The Bishop's Weekly Column from the Parish Bulletin

OUR LADY OF FATIMA

CATHOLIC CHURCH

The "Anglican Identity" ?

October 29th, 2009

Australia's First Woman (Anglican) Bishop

I became an Anglican by accident. It was July 14, 1984 and I had heard the American Evangelist Billy Graham give a crusade address at Anfield, the home of Liverpool Football Club. Truth to tell I had heard him a week earlier during a national radio broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from Sunderland, another northern city in England and my intellectual curiosity had been piqued. I was 16 and knew nothing about God. Yes, I had seen Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth several times on national television (so I knew the story line) and I had also seen a made for TV mini-series called Saul in England but known in the US as Peter and Paul. As a 13 year old, that film made a deep impression on me, sadly, though, I watched it during the Summer (this year) having ordered a copy online and I was less than impressed this time round.

At the end of Billy Graham's address I had intellectually assented to the idea of personal sinfulness and the need for a Redeemer in the person of Jesus Christ. Now the call was made to "come forward". I had no intention of doing that. Then Dr. Graham said that everything Our Lord did, he did publicly, indeed when the sick woman secretly touches the hem of Our Lord's garment and is healed, he makes her declare herself publicly before the crowd as having been healed. Thus I concluded I had to do something more. Now as part of the ceremony a "counselor" or older Christian had the task of taking down contact information and trying to pair the convert up with a church hoping that the minister would follow-up and take the nurturing a stage further.

The young man asked me if I had a church affiliation. At the time I had been attending an Anglican youth group on Friday nights at St. James' Church, Birkdale, for about a year, so I gave that church as a contact merely for the sake of convenience, believing (naively) that all churches were the same, then. I was baptized on September 30th which makes 25 years since I was baptized this year. After Baptism I began to study what Anglicanism actually believed in contradistinction to all other Christian denominations. At the back of the Book of Common Prayer there are 39 Articles of Religion which are the official statement of belief of the Anglican Communion. Reading through those articles I quickly realized that they read like a litany of rejection. Rather than affirm something, they set out a series of denials and all of the denials were aimed at the Catholic Church, which, in England, was sneeringly referred to for centuries as the Papist or Roman Catholic Church, since Anglicans believe they are English Catholics as opposed to Roman Catholics.

I remember watching one of Marcus Grodi's Coming Home shows on EWTN earlier this year when English convert from Anglicanism Julian Chadwick (former chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales) referred to the feeling (always unspoken) that it is somehow unpatriotic to leave the Anglican Church rather like "letting the side down" as he put it. I remember feeling exactly that sentiment when I finally swam the Tiber as it is sometimes called. Truth, to tell, though, and it is a big lie, the Old Religion, Catholicism, is the Religion of England, Anglicanism is a mere interloper !

In any case my in depth study of the claims of Anglicanism to Catholicity led me to certain conclusions:

1/ Private Interpretation of Scripture leads to all sorts of false and contradictory conclusions. Obviously Our Lord in founding the Church (like any other institution) would have left a CEO. The Archbishop of Canterbury makes no claims to infallibility, but the Papacy does. History alone proves that the entire Church always looked to Rome.

2/ Baptism wipes sin off the soul - what happens to sin after Baptism ? Anglicanism rejects the notion that Penance is a Sacrament, Catholicism teaches that it is.

3/ Anglicanism denies the mystery of Christ's Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament through the miracle of Transubstantiation. Many Protestants take the Bible as the literal and inerrant Word of God, but almost uniformly ask their congregants to accept that at the Last Supper Our Lord was merely talking figuratively when he said "This is my Body" and "This is my Blood".

4/ Finally, and by no means least, the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Economy of Salvation. Here the Rosary was of particular importance to me. I can remember buying my first set of beads and the joy of holding them even though it would be a couple of months before I would purchase a sheet that explained how to pray it, which I did every evening before a 12 inch statue of Our Lady of Lourdes.

So study and prayer led me to Anglo-Catholicism, which I quickly recognized as the chimera for which it is - I wanted the "real deal". I didn't last 5 years as an Anglican, but in August gone I completed 20 years as a Catholic.

For years I kept bottled up inside me my Anglican experiences, thinking of the tragic mistake I had made on the pitch at Anfield, but in recent years I have had a certain fondness for that time in my life - one thing it taught me in spades was to love to go to Church and worship God, not by rote or obligation as in Catholicism but for the sheer joy of loving God for his own sake. The Anglican who never quite made it to Catholicism, Clive Staples Lewis, once wrote in his spiritual biography Surprised by Joy that for 5 years of his Christian journey he didn't believe in heaven, which he took to be a salutary experience, since he came to love God for His own sake, not for any mercenary reason like the reward of an afterlife with God.

I deliberately refrained from commenting on the recent announcement by Cardinal Levada that an Apostolic Constitution (AC) is in the pipeline permitting the conversion en masse of Anglicans who wish to preserve their "Anglican Identity" within the Catholic Church.

First, as usual, there is no document. There was a lot of hot air at a press conference and a watch-and-wait for a rumored document to appear. Now where have we seen that before ? MP ring a bell ? The MP clarification document that never showed ? The latest (today) from Rome is that the AC is in revision again especially the part about mandatory celibacy for all future Anglican clergy that might be ordained. In regards to all the continued "hot air" from Rome (and other quarters) the words from one of the songs from My Fair Lady seem particularly appropriate:

Words! Words! Words! I'm so sick of words! I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do?

Next, the primary group that the provision would address, the Traditional Anglican Communion TAC, is a loose affiliation of Ex-Anglicans headed-up by a twice married former Catholic priest.

Finally, the talk is about preserving the Anglican identity within the Catholic Church. What precisely is meant by "Anglican identity" ? Take the TAC, for example, one minister may be using the Book of Common Prayer (1662 or 1928), the so-called Knott & Son English Missal which is a fairly faithful translation of the Tridentine Missal with Anglican interpolations from the BCP or in editions printed during the mid 1960s with series 1, 2 or 3 that closely resemble the Novus Ordo in embryonic form, or even the Sarum Rite the pre-Reformation English rite that had the greatest predominance in England over the other usages by the time of the separation. That's the liturgical question. As to what they actually believe in Anglicanism there is a verse that says it all:

Broad of Church
Broad of mind
Broad before
And broad behind

If memory serves it was another famous Anglican convert who taught me that (currently residing in a suburb of England's fair capital !)

I never met an Anglican who espoused the 39 Articles in their entirety, so what is Anglicanism if not a disparate grouping of people who just "muddle through" which is a very English way of doing things. Take the vicar who baptized me, he didn't believe in Transubstantiation, but one Thursday morning he came to the High Church whence I had repaired for a while during an interregnum in the parish, donned the fiddleback vestments I laid out for him with nary a blink of an eyelash and led by myself proceeded to the altar to "say Mass" prior to this I had never seen him in anything other than a surplice and stole or tippet for Morning Prayer. That's Anglicanism for you !

+TF