I find the debate over Anglicanism’s position between Protestant and Catholic somewhere between unenlightening and tiresome, because it doesn’t really get us to what Anglicanism is supposed to be. Subsequent events have shed some light on the subject but it’s ignored by many who should know better.
As someone who has been both in my lifetime, I feel i’m in a good position to comment on this issue, and I’ll try to get to the point:
- Some think Anglicanism is Catholic because of its episcopal government. But churches in the Wesleyan tradition (the Methodists and my own Church of God) have bishops and centralised government and are anything but Catholic, although people like J.R. Graves have tried to argue to the contrary. (The Lutherans are also subject to this criticism, with the same response.)
- Others think that it is Catholic because it requires (or used to require) liturgical worship. This panders to a tradition that thought it was putting the Bible at the centre of worship when in fact it was putting the pulpit and the preacher in that place.
- Still others think that “High Church” is a clear sign that we have creeping/creepy Catholicism in the church. Being one of the now diminishing survivors of the pre-1979 BCP PECUSA church, High Church certainly was ceremonial (to excess in many ways) but it wasn’t really Catholic. “Swimming the Tiber” in 1972 showed just the opposite; the RCC handled its liturgy in a way whose informality surprised, as I noted in There’s Catholicism and Then There’s….
- Ultimately we must deal with Anglicans who have moulded, in Tractarian fashion, their 1928 BCP liturgy around what they think is really Catholic. The way Roman Catholicism is really practiced depends to some extent on who is at the top. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI tried (in different ways and with different degrees of success) to pull the drift under Paul VI back to a more traditional form of Catholicism. The current Occupant of the see of St. Peter is trying to undo that, but what he’s aiming for is left-wing Protestantism, not traditional Protestantism. I have characterised those Anglo-Catholics as “more Catholic than the Pope” who yearn for unity with Rome but are better off staying where they are while waiting to see if the “mother ship” can stay off of the reef.
- One thing that has complicated this debate is defining “Protestantism.” This is not a univocal idea; even at the start we have the Lutherans and the Reformed at odds with each other, a process that influenced Anglicanism’s early development. To say that Anglicanism is really Reformed is, IMHO, a misnomer; any group of churches who put a confession and repentance/absolution in all of their central liturgies is obviously not counting on unconditional predestination and election to carry their people through.
As long as we continue to dicker over this point, Anglicanism will continue to be a way station rather than a destination for many people.
Positive Infinity 