A New Direction

There were a couple of surprises in the recent edition of New Directions, the magazine of Forward in Faith.  Many of the articles were interesting and good (the famous Davage writing style is always a treat to read), a hallmark of New Directions over many years, but there was some of the magazine that took me rather aback.

In the magazine, a prominent Anglo-Catholic was asked who his favourite historic figure was.  The reply: "Dr Pusey".  Anyone with an Anglo-Catholic background and/or a connection with Pusey House will be able to reflect thoughtfully on that, indeed I have prints of Dr Pusey and Blessed John Henry Newman side by side on my wall at home.  However, the reason for his choice was rather striking.  It was "Because he stayed in the Church of England".  I suppose we can take it that the interviewee is not a great devotee of Blessed John Henry Newman.

Has the mask of the modern Anglo-Catholic slipped?  Is there not even the slightest pretence any more of a shared goal of corporate reunion, something that seemed so important when Blessed John Paul II knelt beside Robert Runcie, then Archbishop of Canterbury, in Canterbury Cathedral?  Is the goal to remain in the Church of England, come what may, and if so, what on earth has all the fuss in General Synod been about, why not just sit quietly in a congregationalist bubble and let everyone else get on with what they wish to do?

Even Dr Pusey himself, in Eirenicon, a publication in which he outlined many of what he perceived to be faults and errors of the Catholic Church, was in fact arguing for a reunion of Catholic Christendom.  His old friend Blessed John Henry Newman, whom shortly before publication Pusey had met for the first time in 20 years, acknowledged as much in a letter to Pusey, in spite of Eirenicon's criticisms :

you discharge your olive branch as from a catapult.

Of course, I am being terribly unfair.  I should put my own Puseyite catapult away.  It was probably a rather tongue-in-cheek comment, in the context of a friendly and jovial discussion at which none of us was present.  We cannot assume that this means we should translate "Better Together" as meaning "Better Together away from the Catholic Church".  Still, I wonder if there is not some small kernel of truth in the analysis as it at first seems to be.   Dr Geoffrey Kirk, a former regular contributor to New Directions in his days as Secretary of Forward in Faith, and one of the newest members of the Ordinariate, put it rather more eloquently than I have, and perhaps rather more bluntly too, talking of Anglo-Catholic leaders who, notwithstanding all that is happening around them, carry on regardless, thereby allowing others to believe all is well :

This ignominious ending to a long and hard-fought campaign is properly a cause of grief and shame. Shame, because it is a betrayal of the entire Catholic movement – of Keble as well as Newman, of Pusey as well as Froude. Grief, because it has exposed a fault-line which, in our generous optimism, many of us supposed not to be there. When Benedict XVI called their bluff, men whose rallying cry had been ‘Look to the Rock from which we are hewn!’ looked the other way. When the life-boat was launched, they complained about its colour. They claimed to act out of affection for the Church of their baptism and ordination. Tragically that is a demonstration of loyalty which, in the course of time, the Church of England will discover that it can well do without.

It may simply be that there is, even among Anglo-Catholics, a residual, irrational, atavistic anti-Romanism which the passage of time has not been able to erode. But I think there is a deeper and more disturbing explanation for this sorry state of affairs.

A characteristic of modern Anglicanism, of all parties and opinions, has been creeping indifferentism. In increasing numbers people have concluded that doctrine does not matter – that it is merely ‘theological’, in the Harold Wilson sense of abstruse and irrelevant. How vividly I remember Dennis Nineham celebrating in the college chapel in a chasuble bought by Austin Farrer, behaving for all the world as though he believed in the Real Presence, when he did not even believe in the Incarnation. And I wondered what John Keble would have made of that.

The old argument was that the Church of England maintained the same historic teachings and traditions as the wider Church.  It was said that there were no differences, even if some work was necessary to make sure that all in the Church of England might come to share this understanding.  As Cardinal Kaspar suggested, since the latter half of the twentieth century, the Church of England has changed its approach from a period just after the second world war when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, could say

The Church of England has no doctrine of its own, save that of the one Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church.

to a time when Holy Order can be redefined with no reference to the Churches of the first millenium.

The Church of England is of course perfectly entitled to take this approach, and people are perfectly entitled to remain in the Church of England whatever its decisions might be.  Nobody argues the contrary.  There are those who say that the Church of England, as part of the Church Catholic (note the order of the words used), should not take such decisions alone, but the fact is that it does.  A leading proponent of the ordination of women to the Anglican episcopacy, Erika Baker, has said :

I still don't understand why those who are deliberately members of the CoE suddenly claim that it isn't the church ...... when they don't like its decisions. Yes, there are those who believe that the CoE doesn't have the power to make this decision.  But the CoE disagrees and it has made that decision and it has had women as priests for a long long time now.

She's right.  If you believe that the Church of England is the Church, and that it does not need to have its decisions approved by Rome or Constantinople, then it doesn't make sense to say that the Church of England isn't the Church on the occasions it reaches a conclusion other than one that matches your own opinion.

Certainly, there is nothing wrong with those who are Anglicans wishing to remain Anglicans.  It is their choice, and we as former Anglicans who remained in the Church of England for many years are in no position to criticise that decision.  However, the pretence that nothing has changed (or that nothing is about to change) is wilful blindness.  The line that Dr Fisher took (and we all know that he was not exacly ablaze with Roman Fever) cannot now be uttered other than in wistful nostalgia.

What has happened (or is in the process of happening) is not Catholic at all.  It is not even what one might call Anglo-Catholic.  Part of the great argument for Anglo-Catholicism, for the branch theory, for the Church of England being part of the one universal Church, separated by mere accident of history (ie Tudor politics and Dr Cranmer's subservience), was that the absence of full unity with the wider Church of East and West, while something to be resolved one day in the future (preferably by someone else), did not diminish the Church of England’s self sufficiency. Each individual diocese was the Church in that area, and the resultant disparate nature of the wider entity was not perceived as a problem sufficient to alter the Church of England's historic role as the Catholic Church in this land, a Church that held on to the Catholic Faith as it always had done (even if that last part required considerable intellectual gymnastics to prove it to any degree).

In Tract 90, Blessed John Henry Newman, while still an Anglican (although Tract 90 became a turning point in his process of seeking reception into the Catholic Church), expressed it as follows

The Anglican view of the church has ever been this: that its portions need not otherwise have been united together for their essential completeness, than as being descended from one original. . . . Each church is independent of all the rest. . . . Each diocese is a perfect independent church, is sufficient for itself.

[the]….Bishop of Rome, the head of the Catholic world……. is not the centre of unity

[the Anglican church is]….. essentially complete without Rome

Newman, as we all know, came to realise the error of his ways and to see that this image of a fractured, broken, dismantled Church is not the one to which we should seek to aspire, and is the vision neither of the Gospel nor of the Fathers of the Church. By the time Newman wrote the Apologia, not only had he very much changed his views on the Bishop of Rome, but he also now attached the most tremendous importance to unity (he perhaps realised that to agonise about the accidence and essence of the status of the Petrine Ministry, as he had in Tract 90, was as a mote to the plank of ignoring the Gospel imperative of Unity) :

The Anglican disputant took his stand upon antiquity or apostolicity, the Roman upon catholicity. The Anglican said to the Roman: “There is but One Faith, the ancient, and you have not kept to it”; the Roman retorted: “There is but one Church, the Catholic, and you are out of it.”

How strange it now seems that nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic arguments were that Rome innovated whereas Anglicanism held firm to the Faith.   Newman himself commented on this in May 1843:

At present I fear, as far as I can analyze my own convictions, I consider the Roman Catholic Communion to be the Church of the Apostles, and that what grace is among us (which, through God's mercy, is not little) is extraordinary, and from the overflowings of His dispensation. I am very far more sure that England is in schism, than that the Roman additions to the Primitive Creed may not be developments, arising out of a keen and vivid realizing of the Divine Depositum of Faith.

Well, General Synod no longer takes its stand upon antiquity or apostolicity.  Even Newman's Tract 90 arguments cannot now be used : Newman's Tract 90 views as an Anglican depended on a shared

possession of the Succession, their Episcopal form, their Apostolical faith, and the use of the Sacraments.

When that has gone, what is left may be wonderful, it may do huge amounts of good, it may be treasured and loved, it may be run by the most kindly and charitable of people, it may even, through the overflowings of His dispensation be filled with not little grace, but it pays no heed to Christ's prayer for Unity.  What's more, this isolationist strategy is adopted for the sake of "second order issues".

In a stunning sermon given during the celebrations held to mark the 125th Anniversary of Pusey House, Canon Robin Ward, the Principal of St Stephen's House, reminded us that Blessed Pius IX had told Dr Pusey that he was like a bell summoning people to church but never entering it himself; Dr Ward went on to wonder whether Anglo-Catholicism might not be able to hope for a better future than that, now that the Church of England with its two integrities was coming to an end. 

What Dr Pusey sought was a recovery of the Catholic nature of the Church of England.  It was the Catholicism of the Church of England that interested him, not primarily its Anglicanism.  If he had lived to see a day when the Church of England's Anglicanism led it to harm what he argued was its Catholic nature, one has to wonder if he really would have "stayed in the Church of England".

As a matter of fact of course, Dr Pusey did stay in the Church of England, but it is very bold to take a nineteenth-century decision made in a nineteenth-century context as being conclusive proof of what he might have thought today.  As we have argued before in an article on Dr Eric Mascall, it is impossible to conclude what the heroes of Anglo-Catholicism might have done had they found themselves facing the current situation. 

The other surprise for me in New Directions was an article by Dr Philip North.  In it, he talked of explaining to some evangelical Anglican clergy (who have taken over the running of a beautiful Anglo-Catholic parish church that has fallen on hard times) what his understanding was of the Mass, of Eucharistic theology, of the Real Presence.  He reported that some of the evangelical clergy had started to "say mass" and had been immensely moved by his no doubt utterly sound descriptions.  It reminded me of the diametrically opposed and mutually incompatible views that can be held in the Church of England, and I'm afraid it rather brought to mind the Nineham phenomenon to which Dr Kirk refers above.

I thought further on this on Sunday, during an excellent homily on the Real Presence, the Bread of Life, from Fr Colven at Mass in St James's.  During the homily, he recounted an anecdote he feared he might have told before (I don't recall it) about an elderly nun that he visits once a month. 

This nun was raised in the West Country, with no religious upbringing whatsoever.  At the age of 16, she and a friend decided that it would be the right thing to seek confirmation, so off they went to the Anglican Vicar.  This holy, kindly and erudite man taught them much.  Before one confirmation class, the future nun's friend urged her companion to ask if they would be required to believe in transubstantiation.  The nun-to-be, having no idea what this was, willingly asked the Vicar. 

This learned cleric proceeded to give her a clear and indeed utterly sound explanation of transubstantiation, of the Real Presence, of what happens during the Mass.  It was impressive and affecting.

He then said that as Anglicans they were entirely free to believe that or not.

His explanation had been so lucid and so powerful that the young woman was very moved by what she had learned.  However, it struck her that, quite simply, what she had been told was either true or it was not, and if it was true, it was a most tremendous truth and of the utmost importance.  She became a Catholic.

Some would perhaps argue that those discussions with the Evangelicals were about catholicising the Church of England, carrying on the work of the Oxford Movement.  If anyone were to argue that, then it would seem, to me at least, to display a rather extraordinary degree of optimism on their part.

Among the musical offerings at St James's on Sunday, we had Esquivel's beautiful Ego Sum Panis Vivus, which was often heard at Bourne St, as well as Tallis O Nata Lux, a fine piece of English Catholic music (we cannot claim it as Anglican patrimony). 



The setting of the ordinary of the Mass was new to me, being the Missa Fac Bonum by the German baroque composer Valentin Rathgeber (the Agnus Dei of which reminded me very much of the theme music from the television series of Brideshead Revisited).  The Gloria of the mass setting is shown below, accompanied by some very improving images. 



As the post-Mass hymn we had a true favourite of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group, O Bread of Heaven, eminently suitable to accompany the readings at Mass and Fr Colven's homily.  Although this hymn has featured many times on this blog before, including in our article Catholic Treasure, Anglican Patrimony, we make no apology for its reappearance, because we share the view of that elderly nun that what St Alphonsus Liguori's hymn speaks of is indeed a most tremendous truth. 

The Sacrament of Unity indeed.  O may we all one bread, one body be.  Let us hope, as Dr Ward dared to do, for a better future for the vision of Dr Pusey and of the Oxford Movement than one limited by a test of whether its inheritors can hold fast to the Church of England, come what may. 

Even Wilfred Knox, a prominent Anglo-Catholic in the early twentieth century, and who unlike his more famous brother Monsignor Ronald Knox did not become a Catholic, included a sentence in the preface to his book The Catholic Movement in the Church of England that seems far from a goal of holding fast, come what may :

It is possible that I shall be accused of a lack of loyalty to the distinctive position of the Church of England. But if in being loyal to the teaching of the Church Catholic I am disloyal to the Church of England, I fear that I shall bear the reproach with equanimity.

We leave the final word to the famous Fr Davage, whom we mentioned at the beginning of this post.  Here is his conclusion from a lecture he gave in Bristol in 2009, entitled "Edward Bouverie Pusey : Post Reformation Saint?" :

........we are invited in this series to consider Dr Pusey as a Post-Reformation Saint. John Henry Newman is poised for beatification and possibly canonisation. Even if we forget about the process and the miracles for a moment, there is something right about that because Newman spent half his life as an Anglican and half as a Roman Catholic. He represents one vital strain of Anglo-Catholicism. Keble and Pusey represent another strain, and [in] the recent papal offer of an Ordinariate that respects and values an Anglican, and more specifically, an Anglo-Catholic patrimony, they would be candidates for admission to the saintly band and could share with Newman a patronage and saintly oversight, joined in heaven as they were in the life of the Oxford Movement. Until that day dawns, perhaps our last image should be of those three profoundly great and holy men dining alone in Hursley Vicarage on the one occasion that they met after Newman’s conversion: Keble at seventy-three, Pusey at sixty-five, Newman at sixty-four, not quite all passion spent. Three elderly clerical gentlemen who had met at Oxford, "the fulcrum from which [they] … hoped to move the Church," together after twenty years. Keble had only one more year to live, Pusey seventeen, Newman twenty-five. The shadows are lengthening, the candles are guttering, the tempest and turmoil of the battle has stilled for a moment as they talk and reminisce quietly and easily. We can only hear the murmuring of voices as we back silently out of the room and quietly close the door: ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem (out of the shadows and images into truth).

O Bread of Heaven, beneath this veil
Thou dost my very God conceal:
My Jesus, dearest treasure, hail!
I love Thee and, adoring, kneel;
Each loving soul by Thee is fed
With Thine own Self in form of Bread.

O food of life, Thou Who dost give
The pledge of immortality;
I live, no 'tis not I that live;
God gives me life, God lives in me:
He feeds my soul, He guides my ways,
And every grief with joy repays.

O Bond of love that dost unite
The servant to his living Lord;
Could I dare live and not requite
Such love - then death were meet reward:
I cannot live unless to prove
Some love for such unmeasured love.

Beloved Lord, in Heaven above
There, Jesus, Thou awaitest me,
To gaze on Thee with endless love;
Yes, thus I hope, thus shall it be:
For how can He deny me Heaven,
Who here on earth Himself hath given?

Contrasting Definitions

Time, indeed like an ever rolling stream, has appeared to go quickly since we became Catholics.  A year ago, we were in our final month at Bourne St, preparing to leave the Church of England and our status as Anglicans.  We were embarking upon a eucharistic fast that was to last several months, in preparation for our eventual reception into the Catholic Church in early September.  It was appropriate that one of the last services we attended as Anglicans was the Bourne Street Corpus Christi devotion, in which we could give thanks for all the grace that had been poured out upon us in our time there.  Bourne Street always marks the Sunday following Corpus Christi with the grandest of services, greenery and herbs strewn on the floor during a procession, and of course some very fine music.  We wish our friends there well for their celebrations tonight. 

At St James's we mark Corpus Christi today with a Procession of the Blessed Sacrament after Mass.  We look forward to welcoming Fr Christopher Pearson of the Ordinariate as guest preacher.

That Bourne Street service last year was the final occasion upon which I served as an Anglican, acting as MC at a service of Evensong, Procession and Benediction.  How apt that the first time that I should serve at the altar as a Catholic should also be for the same form of service and in the same capacity.  Below you will see a couple of pictures of the Catholic service at which I served, the Ordinariate Anniversary at St James's, followed by a couple of pictures from Bourne St. 

You will see why we for us the progression seems entirely natural and normal.  Very much a continuation of the same, but crucially, now in communion with the Successor of St Peter.  A couple of pictures from the Bourne St archive now follow, giving a further indication of the reverence with which Corpus Christi has been treated in Anglo-Catholicism.  The first picture is from 2011, the second from c1995.

Our memories of those happy days have not flown, forgotten as a dream, but are very much fresh (all these Isaac Watts quotations were not intended to link with the mention of St Anne in our previous post, but do so quite nicely).  While in many ways so much has happened over this year, some of which has been recounted on this blog, in other ways we consider that what has happened was nothing more than the natural outcome for us, given the way we had understood Anglo-Catholicism.  There was a predictability, perhaps even in some ways an inevitability about what has happened, even if not about the way it has been allowed to happen, through the graciousness of Anglicanorum coetibus. 

Now, more than ever, it has become very clear that there was no one definition of what people understood by Anglo-Catholicism.  There had always been a wide range of sub-groups, that themselves could either be virtually entirely in line with the teachings of the Catholic Church, or in reality quite far from them in some important ways.  High Church Anglicanism and Anglo-Papalism are but two of the most long-established terms, but even there the difference is clear.

Over the past 20-30 years, the picture has become even more confused.  Movements such as Affirming Catholicism have sprung up, which happily absorb much of the liturgical and sartorial practice of the Catholic Church, while adopting an approach to moral teaching that is not based on the Catechism but on what people feel - quite genuinely - to be right and good.  It's the same old debate about there being a Truth that has been revealed, and is interpreted afresh in each generation, or there being an ongoing series of revelations in which the Truth today is not the same as the Truth yesterday (and indeed even today there can be multiple Truths, some of which can contradict each other).  We touched on this topic in this recent and widely-read post.  Anglo-Catholics of a more traditional outlook were sometimes prone to using the odd slightly unkind nickname for Affirming Catholics, the more printable of which include AffCaths and indeed De-Caffs.  However, the same naughtiness was shown in return, with Forward in Faith and its quasi-predecessor Cost of Conscience having been unkindly labelled Backwards in Bitterness and Price of Prejudice respectively.

That debate continues with Anglo-Catholicism.  With the departure of many to the Ordinariate, and the seeming acceptance of the changes likely to emerge from this summer's General Synod, the overall theme of Anglo-Catholicism seems to be shifting.  The debates on the approach to moral teaching will remain, but there now seems to be a view that the primary object of Anglo-Catholicism is not [to act]..in defence of Catholic Truth and...[to labour for]...the Reunion of Christendom, (as the words on the memorial to Lord Halifax say, see the photo in this post) but rather to be one of a number of contrasting strands of Christianity that should co-exist within the Church of England, even if the teachings of those strands are in some very signficant ways utterly incompatible.  The new Anglo-Catholicism now seems to be moving towards saying that if corporate reunion with the Roman Church were to come along, that would be lovely, but only if Rome moves on a number of significant matters, because Rome cannot expect to dictate to the Church of England the terms on which any such corporate reunion would take place. 

Perhaps this was obviously going to be the case.    The people who felt more of a draw to Rome and the Catholic Church have left or are very seriously considering leaving: yet this is not a new trend.  Yes, there have the departures since the 1990s, and indeed since the Ordinariate, but ever since Anglo-Catholicism began (in the sense we understand it arising from the Oxford Movement), there has always been a steady flow over the Tiber, even before the moment that Blessed John Henry Newman concluded that his eloquent and impressive arguments about the catholic nature of the Church of England, written while still an Anglican, did not stand up to the reality of the day (see here for details of where Newman drew his line in the sand, it being, to mix metaphors, a final straw at the end of a long process).

Newman's Tract 90, in which he argued that the 39 Articles of the Book of Common Prayer were not an attack on Catholic theology but rather an attempt to limit excesses, caused a great stir.  In response to protests from (Anglican clerics who were) senior in the University of Oxford (including Archibald Campbell Tait, mentioned so prominently in our most popular ever post) the Anglican Bishop of Oxford requested that there not be a Tract 91, and neither there was.  Tract 90 was published in 1841, just before Newman's withdrawal to Littlemore in 1842, from where he was received into the Catholic Church by Blessed Dominic Barbieri in October 1845.

Anglo-Catholics still cite Tract 90 today in defence of the great Anglo-Catholic vision of old, but given what is happening around them, one wonders if they can really continue to do so for much longer, at least in respect of the Church of England as it is today.  The drive of the Tracts for the Times, particularly Tract 90, was to show the Church of England as ecclesiastically catholic rather than protestant, ie that it was in tune with the teachings of the Catholic Faith.  As we mentioned a week or two ago, Geoffrey Fisher, a recent Archbishop of Canterbury summed this view up in the following way, just after the second world war.

The Church of England has no doctrine of its own, save that of the one Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church.

When we quoted this recently, a comment on that blogpost was picked up upon by the excellent Let Nothing You Dismay blog.  There, the author pointed out

Although the idea of a synodical structure which would allow the laity, clergy and episcopate an opportunity to deliberate together on the issues facing the contemporary Church is (in theory) a laudable one, it has proved disastrous in practice. And this has been, not only because of the adoption of a quasi-parliamentary 'democratic model which has given the politicisation of church life a focus and an official platform, but because within Anglicanism there is no consensus as to what constitutes the authentic tradition.

Archbishop Fisher's comments about the Church of England having no doctrine which is not that of the catholic church are often seized upon by people like me, but the truth is that, however authoritatively they were expressed, they remain just the views of one Archbishop of Canterbury among many; they may have been an accurate snapshot of the consensus at the time within the Church, but are they any more than that? It's instructive that his comment was made just before the then established consensus (perhaps the high water mark of Tractarian influence within Anglicanism, going far beyond those who would identify themselves as 'Catholics') was about to fall apart.

As usual, the LNYD blog is spot on.  You cannot argue for the catholicity of the Church of England now (I make no comment about the past, nor do I make any comment about orders, which is an entirely different point) without addressing the issue of the change of direction.  You cannot logically argue using Tract 90 without volunteering to write a Tract 91, arguing the impossible, that everything that is now happening in the Church of England will not change the catholic vs protestant analysis that so obsessed the Tractarians who gave rise to what we call Anglo-Catholicism.

So in the CofE for those Anglo-Catholics who stay, change is required.  You can see this even from the wording of the statement issued by the Forward in Faith bishops last week. 

.....we must say something about diversity. At the heart of our theological tradition is an acceptance that the Church of England is enriched by the range of viewpoints within its spectrum. We are committed to the recognition of this diversity and to the liberty that protects it. Of course, the defence of liberty is one of the functions of justice and law, of which the monarch is guardian and symbol.

Really?  Diversity, with mutually incompatible theologies, is that a good thing?   Of course, this phenomenon is not new in the Church of England, but it has not always been seen as a strength of Anglicanism.  It seems there is no longer the attempt to catholicise or re-catholicise the Church of England, but that diversity of opinion,  Anglo-Catholic (of whatever hue) and protestant is good.  Well, here we come back to what we think we mean by saying "the Church", or even "the Catholic Church".  

The Forward in Faith bishops go on to say:

.....our search for unity will commit us to continuing engagement with the ARCIC process and dialogue with the Orthodox Churches.

So there you have it.  Anglicanorum coetibus is not on the agenda, the outcome of July's General Synod is irrelevant.  Christian Unity for the Forward in Faith bishops is the ARCIC process and the Orthodox (who, as we have noted before, do not think in the least bit favourably of the current Anglican changes).  That means it is not a high priority for them.  In the words of the Anglican Archbishop of New Zealand after the end of the recent ARCIC talks in Hong Kong:

There seem to be many obstacles from a human point of view, and it does not seem likely to have fully visible unity in the near future

Diversity constituted by incompatible theologies, and what risks appearing as institutional loyalty (however much any of us love our view of what the CofE is or has been) at the expense of a clear impetus towards unity, those are not goals for which any of us in the Marylebone group could have ignored this gracious call to Unity issued by Pope Benedict.

For us, it is sad to note this seemingly different approach.  However, we must acknowledge that it is only sad because it relates to our vision of what Anglo-Catholicism was all about.  We had always seen the Church of England as being part of the Church, but being in impaired communion, we had viewed the Catholic Church as being the rock from which....[the Church of England was]...hewn, we had seen ourselves as being separated by accident of history.  We had never seen the Church of England as a standalone entity in which we could seek to maintain a strand of catholicism.

So while it may all be rather sad for us, the changes may be positive and welcome for others.  The word Anglo-Catholicism has never meant just one thing, and the Anglo-Catholic movement has never had one single goal upon which all its adherents agreed.

Let us move back to Corpus Christi. Here are two contrasting pieces of music to prepare us for today.  First, some Tallis, and then another appearance from Frank Patterson.