The ECUSA of our brethren

So the US Episcopalians - the ECUSA of our brethren as we used to refer to them in my Anglican days - have been suspended from the Anglican Communion for three years over their attitude to same-sex marriage. There are the predictable howls of protest from the predictable people and interest groups.

Despite their small numbers, but great number of bishops, the US Episcopalians have wielded a disproportionate influence in the affairs of the Anglican Communion in the post-Second World War era.

It is a pity that similar sanctions were not taken agains those Anglican provinces which first ordained women in order to discipline them.

Homosexual acts are condemned as sinful in the Bible and by the tradition of the Church - but personal sins may be forgiven. That's why there is the Sacrament of Confession.

Altering the sacramental structure of the clerical orders is destructive of the future authenticity of the ecclesial body concerned. It is not a sin that a visit to the confessional can wipe away, it is structural and enduring.

By changing the received tradition about Orders the Anglican Communion made infinitely more difficult the possibilities - such as they were - of reconciliation with the Catholic and Orthodox communions.

That is something to think about as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity approaches.

Told you so

In my post Strange goings on in Yorkshire I commented on the amalgamation and reorganisation of three of the Anglican dioceses based in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Special Correspondent has recently forwarded me this comment from Facebook about this bright idea. It looks as if what I wrote is now (already?) coming to fruition. It can be viewed, with a set of relevant comments, at https://www.facebook.com/robin.ward.37/posts/10153324909543993

I did, when I had the opportunity some months ago at a lecture in Oxford, tell the ecclesiastical civil servant who chaired the committee which came up with the implementation of this scheme, and who happens to be an acquaintance, just how daft an idea it all is in my opinion.

Women Bishops

So the General Synod of the Church of England has finally, today, gone through all the necessary stages and legislated for Women Bishops.

As a former Anglican, who has found his true home in the Catholic Church I am no longer hurt by this move - still less, of course, affected - though I can still be nauseated by the prospect. I am however saddened - saddened at the pain caused to those who cannot accept this move yet wish to remain in the communion of their birth, saddened by the erosion of a tradition and claim to Catholicity, and saddened by the loss of a chance, however slim it may in reality have been, of some form of corporate re-union. Without the issue we would not have had the Ordinariates, but equally we might, just might perhaps, have had the possibility of the whole Church of England becoming the Ordinariate...

 

The historian in me does note what a day it is to choose to hold this vote - the 456th anniversary of the death in 1558 of Queen Mary I and of Cardinal Archbishop Pole, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth I and the advent of the Elizabethan Settlement. I bet Queen Elizabeth would not have been keen on Women Bishops.

It is also the feast of both St Hilda of Whitby and St Hugh of Lincoln. I cannot imagine they looked down upon the day's events with any sense of approbation.

Strange goings on in Yorkshire

As I understand it last Sunday, Easter Day, there came into being the merger of three Anglican dioceses in Yorkshire to create a new see of West Yorkshire and the Dales. 

This has been done by amalgamating the Diocese of Ripon, founded in 1836, and in recent years styled Ripon and Leeds, whose territory was the western half of the North Riding and the north-eastern part of the West Riding, with the diocese of Wakefield, founded in 1888 - a strip of the central West Riding including Halifax, Huddersfield, Barnsley and Pontefract - and that of Bradford, founded in 1926, which comprised the north-west West Riding up to Skipton and Sedbergh.

Under the scheme the diocese will have three co-cathedrals - Ripon, Wakefield and Bradford plus the recently elevated pro-cathedral in Leeds - and the new Bishop will be assisted by at least two suffragans. the existing diocesan Bishops have retired and the suffragans of Knaresborough and Pontefract have stepped up to take the titles of Ripon and Wakefield respectively. The other West Riding diocese, Sheffield has been left alone. All clear so far?

Now this is my home area, and I can see there was a case for adjusting diocesan boundaries to align with local government ones and social realities and patterns. I can see a case for combining the cities of Bradford and Leeds in one urban diocese, rather like the Anglican dioceses of Birmingham or Manchester, with a cathedral and a pro-cathedral to keep both cities happy. If that were done the rural part of Bradford diocese could be returned to Ripon to create a large, essentially rural/market town diocese, and Wakefield might take in part of the adjacent southern bits of Ripon, and its boundary with Sheffield adjusted in the outskirts of Barnsley. That might well make sense, even good sense.

However what has been done, to my tiny mind, makes no sense whatsoever. There will be a vast new unwieldy diocese, whose people will not know one another. I recall from my days in the Wakefield diocese that the Anglo-Catholic inclined deaneries of Pontefract and Barnsley had little in common with those around Huddersfield and Halifax; when I was on the Diocesan Synod it was a meeting of strangers, guarding our own interests, rather than of a genuine corporate body. 

There will still be three bishops at least, and three cathedrals and a pro-cathedral with their establishments, and doubtless as many Archdeacons etc, not to mention all the diocesan bureaucracy of boards for parsonages, education, ministry..... So the case for economies of scale looks pretty thin.

I am told that one bright idea was to call this monstrosity the diocese of Leeds - until it dawned on the organisers that there is such a body, the Catholic diocese created in 1878 for the West Riding (now minus the fairly recent Sheffield-based diocese of Hallam). Since when did Church of England dioceses have such territorial names as "West Yorkshire and the Dales" rather than using the name of the See city? Since now obviously. How we used to smile slightly, if politely, at the titles of colonial bishoprics such as The Gambia and the Rio Pongos, or even Australian dioceses such as Wangaratta...

There will, I can well imagine, be twenty years of telling parishioners how wonderful this barmy scheme is, despite all the evidence to the contrary, followed by a twenty year long period of divorce and dissolution, back to three separate dioceses...

I know the Church of England has an unfortunate predilection these days for daft ideas - the ordination of women is not a unique aberration - but this one really is a classic. Whoever had this bright idea will, no doubt, get a mitre or an O.B.E. out of it, but they certainly will not deserve it.

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.

Act of Uniformity

Today is St Bartholomew's Day and the 350th anniversary of the coming into force of the Act of Uniformity which definitively restablished the Church of England and the Book of Common Prayer. Those of more Congregationalist sympathies who could not accept the restored settlement were excluded from the national Church, and the Dissenting Minister and his convecticle came into being.

The new Book of Common Prayer was slightly amended, but essentially that of 1559, itself with slight changes the 1552 book. The 1662 Act of Uniformity is the continuing guarantee of the Established Church and of its primary Liturgy, the BCP.

Image: justus.anglican.org

It occurs to me that the tragedy of the contemporary Church of England is this loss of Uniformity. By that I do not mean the loss of liturgical uniformity. That was blown away by the second and third generation of Tractarians - the Ritualists - and ill considered measures such as the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 and its debacle in the Lincoln Judgment of 1890 did nothing to halt such changes. The 1927 and 1928 debates on revising the Prayer Book marked the end of attempts to enforce real uniformity of practice - the 1928 Prayer Book issued on the authority of the Archbishops is a landmark in terms of practice and policy.

The loss of Uniformity I mean is that loss of coherence in belief and practice. In the last half century the Church of England seems to have abandoned any consistent sense of having a shared set of beliefs both with fellow Anglicans and fellow Christians.

As a former Anglican and as an Englishman I regret this - it is not good news for our society. The awareness of that fragmentation of underlying shared views led in part to my seeing that my true home was elsewhere, in thaa Catholic Church of which there are still residual parts in the Church of England, but not enough to sustain me on the journey.

The confidence of being a national Church that could re-evangelise the nation has gone. The idea once held by Anglo-Catholics such as T.S.Eliot that by becoming more Catholic the Church of England could thereby Catholicise the country has proved, or been shown to be, a chimera.

The Church of England was always a strange sixteenth century theological and constitutional compromise. By 1662 it was nevertheless the majority faith of the English people. Its loss of that identity in the last half century may well have exposed those inherent contradictions to the glare of full daylight, but in abandoning any real coherence or discipline in anything the Anglican establishment has progressively (sic) abandoned its ability to speak to the nation.