degrees. It takes a lot of courage to get over the crest of the hill, accept the disillusionment and the blinding revelation on losing the cognitive dissonance, and arriving the other side with a faith based on the life of the spirit and the desire for the divine. There are no true and false Churches, only Churches with their bishops, priests and people participating in the life of the Eternal Church. As I spit out this bitter poison of papal ideology, I leave my readers with this meditation on the Church from the Prose of the Dedication in the Parisian rite:

Jerúsalem et Sion fíliæ,
Cœtus omnis fidélis cúriæ,
Melos pangant jugis lætítiæ.
Allelúia.

Christus enim norma justítiæ
Matrem nostram despónsat hódie,
Quam de lacu traxit misériæ
Ecclésiam.

Hanc sánguinis et aquæ múnere,
Dum pénderet in crucis árbore,
De próprio prodúxit látere
Deus homo.

Formarétur ut sic Ecclésia,
Figurátur in prima fémina,
Quæ de costis Adæ est édita
Mater Eva.

Eva fuit novérca pósteris ;
Hæc est mater elécti géneris,
Vitæ portus, ásylum míseris,
Et tutéla.

Hæc est cymba qua tuti véhimur ;
Hoc ovíle quo tecti cóndimur ;
Hæc cólumna, qua firmi nítimur
Veritátis.

O sólemnis festum lætítiæ,
Quo únitur Christus Ecclésiæ,
In quo nostræ salútis núptiæ
Celebrántur.

Justis inde solvúntur prǽmia,
Lapsis autem donátur vénia,
Et sanctórum augéntur gáudia
Angelórum.

Ab ætérno fons sapiéntiæ,
Intúitu solíus grátiæ,
Sic prævídit in rerum série
Hæc futúra.

Christus jungens nos suis núptiis,
Recréatos veris delíciis,
Intéresse fáciat gáudiis
Electórum. Amen.

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More from the Rear End

Posted on Wednesday, 7 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My old friend in California, John Bruce, is having another go in So, What’s Really Going On At St Mary’s?

He doesn’t allow comments on his blog, so I will exercise my right to a response here.

His “regular correspondent” tried to conjecture how Mrs Deborah Gyapong, Christian Campbell and I tried to understand the problem of Archbishop Hepworth, especially when the endgame was over – by about 2012. I have discovered that one can become quite unstuck by trying to attach psychological labels to people. Perhaps all I would say of my former Ordinary whom I had esteemed and treated with gratitude is that he had traits suggesting lack of empathy, manipulativeness, total lack of practical judgement and the characteristics of a bully. I discussed these issues with someone who knew him intimately, and he was more hurt than I was for other reasons which I will not discuss here.

Mrs Gyapong wanted to see the best and noblest motives in him. The trouble is that the evidence slapped me in the face every time. I do agree that the Archbishop might have found more respect had he retired from the TAC, reconciled with the Roman Catholic Church as a laicised priest and disappeared for several years. A stay in a monastery is the usual way, something I have done myself. Having the responsibilities of his second wife and home, perhaps he would have taken the time to write a book and settle down as a lay Roman Catholic. After that, there are two sides to any agreement… The fact he continued to style himself as an Anglican archbishop, have priests under his “jurisdiction”, exercise some form of independent ministry in Australia – all are suspect for someone who believes in unconditional surrender to the Roman Catholic Church as he advocated at the bishops’ meeting in October 2007. Perhaps I am crazy in deducing such a possibility. Perhaps Winston’s torturer from 1984 is holding four fingers up at me and telling me there are five…

I am flattered to be considered as “highly influential” whilst being “crazy” at the same time. So much water off a duck’s back! I am strangely independent from affirmation coming from other people. I have learned to compare myself with myself as I was yesterday, and not with other people. That comes from bitter experience of life.

The “correspondent” speaks of his uneasiness about being under Hepworth’s oversight on account of his no longer being the primate of an institutional ecclesial body. St Mary’s is not my problem. Even lovely ships like the Titanic had to be abandoned when they were sinking. A building, however beautiful, is not worth that amount of litigation. The caricature of episcopi vagantes is nothing new. Some are self-aggrandising and perhaps have narcissistic traits in some cases. Others ask fundamental questions and go completely quiet after finding that their idea of a new type of ministry was an illusion. I have been down that path – never again.

I think I was excessive in applying the words narcissist and psychopath. They would be the result of a rigorous diagnostic by a professional psychologist or psychiatrist. I am neither. All I can do is observe a few traits and compare my own findings with those of others who suffered more than I did in their particular circumstances of life. I am in possession of some documents which I have promised never to divulge. There is the “seriously flawed judgement” but there are other traits too. I became weary with the discussion long ago and I have moved on.

John Bruce has decided to be an ordinary mainstream Roman Catholic. I think he could do better by adopting the casual indifferent chatty and happy attitude of most cradle Roman Catholics or commit himself to some spiritual or humanitarian work in his parish. There are many homeless people in California, and I’m sure the parishes are doing a lot of good work. This is his vocation, his chosen way, not mine. He and I are both limited by the places in this world where we live. Why get involved in some plan involving former Archbishop John Hepworth flying half way round the world to ingratiate himself with the passengers and crew of a sinking ship?

In many respects, rationally speaking, John Bruce isn’t wrong. The small groups of counter-cultural and committed clergy and faithful are eccentric, proving ourselves, justifying ourselves, doing the best we can with little money or resources. I correspond with one or two people in the English Ordinariate and learn of their issues with the mainstream RC Church in England. The general notion is one of inconclusiveness and lack of resolution. For me to return to the RC Church would be a step of nihilism, more so than twenty years ago. The challenge he implies is quite bleak: the darkness before the light or the darkness with nothing beyond. The problem with getting rid of Christianity is knowing what comes next. I believe that materialism is wrong! Only transcendence gives meaning to life.

In my own “crazy” thought and my current projects, I try to find a way to live Christianity differently and to present it to others in a new way. It is my conviction that Christianity is not for all, but only accessible to those who are prepared in philosophical and spiritual terms. Christianity is esoteric and exoteric. The Mystery was taught to Christ’s inner circle, and the ordinary people heard parables, which sometimes were explained, sometimes not. The idea of “being saved” by accepting Jesus as your “personal Saviour” is complete and absolute bunk. It is all analogy and symbol for a reality of which very few have knowledge. The political notion of Christianity as the “social kingship of Christ” is also bunk. The teaching and Mystery of Christ can only be real and true in a very precise set of dispositions and state of readiness to receive Revelation. That is why most church Christianity is discredited.

I am no more holy than anyone else, but the gap is brief between belief and commitment, and unbelief. I am a priest in a Continuing Anglican Church, the ACC, which has made some remarkable efforts to clean out the stables, become stable and improve the quality of the clergy. Several priests in the ACC in England are university educated, and some have been mainstream Anglican – and do great work in their little parishes. I carry my head high and am proud to serve our little Diocese. We may be eccentric in some ways, but we are doing the work of the Catholic Church. That is not to be poofed out of the way by the smug of this earth.

I feel sorry for former Abp John Hepworth. I have good memories of meeting him in Paris back in 2005 and spending a day with him in Senlis to discuss my entering the TAC as a priest. I was impressed by the bishops’ meeting in Portsmouth in October 2007 and relativised the total incompetence of some of the bishops in simply celebrating Mass. There seemed to be something powerful and hopeful, but it was all illusion. Some TAC clergy joined the Ordinariates, and now the TAC is little more than a name, and the viable component Churches are forming new alliances like the big Synod last October in America. Things have changed. John Hepworth could have found his happiness through a long retreat and discernment of his vocation in the context of his canonical irregularities. He could have made his peace with his own clergy and faithful, and trodden another path. The important things are lucidity and truth, humility and self-knowledge. I still pray for him and hope in some way that God will unravel the tangled mess.

Perhaps he might do something for St Mary of the Angels, but I think the Roman Catholic authorities would find him an obstacle. They don’t need him, but a relationship with the Ordinariate or the local Archdiocese if they really want to become Roman Catholic. There is no sense in that community being led by someone who is perceived by the RC bureaucracy as a toxic apostate priest. John Bruce’s inclination to go this way makes no sense. I wouldn’t call him raca or fool, but I would simply question his own judgement.

Finally it isn’t my problem, and it is puzzling to imagine how my insignificant ideas could change anything in this grand plan.

Now back to my Blue Flower – and a substantial translating order for next week…

* * *

Update: See Abp Hepworth And The Titanic

I have little to add, since I don’t know how I could be more “consistent” about St Mary of the Angels parish. I have never been there, only seen photos and read a few bits and pieces. Most of what I know comes from John Bruce, leaving me with an impression of such an amount of litigation that it might be better to sell off the church to the highest bidder, pay off the attorneys and call it quits. But, I might be wrong. Should I care?

Likewise, given the turning of events around 2011 to 2012, my impression of Abp Hepworth is that I had not know him or his true personality. It took me a while to suspect that there was an abundance of bullshit, and that I would never unravel things well enough to get a good understanding. Various other people filled me in on the most disturbing traits and facts, and I had no reason to distrust them. I stayed formally a member of the TAC until there was no Patrimony of the Primate anymore. Archbishop Prakash put me into the English diocese (Traditional Anglican Church), and I had no certitude there was still very much going on. I honourably resigned for the reason that the ACC was ready to accept me and give me a canonical title as a priest. That was in Eastertide 2013.

Perhaps there is little comparison between an ocean liner on its way to the bottom of the Atlantic and a church mired in litigation between the ACA and an independent priest and congregation. I have no side to take in this affair. However, many things are compared with sinking ships even if they are not ships at sea and containing human persons in danger of death from drowning or hypothermia.

From my scant information, I am given to believe that John Bruce and his wife were badly hurt by these comings and going of St Mary’s parish. That is understandable.

The argument of Abp Hepworth having the right to hear confessions in the name of the Roman Catholic Church in the case of the congregation at St Mary’s does not hold water (excuse the pun). He is an independent bishop in Anglican orders (ie: considered as invalid by the RC Church) and irregular as a priest having committed the delict of schism and getting married without a dispensation from Rome following a rescript of laicisation. These are just facts without any judgement on my part, and are the reasons why he could not hope to be accepted by Rome and allowed to minister as a priest, let alone as a bishop. I have done the same thing, but there is a difference: I have not applied to Rome to ask for anything and have no intention of going back to that Church. He was telling us that he had friends in the Vatican and everything was going to be “all right”, even for the canonically irregular. That was a pile of crap, evidenced by the cold manner in which he was treated by Cardinal Levada. He cannot act as a Roman Catholic priest, and there is no way that will change even if he is at the head of some Rome-bound community. It won’t work. It won’t wash. Anything associated with Hepworth, from Rome’s point of view, is tainted and in bad faith. I may be “crazy” but I know my canon law!

Perhaps in John’s place, I would have removed myself from St Mary’s and would have worshipped at various churches (or just one) without asking to be received into anything or receiving the Sacraments. I would probably have spent several years like that, leaving St Mary’s in the past and moving on spiritually and in terms of my own health and that of my family. There are plenty of churches in Los Angeles. Then, perhaps after a couple of years, I would have become Orthodox or Roman Catholic, gone back to the ECUSA or a more stable and peaceful continuing Church. I would have taken the time to read and study, and make the right decision for me in peace and prayer.

Yes, there are plenty of converts to the RC Church and loads of RC priests who become Evangelicals, Anglican bishops or join another religion. The ticket is one-way. Abp Hepworth is ipso facto laicised as far as the Roman Catholic Church is concerned. He cannot use the absence of a rescript of laicisation to pretend to have any legitimacy as a Roman Catholic priest. He might have done had he gone to the traditionalist movement, remained celibate and not become Anglican. That’s just the way it works, not any opinion from me. The TAC has rid itself of him and he is not a Roman Catholic cleric. He is not Archbishop of anything nor does he have a canonical title as a priest, even by epikeia.

St Mary’s is not an Anglican parish, unless it is under the local diocese of the ACA or some other mainstream or continuing jurisdiction – at least identifying with Anglican traditions. If those who have left the ACA are in charge, then it isn’t an Anglican parish. It is completely independent. Abp Hepworth changes nothing. He changes nothing for Rome except perhaps demonstrating that the community isn’t ready to be received into the Ordinariate or the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. They would be better off as a community with a priest, uncanonical but in good faith. The, perhaps, with the litigation sorted out, something might be envisaged.

Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb… One justification for having Abp Hepworth would be remaining as an independent community, perhaps in view to rebuilding and joining another Anglican jurisdiction (as I don’t think the ACA would have him!), but that doesn’t seem to be the idea.

I’m not sure what the problems are in seeing Abp Hepworth functioning as a bishop.

Is he not? Then I’ll enlighten him. The problems would be putting Rome right off the whole idea of receiving St Mary’s parish even if they were sympathetic with the priest. Would ECUSA be better disposed, or any Continuing Church, given the reputation Hepworth has earned for himself? The problem is ruining their own chances with anyone. That’s what the problems are.

If St Mary’s doesn’t have a “long term”, then why bother? Split the congregation up into individuals, and then they will be none of John Bruce’s business. Each will decide according to his or her conscience, and conscience is supreme. No story – nothing to report. Perhaps those people don’t need “leadership and spiritual counsel” but to stand on their own two feet as adults. One problem with a lot of Christians is that they want to be children! Let them sort themselves out. They might decide to pack it in with Christianity and become atheists or Buddhists. If that is what they think is right, then they should get on with it and live their lives. If Christianity is true, then they’ll get their “tweak on the thread” without any need for a guru.

It might sound unpastoral coming from me, a priest, but that is the tough reality. We all have to face tough realities and have to make our own decisions.

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