The Other Side of the Tiber

A couple of years ago the Roman Catholic diocese of Arundel & Brighton was considering what to do with the parishes in Surrey. They have no shortage of laypeople, and most of the parishes are thriving tolerably; it's just clergy they can't find enough of. I gather about 35% of RC priests in Britain are now reordained Anglican converts, but they can't only rely on that pipeline. So our local parish went into a process of soul-searching to work out which of its three mass centres should close, and after much angst and trouble the diocese decided to take the easy option and just make the existing clergy work harder, retaining all the existing communities and spread the clergy more thinly between them. The whole of the area, everything south and west of Guildford, would be constituted as a single parish.

I was invited to the inaugural mass on Saturday evening. It was lovely to be asked and our local RC priest Fr Jeffrey couldn't stop repeating how grateful he was I was there to the extent that I wondered whether anything else had been said about it. Maybe I was the only ecumenical representative who turned up. I decided to leave my biretta and stole at home and appear just in surplice, scarf and hood, seemly but unmistakably Anglican, as I thought that was polite.

Aesthetically the church in Guildford is no more than functional, but it is big, and was fairly full on Saturday evening. Perhaps it should have been given that so many congregations were represented, but it's always encouraging to be in a full church. If I envy the Italian Mission for anything, it's its comprehensiveness and cosmopolitan nature. We've had a young Nigerian-born carer attending our church recently who wants to get married at home and needs Fr Jeffrey to confirm that he's doing his best to worship somewhere at least: 'Tell him I will write a nihil obstat', Jeffrey told me, and it amuses me to think that such formularies are still expressed in Latin even south of the Sahara. But this is what the Church of Jesus Christ is supposed to be. 

But I was soon reminded what I don't envy, as Jeffrey and his colleagues lined up before the Bishop to affirm their oaths, and they made the customary declaration of acceptance of the teaching magisterium of the Church - not only in what it has taught hitherto, but whatever it will teach in the future. This has always hit me as an intellectual leap I could not perform. I understand it's about expressing the belief that the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit, that God's hand rests upon it and therefore it can never not be so guided, but it epitomises a model of how the Spirit works that is not what I observe from the Church's history, full of dead ends, re-emphases, re-interpretations, and plain error as it is. 'The magisterium has never erred in vital doctrine', you might argue; but how do we tell what vital doctrine is? 'Vital doctrine is that in which the magisterium has never erred', and that I find basically unconvincing. In the Anglican dispensation our declarations of acceptance are far less exact, and our relationship with our Bishop is described in terms of personal allegiance. Battered and compromised the Anglican Church is, I have never been more sure of the fundamental rightness of that.