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?

Erastian Decrees

William Oddie is on particularly robust form today.  Having read Dr Oddie's latest article, the words of the late Gerald Ellison, formerly Anglican Bishop of Chester and London, come back to haunt not just Anglo-Catholics still in the Church of England, but also any Anglican who believes that the Church of England should have ability to decide its own positions. 

Now, whatever one's views on the ordination of women or indeed on any other of the topics on which General Synod likes to spend its time, and whether a Catholic, an Anglican or anything else, does anyone really think it is desirable that a religious body should have these things decided for it by politicians?  Would the most ardent Anglican proponent of the legislation to introduce women bishops want the Church of England's 30+ years of deliberations on the matter to be decided upon by a committee of politicians with, let us be fair, perhaps not the greatest understanding of theology?  Surely there is a difference between accepting a Church by Law Established and having one's theology dictated by the latest crop of politicians?

Isn't this a modern day Gorham judgment in the making?  In the post Lines in the Sand, we explained how state interference prompted Cardinal Manning to leave the Church of England for the Catholic Church, and we hinted at modern day political manoeuvrings to make sure that the Church of England decided the way that politicians wished it to decide.

It is an extraordinary co-incidence that we are talking about this issue on the eve of the 179th anniversary of John Keble's Assize Sermon, in which he protested about the then government's interference in the question of Anglican bishoprics in Ireland.  That sermon is usually cited as the beginning of the Oxford Movement, the movement in the Church of England that eventually gave rise to what we have historically referred to Anglo-Catholicism, and to a revived sense of the importance of the church (the Church of England) having control over what it said it believed, rather than the state decreeing what it believed.

In the interesting set of comments provided on our post Missing the Point (for which, dear readers, many thanks), we answered a point by motuproprio agreeing that the Trojan Horse that has led to the current situation was the Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974, which in fact sought to keep the Church of England's decisions for the Church of England.  In 1972, when still Anglican Bishop of Chester, Gerald Ellison summed up the General Synod debate on that legislation with the following words :

I think it will be generally agreed that the least qualified body to decide the doctrine of the Church of England is Parliament.

In 1974, by which time he had been translated to become the Anglican Bishop of London, he said to the February session of General Synod :

Before granting this freedom, Parliament is entitled to guarantees that the Church of England will not depart from its traditional doctrine and position.

No comment, other than to say that it shows how far things have come in 40 years.  The Church of England had to promise not to change itself, but now risks being forced to change further than even it seems to be able to agree clearly and formally that it wants.

Gerald Ellison ended his 1974 speech with these words :

It is for many of us a matter of principle that the Church is the guardian of the purity of the faith and its voice through its synods should be decisive.

How unfortunate that legislation intended to replace parliamentary "interference" ended up, mixing metaphors here, opening a Pandora's Box that would lead back to the exact same starting point.  If Dr Oddie's report is correct, then Gerald Ellison's good intentions have been squashed.  The Church of England's voice, through its synods, will not be allowed to be decisive if it doesn't decide what politicians want it to decide.  The parliamentarians are not, as seemed to be the concern in 1972, upbraiding the Church of England for departing from its traditional doctrine and position, but for quite the opposite: for trying, in however limited a way and with however limited support, to take into account theological arguments, and for trying to maintain the broad church approach in which the Church of England could try, however unsuccessfully, to be all things to all men, simultaneously holding all manner of mutually incompatible theologies in order to attempt to keep together a national church.

There is no attempt in our blogpost to argue for or against what the General Synod is debating.  That is another story, although one could certainly argue that the mind of the Church of England does seem to be relatively clear, and probably not entirely out of line with what parliament might perhaps force upon it.  No, our point is, like Dr Oddie's, that when your church has its decisions made for it on rather important matters by the state, then you really are in an Erastian environment.

As Dr Oddie said :

......an Erastian Church is ultimately a secular organisation, though one in which religion is permitted, so long as it doesn’t clash with the ethical principles which govern secular society.

How can one reconcile that with the Anglo-Catholic vision of old?  How can one reconcile that with the well-known and oft-repeated line of Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury shortly after the Second World war, that

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

Celebrity cleric Giles Fraser has also been writing recently on this heated debate, but although his article contains one or two rather naughty throwaway lines that betray either ignorance or deliberate oversight,  what he says does seem to sum up relatively accurately what is perceived to be the mind of the Church of England, that women will be anglican bishops, end of story.  Like Dr Oddie, his conclusion is that those who do not like this must either adapt and accept, or leave.

But there is no way of unifying those who think women bishops are a theological impossibility and those who think they are a theological necessity. There is no bridge here to be built. In such cases the vast majority will has to prevail.

Dr Oddie says it like this:

Anglo-Catholics need to understand clearly that there is no longer a place for them in the Church of England; they are not wanted. They have, however, an alternative, in communion with the one true Church: the ordinariate has been erected precisely for them. If they will not become part of it, they will have simply to accept that they are members of a Church with women priests and women bishops and get used to it.

We referred above to the Church of England's old habit of attempting to hold everyone together, no matter the diversity and sometimes directly contradictory beliefs.  In this context, in a succinct and powerfully direct article in the London Evening Standard this week, Melanie McDonagh talked of the endless current CofE debate as follows:

The whole thing is preposterous, and not just for unbelievers who can’t quite get their heads around the notion that this is being debated at all. The point of the C of E is that it’s recklessly inclusive, a national church that seems incapable of turning anyone away. You can have ordained Anglican clergy who believe that God was made man and born of a virgin and those who can’t quite buy the Virgin Birth. You can have bishops who believe in the Resurrection and those who believe it is true in a very real sense, ie, not at all.

I would have said once that the only thing that actually unites the Anglican communion is a belief in God but that was before the Right Rev Richard Holloway came along, the former primus of the tiny Scottish Episcopal Church, who couldn’t make his mind up about it.

And with this extraordinary latitude on the things that actually count, the one thing they’re going to make a stand on is women bishops?

Well, preposterous it might be, but it is indeed the case that whereas the Church of England could for many years manage to hold utterly incompatible views on baptismal regeneration, and, as Melanie McDonagh says, on all manner of other pretty fundamental things, it seems that there will be a three-line whip imposed to ensure very clear acceptance of women bishops.  If the CofE itself fails to come to that conclusion, then it  appears that politicians (long known for their familiarity with scripture, tradition and, ahem, reason) will reach it for them.

As Dr Oddie rightly said:

The fact is that the Anglo-Catholics who are still determined to stay in the Church of England are in an impossible situation.

There are those among them who are attempting to call out to the old broad church nature of the Church of England.  The recent Better Together campaigns points to exactly that (although having the same name as the government's campaign against Scottish independence is unfortunate).  Well, if they really mean that, all well and good, but they should note that even those usually as poles apart as William Oddie and Giles Fraser agree that those staying will be better together in a Church of England that has willingly thrown off the understanding of Anglo-Catholicism that we at least have always held, and that sees the Gospel call to Unity as subservient not to theological understanding but to the rulings of politicians.

Dr Oddie says that they should no longer call themselves Anglo-Catholics.  Well, we take a very soft approach here on this blog, as you must all surely know, and we certainly accept that "Anglo-Catholic" has many different meanings.  We will not engage in that debate, much less will we cite Damian Thompson's very forthright and typically punchy summary of these matters towards the end of a recent blogpost covering a range of issues.

However, we would just mention to our former fellow Anglicans who wish to stay in the Church of England yet who are not in favour of the likely changes, that the Better Together campaign is producing some interesting reactions.  An admittedly non-scientific survey conducted by perusing Facebook comments indicates that at least some of those who might describe themselves as liberal Anglo-Catholics, perhaps members of Affirming Catholicism, view the Better Together campaign with confusion, or with suspicion, or with a perception (which may or may not be correct, we have no idea) that it is a form of olive branch, or said more cynically, a white flag.  For them, a movement which for so long proclaimed clearly its objectives and theology is now arguing a very different line.  What they perceive is that instead of seeking to tell the rest of the Church of England what it thinks is true, as it has long done, this movement now seeks a quiet corner in which to be one strand among the many.  You can understand why they are confused.

If Erastian practice is confirmed, then just how many such strands are allowed to exist will become a rather delicate point.

What Would Dr Mascall Have Done?

One of the many subjects debated between those who have decided to join the Ordinariate and those who have not is what the late Fr X or Bishop Y would have done if they had been faced with a similar decision. 

It is, of course, impossible to come up with a definitive answer.  The circumstances are too different in most cases, and indeed the Church of England, and its Anglo-Catholic constituency, have transformed themselves dramatically.  (To be fair, the way Rome engages post Vatican II and the initial stages of ARCIC also change the analysis.)  People used to talk of corporate reunion between Canterbury and Rome, of a need to remind the Church of England that (if one accepts the theory) her rightful place is as the  historic Ecclesia Anglicana, part of the one universal Church.  Instead, people now talk about whether or not to preserve a cordonned-off space within the Church of England in which Anglo-Catholics can carry on peacefully ie a more or less catholic enclave within a Liberal Protestant church, or even about whether the Catholic Church and the Pope have the monopoly on being the Catholic Church.

None of this was properly imaginable even a generation ago.  Indeed, it is so bizarre that it barely seems imaginable even today : yet it is reality. 

Of the three most famous founding fathers of the Oxford Movement, we all know what Newman did, and perhaps Keble seems the one most likely to have understood the approach of the modern day deniers.     Pusey, well, it's true that he was not burning with enthusiasm for a ticket to Rome, but on the other hand would he have felt more positive about following his friend Newman's example if he had been a part of the Church of England as it is now, where Holy Orders are defined by majority vote?  There is quite simply no way of knowing, although one rather thinks that the scope for debate would be rather more limited if one imagines Dr Pusey having to decide between Rome and for example the US Episcopal Church as it now is.

All such debates are fun but rather futile.  To stand a chance of coming close to being able to speculate slightly more accurately on what the great figures of Anglo-Catholicism might have done, one needs to move much nearer to current times.  The most obvious example is Dr Eric Mascall, a towering figure of Anglo-Catholicism and indeed of theology in the twentieth century, who was for many years one of the clergy at St Mary's Bourne Street (the former home of the members of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group). 

Clearly, there can be no certain answer as to what Dr Mascall would have done.  While the dramatic events of 1992 and 1993 unfolded in England, he was too ill to reach a conclusion about what path he might take, and indeed he died before the first of the ordinations of women priests in the Church of England (although after the decisive vote in General Synod).  Nonetheless, Mascall is probably the nearest to us in time of those leaders of Anglo-Catholicism who died before a decision came to be necessary.  Monsignor Graham Leonard and the Rt Revd Eric Kemp both lived long enough to make their decisions, and as such they fall just this side of the dividing line : there is very little gap between the time of their decisions and the death of Mascall. 

Having had some email correspondence with Professor William Tighe on the matter, we have included below an article that he wrote for the excellent Anglo-Catholic blog in February 2010, on the 17th anniversary of Dr Mascall's death.  Many of you may have seen the article already, but fewer of you will have picked up on one of the comments, one posted by Professor Tighe himself.  The comment demonstrates just how awkward the situation is for faithful Anglo-Catholics who remain in the Church of England, as compared to the more compassionate and pastoral approach that would have been favoured by Dr Mascall.  Here is the comment, followed by the text of the original article by Professor Tighe, with thanks and acknowledgement to the Anglo-Catholic blog, where the article was first posted.

In my posting, I wrote:

"His correspondence, now in the archives of Pusey House, Oxford, contains some tense and even fraught exchanges with his old friend Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, over some of the resolutions of the 1968 Lambeth Conference, and over the Anglican-Methodist unity votes of 1969 and 1972, which the Methodists supported, as did Ramsey, but which failed to achieve the requisite majority in the Church of England’s General Synod, and which, in their final form, Mascall opposed."

When reading through Mascall's correspondence in the Pusey House archive in July 2007 I was struck by one exchange between Mascall and Ramsey in the lead-up to the 1972 vote. Ramsey had written rather vehemently to Mascall protesting the latter's eventual opposition to the scheme (Mascall had earlier joined with his fellow Anglo-Catholic Graham Leonard, and with two Evangelical Anglicans, Colin Buchanan and James Packer, to propose alterations which, if adopted, would make the scheme acceptable in their sight); evidently Mascall had expressed the view that to proceed with the union, even with the requisite two-thirds majority in the General Synod, would be inappropriate, given that to do so would make it morally necessary for a large portion of the opposed minority to separate from the Church of England, as likewise for a considerable proportion of the approximate 20% minority in the Methodist Church who opposed it. Ramsey, in reply, urged Mascall to consider how unsatisfying and absurd it would be to allow a small bitter-end rump of Protestants (or words very much to the same effect) to block the achievement of sacramental reconciliation between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, "a cause which, as you know, is as dear to my heart as it is to yours."

In his reply, Mascall acknowledged his long-standing desire for just such a reconciliation, but he went on to declare that if there were any organized and recognized body of Anglican opinion within the Church of England that could not accept the terms of such an Anglican/Catholic reconciliation, he would prefer that such a proposal be deferred, or even defeated, rather than seeing conscientious fellow-members of the Church of England being driven to leave. Mascall's reply is a vivid expression of his pastoral sensitivity — but it also related rather closely to his final apprehension that that the Church of England in particular, and "Anglicanism" more generally, was a church structure consisting of "three parties or groups 'severally holding three irreconcilable views of the nature of the Christian religion' existing alongside one another in the same church" — a logical inference from which is that until the triumph of one particular party, the one with the least scruples about treading upon tender consciences, the illiberal "Liberals," that is, in order to achieve their goals, which is what recent decades have seen among Anglicans in America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere, and more recently in England, Angican churches generally would be unable to achieve ecumenical goals of any sort without the risk and reality of fragmentation.

How times changed over the past forty years.  The General Synod in its voting record has much to learn from the charitable approach of Dr Mascall, concerned as he was to bring people along with him rather than leave a minority in an impossible position.


ARTICLE FROM THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC BLOG
DATE 14 FEBRUARY 2010
ORIGINAL TEXT CAN BE FOUND AT THIS PAGE


Eric Lionell Mascall as Anglican Patrimony

February 14, 2010 marks the seventeenth anniversary of the death of Eric Lionel Mascall, one of the great luminaries of English Anglo-Catholicism in the Twentieth Century, a man to whom his distant kinsman through marriage, Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., dedicated his admirable book, The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism in 1993 — a book of which a new edition may be in prospect — referring to Mascall in the dedication as magistro catholicae veritatis, which one might render as a “masterful teacher of catholic truth.” He would be pleased, I think, at the prospect of the “rescue mission” for elements of the “Anglican patrimony” offered in Anglicanorum Coetibus, and at the place within that patrimony which his writings will surely come to hold.

Unlike his friend Dom Gregory Dix, Mascall did not espouse an overtly “Anglo-Papalist” ecclesiological stance, but neither did he espouse an anti-papalist one such as did Austin Farrer, another one of his friends. His criticisms of some of the excesses and conundrums of a “hyper-papalist” ecclesiology in the last two chapters of his The Recovery of Unity: A Theological Approach (1958) are cogent and forceful because of their limited scope, and given his explicit acceptance of the postulates that Christ conferred a primacy over the Church and the other apostles upon St. Peter, that that primacy was transmissible to his successors, and that his successors are the Bishops of Rome. One might even claim to find in the writings of Joseph Ratzinger, now happily reigning as Benedict XVI, some of the same kinds of criticisms and reservations, and one might likewise see in Vatican II the beginning of a remedy for some of these “excesses,” while the greater “excesses” of theological revisionists have underlined the need for a magisterial authority rooted in the Tradition which it both serves and defends.

Mascall has chronicled his life in charming and full detail in Saraband: The Memoirs of E. L. Mascall, which appeared in 1992, months before his death (he once told me that his preferred subtitle was “the memoirs of a senior citizen,” as he was much taken with that American term). Briefly, here — he was born December 12, 1905, read Mathematics as a Cambridge undergraduate, taught Mathematics from 1928 to 1931, then studied for ordination, and was ordained in the Church of England in 1933. Curacies followed, then in 1937 he became Sub-Warden of Lincoln Theological College, in 1945 a don at Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1962 Professor of Historical Theology at King’s College, London, from which he retired in 1973. During his years in London he lived in a suite of rooms in the top floor of the presbytery of St. Mary’s, Bourne Street, an Anglo-Catholic “shrine church” close to Sloane Square, and he continued to live there after his retirement until ill-health necessitated his retirement to a nursing home in 1987 where he passed the remaining five years of his life in some loneliness and among mostly demented fellow patients.

I had discovered the works of Mascall on my own, as a library-haunting undergraduate at Georgetown University in the early 1970s. Later, as a graduate student at Yale I happened to read in a newspaper that he was preaching the three-hour’s devotion at the Church of the Transfiguration in Manhattan on Good Friday, and so I decided to go down to the service, and after it met him. He invited me to correspond with him, and when I told him that I would be leaving Yale for Cambridge in 1978 he invited me for tea with him at his flat.

That was for me the beginning of a long and valued acquaintanceship. In the years that I lived in Britain, 1978 to 1986, we tended to meet three or four times a year, and more often during the two years I lived in London. In subsequent summer stays in London I traveled to the nursing home in Sussex in which he lived to visit him, for the last time in August 1992, some six months before his death. Our conversation ranged through many areas, theological, historical and ecclesiastical. He gave me copies of many of his books and articles, and we discussed others. In his earlier years he had professed a robust Anglo-Catholicism, believing that the Church of England was a truly “Catholic church,” although unfortunately (in his view) separated from the mainstream of Western Catholicism by the self-interested actions of Tudor monarchs in the Sixteenth Century, and the subservience to them of Archbishop Cranmer (for whom he expressed to me more than once a thorough detestation), and although interested in contemporary Roman Catholic theology, had many lively and ongoing contacts with the Orthodox world through the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, of which he had been “present a the creation” in 1927 and in which he was to be active for over sixty years, but by the time that I met him his confidence in the tenability of such a view had weakened.

There were various reasons for this. One was what he saw as the remarkable “opening” of the Roman Catholic Church to ecumenical activities, discussion and hospitality — a hospitality he personally enjoyed in various Catholic venues in Rome, Europe and America from the late 1960s onwards. He had a strong admiration for Pope Paul VI, an admiration that seems to have been reciprocal, and as one who, as he told me, had always thought the 1930 Lambeth Conference’s acceptance of the practice of contraception an error, he was a strong supporter of that pope’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. Secondly, he had come to believe since around 1968 and in connection with that year’s Lambeth Conference, that the Anglican Communion was becoming more and more “unprincipled” in its ecumenical dealings with other Christian traditions, and more tolerant than was wise of heterodox theologians and their theologies. His correspondence, now in the archives of Pusey House, Oxford, contains some tense and even fraught exchanges with his old friend Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, over some of the resolutions of the 1968 Lambeth Conference, and over the Anglican-Methodist unity votes of 1969 and 1972, which the Methodists supported, as did Ramsey, but which failed to achieve the requisite majority in the Church of England’s General Synod, and which, in their final form, Mascall opposed. Thirdly, he was an “impossibilist” on the ordination of women, at least to the priesthood and episcopate (I never heard him express an opinion on the ordination of women to the diaconate) and felt that to “ordain” women destroyed the credibility of the “Catholic claims” of any church body that did so.

From the 1960s onwards his more “polemical” books, such as The Secularization of Christianity (1965), Theology and the Gospel of Christ (1977) and Whatever Happened to the Human Mind (1980) — none of which dealt solely, or even mostly, with matters of Anglican concern — reflected this concern with “things gone awry.” His final unpublished book manuscript, now in the Pusey House archives, which seems to date from about 1985 and had the title The Overarching Question: Divine Revelation or Human Invention, is, like these other works, not primarily Anglican in its focus, but has a final chapter, “And Anglicanism Whither?,” in which he attacks both the synodical structures of modern Anglican churches, in which truth is “created” by legislative-assembly-style votes, as with the “ordination” of women, and the inability of successive Lambeth Conferences to exercise the type of authority which he believed was inherent in the episcopate as understood by Catholics. In what seems to have been remnants of an earlier draft version of the book he attacked the Anglican theory of “comprehensiveness” and the related idea that it was the glory of the Church of England and Anglicanism generally that it possessed three “schools of thought,” the “catholic,” the “evangelical,” and the “liberal,” each one of which embraced a part of the truth but each of which needed the others to “complement” and “balance” it — he saw it rather as an administrative devise or plausible fiction to conceal the fact of three parties or groups “severally holding three irreconcilable views of the nature of the Christian religion” existing alongside one another in the same church; and in it he went on to criticize what he saw as a return of a form of the Anglican “Liberal Catholicism” of the 1920s and 30s, in which a “magisterium” of academic scholars would be the ultimate arbiters of Christian Truth and Church Tradition.

On my final visit to Mascall in August 1992 I found him visibly and emotionally upset in a way that I had never previously experienced. The Women’s Ordination (Priesthood) Bill was to come up for its final vote in November of that year — it squeaked by the necessary two-thirds majority by only two votes, the votes of Evangelical laymen who changed their minds (or at least their votes) in response to the emotional pleas in favor of the bill by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey — and he was alarmed a the prospect. “I know what I shall have to do if the bill passes,” he said to me, “but I don’t know if I shall have the strength and health to do it. I hope I die first.” I didn’t dare to ask him what “it” was, and he did die first: the General Synod did approve the measure in November 1992, but the passage of the legislation through Parliament subsequently, and the “Act of Synod” providing compensation for those opponents of women’s ordination who would feel compelled to leave the church, and a scheme of Provincial Episcopal Visitors (or “flying bishops”) for those who wished to remain in the Church of England — a scheme now evidently to be withdrawn and terminated in connection with the legislation to allow women bishops — ensured that the measure did not come into legal effect until February 1994, a year after Mascall’s death.

What would he have decided? After his death I made some attempts to contact the executor of his will, listed in his obituary in The Times as “Col. Robert Gould,” but to no avail. A friend of mine inquired some years ago of the recently-deceased former Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp (1915-2009), a friend of Mascall’s, who in his memoirs said that in the unlikely event that he would ever feel compelled to leave the Church of England he would become Orthodox, who replied that he thought he would become Orthodox. Another friend made the same inquiry of the late Msgr. Graham Leonard (1923-2010), a former Bishop of London who became a Catholic in 1994, and likewise a friend of Mascall, who responded that he was sure that he would have become a Catholic. Then a chance telephone conversation with a friend led to another with a colleague of that friend, who identified “Col. Robert Gould” as in fact “Fr. Robert Gould,” a man who in his youth had been a colonel in the “territorial army” (the British equivalent of the National Guard), had then been ordained in the Church of England, served as a priest in it for many years, until he had become a Catholic at the time of Mascall’s death, and had resumed the use of the “courtesy title” of colonel until his subsequent ordination in the Catholic Church. I was given Fr. Gould’s telephone number at the retirement home in which he lived, and in subsequent conversations with him learned that Mascall, whose confessor Fr. Gould had been, had after much agonizing come to the conclusion that he would have to leave the Church of England if the legislation should pass — but that by the time it did pass his advancing debilitation had reached such a state that he concluded that he did not have the mental faculties to make such a decision. At the end, though, it seems that he was a Catholic in desire if not in fact. We should remember him today, and on this day, as someone whose thought, writings — and lived experience — forms a bright tessera in the mosaic of the Anglican patrimony that is moving towards reconstitution within the Catholic Church. Perhaps he might one day be a candidate for canonization, a suggestion made recently concerning Edward Bouverie Pusey, as one of the earthly inspirers and heavenly patrons of this movement.