One following the news in the Anglican Communion will know of the steady stream of persons, including clergy, who have moved to Roman Catholicism or to Eastern Orthodoxy. Fr. Alexander Wilgus thinks we have grossly misunderstood the phenomenon’s roots. The moves do not expose a weak self-understanding and feeble self-confidence in Anglicanism’s Protestant roots—traits which, combined, lead to dabbling in other traditions before jumping ship for them.
As someone who started out in the “Old High Church” and passed through Roman Catholicism just coming out of Vatican II, I find this debate frustrating because there are too many terms which are used “equivocally,” as the Scholastics would say. I have a few observations which may add heat, light, or a mixture of the two to the whole discussion:
- It’s true that High Church Episcopalians/Anglicans have undermined confidence in their own spirituality by leaning on ceremony too much, something I observed in There’s Catholicism and Then There’s…. Over-reliance on ceremony can lead people to think that “If they miss a step in the playbook, the sacraments are invalid,” which may not be the idea but may end up being the impression left. That’s a lesson that Trad Catholics would do well to learn.
- There’s too great a tendency to equate “Protestant” and “Reformed” these days. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Anglicanism isn’t a Reformed religion because both its Articles of Religion and its BCP’s do not support the idea of unconditional perseverance (among other reasons.) Just because the Reformed people have done such a good sales job convincing so many they’re the true Protestants doesn’t make it so. It’s also worth noting that “Catholicity” is also an equivocal term in its own right, as the internal struggles the RCC is going through show.
- As discussed in Book Review: Trevor Gervase Jalland’s The Church and the Papacy, the Church of Rome had one job:
The second is that the principal objective in bishops of Rome exerting this primacy was to insure that the faith which was handed down by the apostles–the paradosis, to use the transliterated Greek term that Jalland employs frequently–was preserved and maintained. That brought a conservatism to the way Rome responded to the many doctrinal crises that came from the East, a salutary one in most cases.
I think it’s fair to ask whether the Occupants of the See of Peter have botched the job or not, especially after the collapse of the Western Empire. The Reformation in its entirety rests on the assumption that they have, and we have a current Occupant who is doing his best to remind everyone of that failure.
Roman Catholicism is certainly capable of making it all work, as I noted in my book review of Bossuet’s History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches:
The Variations were Bossuet’s efforts to show the serious problems inherent in the Reformed churches. So how successful was he? Part of how successful he seems depends upon how you accept his view of Roman Catholicism. A Roman Catholicism which is more like Bossuet envisions it–conscious of Scripture, independent of the state, Augustinian in theology–would be a better entity to adhere to than the one that he had then and we have now. A big part of the problem is that the reverends pères jesuites, or at least one in particular (Pope Francis,) are once again propagating their morale accommodante, as they did in Bossuet’s France (much to its long-term detriment.) Unfortunately then and now the situation is more complicated, but Bossuet tends to ignore this.
But all too often they do not rise to the occasion.
Anglicanism, with all of its institutional problems, was and is a reasonable attempt to bring Christianity back closer to its roots. It is not perfect. If it spent as much time worrying about the calibre of its parishioners and less on how close to Rome or Constantinople it is, we would all be better off.
Positive Infinity 