The Archbishop of Canterbury designate

The announcement yesterday of the nomination of Dame Sarah Mullally as the next Archbishop of Canterbury caught the headlines amongst so much else. I was a little surprised, having thought that the Anglican powers-that-be would perhaps wait until the next appointment to Canterbury or York to advance a woman.

It is now over twenty years since I left the Church of England, and then from a strongly Anglo-Catholic position. Such an appointment no longer concerns me directly. 

However the Church of England is part of our constitution and national establishment, and that fact is appreciated by people who are Catholics in full peace and communion. 

I still have Anglican friends and am aware of an Anglican tradition that cannot be happy with this appointment and what it implies, and who, dare I say it, are running out of sand in which to bury their heads like ostriches.

Dame Sarah’s views are mixed on issues where faith and contemporary social issues meet. She has, perhaps as a former nurse, been steadfast in her opposition to the Assisted Dying Bill. Less reassuring are comments she has made, which are both worrying, as well as gnomic, on abortion  and same-sex blessings.

The media stress  is on her being the first woman to be nominated to the Primacy of All England - no-one has yet found a transgender predecessor. During the discussions about the Church of England legislating for ‘Women Bishops’ I remember the suggestion being made that the two Archbishoprics might be reserved for men as a concession to unity and the idea of ‘male headship’ if and when women were allowed to become ‘bishops’. That has clearly gone by the board. 

Those who speak of and fear the ‘Feminisation’ of Christianity in our society may well see their anxieties realised as the public face of the national Church becomes ‘Mother’ in God, not Father.

For Anglicanism as a whole I cannot see it going well, as has already been indicated, with Evangelicals focussed on the issue of male headship, nor with Global South Anglicans who are often of that Evangelical tradition. Another nail or two, or five or ten in the coffin of the Anglican Communion.

Ecumenical relationships may not suffer with the Lutheran churches that already have women ‘bishops’. Judging by some of the positive ‘mood music’ responses about her appointment coming out from some in Rome relations with the Holy See will doubtless continue at a polite level of meetings, but I imagine joint services at one of the Roman basilicas will be less likely. For the Orthodox there will probably be a much more substantial and suitable barrier, so a trip to the Phanar is not very likely.

In addition to those issues there is the dismal inheritance of the Church of England. The Welby years and Covid have done nothing for church attendance, many parishes feel they are being discriminated against in favour of headline grabbing initiatives to give away the Church Commissioners money, and the continuing issues around clerical and lay abuse of individuals within the Church.

This, of course, brings us back to Justin Welby. Without doubt this incompetent, self-satisfied, bullying little man has been, with the sole exception of the appalling heretic Thomas Cranmer, the worst ever Archbishop of Canterbury. That is no mean, or desirable, achievement. He is the first amongst more than a hundred predeceases  to have to resign for utter incompetence. Even the pluralist Stigand in the eleventh century was at least a patron of the arts.

Justin Welby pushed through the appointment of women bishops, finally destroying residual Anglican claims to any degree of Catholicity, turned a blind eye to abuse by his Evangelical friends, yet obstinately traduced the reputation of one of the most distinguished bishops of the twentieth century ( and there have not been many of them ) blithely went along with closing all churches in Covid - his Easter Holy Communuin celebrated on his kitchen table being the highlight, and which I know, caused one friend to swim the Tiber, and his involvement in the liturgical shambles that was the King’s Coronation.

Dame Sarah has been passed a bitter chalice, but hopefully cannot do worse. Hopefully.

Fr Longenecker on the Ordinariates

I saw on the Zenit website an interesting and forceful piece by Fr Dwight Longenecker about the place of the Anglican Ordinariates in the contect both of the ARCIC discussions and of the future of Ecumenical schemes. He sees the Ordinariates as a rather surprising fruit of the Anglican-Catholic dialogue, and as offering real hope for drawing people into the Catholic Church. His article, which is trenchent and not afraid of being blunt about both communions,  can be read at A-new-ecumenism.

 

Liberal Christianity

This last term one of the American students I have been teaching did a course with me on the history and development of Anglicanism. At the end I came to the conclusion, and in a way that had never struck me quite so clearly before, that Anglicanism in its official expressions and practice - never mind what individual groups within may do or have done over the centuries - is quintessentially Liberal Christianity. 

By that I mean not just the idea of the via media, but that Henrician Caesaro-papalism embraced quite a bit of the Liberal agenda of the age, that Cranmer's system was somehow a Liberal alternative to pre- or post-Tridentine Catholicism and to the claims of Calvinism or radical Protestantism, that this was reinvented in the Liberal Catholicism that was Laudianism (too High for many of course, but not Roman Catholicism), in the latitudinarian response to the era of the Enlightenment, and in the growth of a world wide Anglican Communion that retains links between disparate groups yet never seeks to push anyone too far. Lambeth Conferences and Anglican Consultative Councils that pass fudged resolutions that never successfully bind, but do quite a bit of loosing. That Liberal brand has succeeded for over 450 years, the Civil War not withstanding, in holding a great number of English people in spiritual fellowship one with another and with people with whom they may well profoundly disagree. No mean achievement. It is Catholic and it is Protesrtant, yet it is properly neither, and likes Orthodox icons and Celtic spirituality (but not too much of either) and somehow seems to believe that one day the world will wake up and decide it has been Anglican all along.

However, and it is a very big, indeed fundamental, reservation the price of such Liberalism is high. Everything becomes a matter of opinion - to which, sooner or later, everyone becomes entitled about just about anything and everything. Dogma dies, truth is relativised, preferences prevail.

Bl. John Henry Newman's biglietto speech about his opposition for half a century to Liberalism and his lectures on The Current State of Anglicans appears ever more prescient to anyone who shares his view that there is such a thing as Truth in religious matters.

I had wondered whether to post this thought, but considering it nothing new, merely a further clarification in my mind, until I happened yesterday to be reading The Times (once a newspaper, now a tabloid). Here was further proof . The paper had an article, which can be read at Times claims Church of England 'on the brink of appointing its first openly gay bishop' (courtesy of Pink News, which will have an interest in the matter) by their well known Religious Correspondent, Ruth Gledhill, about the reported fact that the Dean of St Albans, the Very Rev. Dr Jeffrey John, had missed out by one vote on being nominated for the vacant bishopric of Exeter. Now Dr John, a distinguished figure in many ways, famously missed out on the suffragen bishopric of Reading in 2003 when he had to withdraw his acceptance following pressure on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican hierarchy because of Dr John's alleged homosexuality. He was, in effect, compendated with the Deanery. Now, in the wake of Civil Partnerships being accepted by the Church of England as no bar to clerical promotion if the partners remain chaste, and he now has a civil partner, Grant Holmes, who is also a clergyman, there seems no reason why he has not received a mitre. He has been long-listed for Southwark and Durham, and short-listed for Exeter. It is apparently only a matter of time before he gets a diocesan see it would appear.

I do not doubt his abilities - though of the one time I heard him preach in Oriel chapel I can recall nothing - and I am not taking particular sides in the internal debate in Anglicanism about "Gay clergy". I would add as a historian he would not be the first homosexual Anglican bishop in these islands - it is just that the Anglican Church has not hitherto approved of such a situation. 

No, what really struck me was arose from the point made by Ms Gledhill, that of the six Anglican dioceses that are or are about to be vacant, those of Europe, Guildford and Hereford were the most likely, having "liberal" traditions to accept an openly homosexual bishop. Her insider source then really gave the game away by saying that Europe was probably the ideal for Jeffrey and Gavin. After all they have no children to worry about putting through University - not, I think, very likely unless they seek to emulate Sir Elton John and Mr David Furniss in these matters, and I should add that I was struck by the remarkably close resemblance in the photograph accompanying the piece between Dr Jeffrey and Sir Elton - and how they would love all the food and wine to be sampled on episcopal visits across a diocese that stretches from Madeira to the Urals.

There you have it - never mind scripture or tradition, St Paul or Cranmer, the unity or disunity of the ecclesia - what really matters is that everyone has a fair chance to sample the cuisine of Europe whilst wearing a purple frock.