When I left St Thomas the Martyr here in Oxford the future of the church as a place of worship weighed on my mind and conscience. Fortunately for my hubris, and more importantly for it as a church, it has manged very well without me. But I would rather have liked to take it with me, in its case back, into the Roman obedience.
William Oddie was an advocate of congregations which had divided into Anglican and Catholic communities sharing church buildings in his book The Roman Option, but I think it might prove difficult - one can imagine disputes over who used the other group's incense, or who left the sacristy in a mess, let alone whose pyx was which in the tabernacle. That said I do think that with good will such problems could be avoided and need not be insuperable. However how much good will is there around at the moment?
Such arrangements would depend upon the attitude of the Church of England, and that does not look promising - there seems clear hostility to shared use in various dioceses. The phrase "dog in a manger" has been used to describe the attitude, or potential attitude, of some Anglican administrators. What I wonder would be the attitude if an Ordinariate group wanted to purchase a redundant church? In Manchester some time ago the Anglican diocese backed away from a sale to SSPX of a disused church. How would they react to customers from much closer to home?
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St Barnabas in Royal Tonbridge Wells
This was highlighted by a report in last weekend's Sunday Telegraph about St Barnabas in Tonbridge Wells where the Vicar and 54 of the congregation want to enter the Ordinariate, but 18 in the congregation wish to remain in the Church of England, and the views expressed suggested that the split ran quite deep. The Archdeacon had made it clear that the Ordinariate group would not be able to continue to use the church. Looking on the internet I found their "Community blog", and it is clearly now a community that appears deeply and painfully divided. Incidentally the Vicar, Fr Tomlinson, has a blog which you can find here.
That said I wonder if we might not see some interesting legal disputes as to who does actually own the fabric and the site of at least some churches. Quite apart from proprietary chapels there could be some interesting instances. Could we even witness situations like that around S. Nicolas de Chardonnay in Paris? We shall, no doubt, see.
3 comments:
Boozing and blogging rarely mix. It's "Chardonnet", not "chardonnay"!
Mea culpa, not mea gulpa.
Surely the problem is less about consumables like incense, than about the fact that most churches want to hold their services and other events at the same time - my (non Anglican or Roman Catholic) church recently looked at building sharing, but sadly concluded that in practice it was very difficult even with good will.
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