Regular readers here will know I usually avoid classifying myself or others into different boxes and categories. Lately Anglican Catholics have been much in the media in response to the Vatican’s setting up of Anglican Personal Ordinariates.
Bishop Christopher Epting, the Episcopal Church’s deputy to the Presiding Bishop for ecumenical and interreligious relations, has just issued a valuable statement on this.
Last Sunday, Fr Peter Williams, a leading Kiwi Anglican Catholic issued this useful statement:
We Anglican Catholics have always believed that the Church of England essentially continued as part of the great Catholic Church of the west, despite the political events that severed the link with the authority in Rome. Even here, in this corner of the very dispersed Anglican Communion, we continue to believe that. The Catholic essentials continue to keep us close, even though we Anglicans have developed a marked style of our own. As an Anglican Catholic I value that distinctive style a great deal: its dispersal of authority; its unity in essentials and great diversity in inessentials; its ability to live appropriately in very different contexts; its unity through common prayer more than through common dogma; its liberality of style, and so much else.
The Vatican offer appears to invite Anglicans to retain Anglican style, while joining a Communion which is controlled and centralised as never before, which is strangling the life of many of its own communities by its rigid insistence on inessentials such as clerical celibacy and the ordination of men only, and which is inhibiting the ministry potential of so many by demanding slavish conformity. There is an inconsistency here which makes me very uneasy. It certainly has not raised my respect for Vatican judgement or leadership. I shall be very surprised if many Anglicans respond to this offer, and they are likely to be those who cannot cope with the generosity of Anglican style anyway.
The Vatican’s problems which are great, and the Anglican Church’s problems which are also great, will not be helped at all by such an ill-considered move. The spectacular decline of organised Christianity in the west is no respecter of churches, and is best responded to with a generosity of ministry and spirit, rather than with a retreat to the fortresses.
Within all these discussions one might be forgiven for asking, “What constitutes a catholic? What is essential to catholicism? What is catholic spirituality?” Is putting a chasuble on? Or swinging a thurible with some incense? Is wearing a biretta? Or wearing lace, or calling it a cotter? Or being addressed “father”?
Drawing on the insights from the Rule of St Benedict, as highlighted by Martin Thornton, Derek Olsen recently asked these questions and added a three-legged stool to the commonly-used one of scripture, tradition, and reason: the fundamental principles of Eucharist, the Daily Office, and personal prayer. Fr. David Cobb, of Christ Church, New Haven, expanded this with another three legged stool:
If our spirituality is not grounded in the Prayer Book System of Office, Mass and personal prayer- in the same way that our theology is grounded in Scripture, Tradition, and Reason-(and one might add if our life is not focused on service, stewardship and witness, another useful three legged piece of furniture) –  then vestments, titles, billowing clouds of incenses and resonant organs are just trifles. They are, in themselves more appealing than liturgy that is sloppy or chummy or self-consciously restrained – but they are not the point.
Might I add the point that, in my opinion, catholic spirituality is founded upon an insight, a belief, a sense that God’s creation is good. We live in a sacramental universe. With flaws, fine. But creation does not manifest God, is not a vehicle for God, in spite of anything – but because of its goodness. Our human nature is good enough to be joined to God in the incarnation. So bread and wine, and water, and relationships, and sex, and flowers, and music, and colours, and smells, and gongs, and stained-glass windows, and glorious architecture, and singing, and oil, and gestures, and laughter, and tears, and processions, and icons, and candles, and… all can and are the vehicles in and through and with which we encounter the deep mystery in whom we live and move and have our being – the mystery we call God.
Just for the record: I’m an orthodox charismatic evangelical catholic 🙂
Previous posts on Anglican Personal Ordinariates:
First post
Second post
Third post
Fourth post
The criticisms that Father Peter Williams has inventoried match my own critique of Rome, as a loyal dissenter. I suspect that the root cause of Rome’s problems is that it has not yet overcome its rationalistic metaphysics.
Don’t get me wrong. I affirm both metaphysical and moral realisms. I just think that our deontology has to be at least as tentative as our ontology is speculative. And finding a good root metaphor for our highly speculative metaphysics has been extremely problematical (substance vs process vs experience vs semiotic). Bottomline, we need to be more fallibilistic and not persist and even advance into a creeping, even creepy, infallibilism. This epistemically indefensible apodictic certainty pervades our church disciplines (e.g. gender roles, celibacy, women’s ordination), moral doctrines (e.g. human sexuality & procreation) and sacramental theology (e.g. a robustly ontological transubstantiation rather than a more vague semiotic tranSIGNification). There must be some type of invincible ignorance in play (as I eschew a rash judgment of arrogance … sigh)?
But all of the above issues are accidentals, nonessentials. What is essential is our radically incarnational outlook and pervasively sacramental economy fueled by our vivid pneumatological (Holy Spirit) and analogical imaginations. In other words, what Fr. Bosco Peters said, CATHOLIC.
Therefore be it resolved, I am already in full communion with both Rome and Canterbury, at least New Zealand, on essentials, and consider Anglican Catholic – not an oxymoron, but – a redundancy! And it is good to be one with you my dear brothers and sisters! Very good!
Deep peace,
Johnboy
New Orleans
I wonder at all these delineations within Christianity. Seems a bit absurd when you give it a moment’s thought. Which category would JC himself fit into? None of them, I suspect! For the record I am a cradle Catholic who recently took up my childhood faith again. I treasure it. But I think that if Catholics really believe that Jesus Christ is present in the Eucharist, that we should be handing it out freely, not jealously guarding it!
Wikipedia has a fair bit to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Catholicism#Practices_and_beliefs
and I like the sound of Affirming Catholicism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_Catholicism
It is, after all, entirely OK to have knowledgeable folks in funny dress showing some reverence for the sacrament of the eucharist (whatever one’s personal doctrine concerning real presence) whilst celebrating it; we just don’t need no pope, thank you very much.
Oh yeah, and if labels count for much, I consider myself a (post-)Liberal Progressive low (in several senses) anglo-catholic.
Been reading McLaren followed by Borg, can you tell?
I would readily accept the label orthodox-evangelical-catholic for myself as well. I still need some help from the Holy Spirit before I take on that charismatic label 🙂
Because of your post on the etymology of “priest” I was expecting something similar here for the term catholic. Kata + Holos; According to the whole, or from the whole.
The Christian Church is catholic because if its diversity and universality – that it is for and made up of all peoples throughout the world. So to say you are an Anglican Catholic is not an oxymoron. In fact quite often I find the Anglican Communion to more successfully be catholic than the Roman Catholic Church.
This is very interesting.
There are various things I always thought of as “Catholic” with a big C that I didn’t like–the elevation of the Pope, the requirement of one-on-one confession before a priest, the idea of purgatory, the old “babies in limbo” thing….
But when I read your description of catholicism with a small c, I see myself. I feel Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. I feel the sacredness of all of creation, in a sacramental universe. And I joyfully affirm the Nicene creed every Sunday and believe it.
I love the daily office. I love “high church” ritual (although I am progressive theologically–I too am a fan of Marcus Borg, and I am also a Rocco Errico fan.)
And then there is that side of me that wants direct experience of the divine, who has done the Michael Harner workshops and loves to put on a drumming mp3 and meditate/”journey” to interact with Jesus and angels, and animals….and gain direct spiritual insights interacting with them.
And then there are the Pentecostal friend and her mom who introduced me to speaking in tongues when I was in 6th grade, so periodically when I can’t think of the words to say something weighing on my heart, I just pray in tongues…
So I guess that makes me a charismatic shamanic catholic-or perhaps Episcopentacostapagan… But what are labels anyway?
Christian is a perfectly good word. I’ll claim it!
I wonder if ultimately it will be Christians claiming “catholic communion” who are the future of the one, holy, apostolic, and catholic church. Because I affirm so much of what was said in the post and these comments. I too am a “loyal dissenter” and appreciate the faith of my childhood. But nonetheless am so distressed by the lack of mercy, compassion, and justice at the vatican (and by those it harbors who have perpetrated predation) that I would like to cry a river of tears – for a long time – in reparation for what has been done and is being done. The abuse of children, of men, of women. The conferring of leper status on certain groups. But the Holy Spirit continues to call – within each of these catholic communities. That, to me, is a hopeful sign.
May we all be one. May the unity of the Holy Spirit and the Bond of Peace unite us in Christ as we try, each in our own way, to assist in bringing all things into ONE – to the Father.
Amen.
Thank you Fr. Bosco. Both for your coverage of these contributions to the discourse and your own very helpful and affirming insight that goes a long way to giving voice to a notion of catholicity that seems and feels correct.
what happened to good old fashion religion? all these labels are taking us away from our core belief in God. Thanks Father!