Journeys in Anglo-Catholicism

My current dilatory researches into Guildford Anglo-Catholicism led me to this snippet of footage from the 1920 Anglo-Catholic Congress in London, which I’d somehow never seen before. There’s a splendid parade of mitres on show here, not least the gigantic cranial rocket sported by Bishop Mowbray O’Rorke, visible a second or two from the end.

The hardline Anglo-Papalists held somewhat aloof even from the Congresses of the 1920s and 1930s, which were never quite extreme enough for them. ‘Modernism is the problem, Rome is the remedy’, they were once fond of saying. I never really felt that, and while the Papalists’ concerns for Union with Rome is now read as a sort of ecumenism, which it wasn’t, so many of their hopes and fears seem a long, long way in the past now.

So do a lot of my own early enthusiasms. I was led to my conversion by the imagery and spirituality of the Middle Ages (among other things) and so it was the version of Anglo-Catholicism that stressed the Church of England’s continuity with its medieval identity that captured my imagination. While reading up on holy wells years and years ago I came across Fr Herbert Dale’s history of St Leonard’s, Hythe, whose chapter on the Reformation is titled ‘The Schism of the Romanists’, as though it was the Catholic Church that broke away from the CofE rather than the other way around. I was not so far gone as not to see the humour in that, but there was a naughty part of me that found it rather thrilling.

It was somewhat to my surprise that I ended up concluding while I was at Lamford that Roman vestments and birettas were rather smart. Il Rettore insisted I would soon get fed up with trad-albs and amices, but I haven’t and now regard them as a way of maintaining my faltering links with the trad-Catholics who are my friends.

The links – not so much with my friends, but with trad-Anglo-Catholicism – falter because I care remarkably little about the things I used to, and the things that animated earlier generations of my spiritual forebears. Authority was what haunted them, and what drove Newman towards his own crossing the Tiber: the search for certainty and security, something that might be conceived in intellectual terms, but which is rooted deeper in the human soul. I have spent my time in Christian communities which have come from traditional Anglo-Catholicism, but which have long ceased to understand it beyond a certain sort of worship that they know they prefer to others, and in the process of trying to interpret and explain things that people no longer understand, to translate Catholicism into terms that they can grasp, the instinctive appeal of authority and continuity has faded far into the background. What is authority in a Christian body for? What is the worth of continuity? I eventually decided that the point is not to defend an ancient deposit of ‘faith once delivered to the saints’, because it is clear enough – as even Newman concluded once he’d been a Roman Catholic a while – that we grow towards understanding God, not begin with an eternal understanding which we are constantly in danger of losing and which only the right structures can defend. It is instead about community, about maintaining the conditions for the discernment of God’s will and the training of souls in holiness to take place.

The business of actually living in a Christian community with its struggles and joys brings other priorities. Living the spiritual life seems to have little to do with who consecrated your bishop: the real meat of Christian existence is prayer, service, charity and holiness, the work of the Spirit. The Spirit flows through the Body of Christ like electricity, and he doesn’t seem to need particular patterns of wiring in order to work: he can act in the unlikeliest of places. Like the Spirit, God’s absolute and final self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth is ultimately independent of our ecclesial structures.

But not completely separate from them. I remain enough of a Catholic to remember that it was the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church that established the canon of Scripture; that developed its life of prayer and worship; that leads it into all truth. These things have to be done in community, in fellowship with the Body of Christ: we interpret them together, we develop interpretations of what we do together. Anything that disturbs this fellowship is a danger, and schism is a terrible sin. But it is primarily a sin against charity rather than truth, and while it stands the risk of obscuring our sight of God, it never quite hides it, and he works to re-establish it.

My differences with my Church are well-rehearsed enough, but along with seeing its own failings I see more clearly those of its rivals. Though I may sniff at the sayings and doings of the Primate of All England, I have never been so far away from breaking communion with him!