Eternal City Limits

When the Rt Rev Jonathan Baker, Bishop of Fulham, was just Fr Jonathan, vicar of Holy Trinity Reading, he was the first person I was taken to by my then vicar (who’d been at college with him) to discuss my sense of vocation. His main bit of advice was for me to begin praying the Office, which I have dutifully passed on to the enquirers who come and speak to me!

We all ribbed Fr Thesis of the West End when he revealed on LiberFaciorum that, led by Bishop Jonathan, he and the clergy of the trad-Cath Fulham Episcopal Area were going to Rome for their clergy conference. Many priests shared the less glamorous locations of their own conferences; ‘In Guildford Diocese’, I commented, ‘we say that all roads lead to Swanwick’ (but at least Swanwick isn’t Butlins). Little did anyone realise that the trip would result in an ecclesiastical row that had nothing to do with its intrinsic merits but the circumstances of a particular act of worship.

Even I was somewhat astonished to see photographs of Bishop Jonathan celebrating mass for the Anglican party in the basilica of St John Lateran. Now, St Peter’s in the Vatican may be the Pope’s own chapel, but St John’s is the cathedral of the diocese of Rome itself, and in terms of significance and seniority it outranks any other church in the city. Nobody seems to want to be very explicit about how an Anglican bishop came to be presiding over the Eucharist at its main altar, but it wasn’t some kind of guerilla service in which the Fulham clergy ran in with their kit in black holdalls, hurriedly set it all up, and rattled out a mass without asking: it seems to have been done with the full knowledge of the Lateran chapter. To normal, non-churchy people, it would be baffling to have any problem with this, but not if you’re a conservative Roman Catholic for whom Anglicans are at the very best well-meaning heretics whose sacraments are invalid, and at worst deluded deceivers whose services are snares and traps for the unwary soul. To have an Anglican bishop – if you can describe him as such, rather than a man dressed as a bishop – carrying out a pretended mass in the very heart of the Catholic Church mocks the truth, to them. From the photographs of the service you can't easily see that it's taking place in a roped-off area of the cathedral so that no Catholics in communion with the See of Rome might wander in, accidentally take communion, and endanger their immortal souls.

Who was responsible for this appalling event? The day after it took place and Twitter went ballistic the Lateran Chapter issued an abject apology blaming ‘a breakdown in communication’. Presumably they simply didn’t enquire very deeply as to who this group of clergy were: they were, of course, all male, and the presence of a female or two would have given the game away. Fr Jeffrey here in Swanvale Halt hadn’t heard of the fuss, but he could see how it might have happened: ‘In Italy nobody understands what Anglicans are’ (rather the same as in England, then). There are photos of Bishop Jonathan by the side of Pope Francis in St Peter’s Square, and again, you can excuse the Pontiff for not investigating when he gets photobombed by a random character in purple. The same could not be said for Cardinal Kaspar who came to address the Fulham clergy during their tour, but had it been just him, and had the mass taken place in some back-street church in Rome, probably nobody would have noticed, because Anglicans, I fear, are loaned Roman altars all the time, in the same way Fr Jeffrey is loaned ours each and every week. I wouldn’t ask to use his, though; as I know he wouldn’t be able to say yes.