Becoming a Catholic after one has lived life as an Anglican is not an easy thing to do. The belief of many Catholic-minded Anglicans is that whatever the Catholic Church might express in the Catechism and the Missal, the appalling way in which so many of her priests celebrate the Liturgy, the lack of attention paid to the content of homilies, and the rebellion of so many Catholic adherents on so many crucial questions, contradicts, and ultimately undermines, her declared intentions.

And so I had always believed.

A Picture of Vatican II

Even after having studied the Second Vatican Council in detail, I took the view that the Council had served to radically alter the Faith of the Church, and so to make the Catholic Church as protestant as any of her 16th-century offspring. What is more, I thought, she was still seeking to explain the doctrine of Christ according to overwrought definitions and legal decrees, all while allowing the Liturgy – her principal task – to become a tool of populist priests and extroverted, domineering parish busybodies. This, from the Catholic Church: the Church that had withstood the persecution of pagan Roman emperors, the Church that had deigned to crown the new Holy Roman Emperor, the Church that had fostered the best art, the best philosophy, and the best science that the world had ever known. All that thought and beauty and mystery was reduced to Father Personality and his band of ‘lay-popes’ cajoling everyone in the parish into mumbling the latest ditty by the St Louis Jesuits (see this article for a revealing commentary on the state of Catholic music). Or so I thought.

While I would still maintain that the Mass has, in some places, become the victim of zealous de-mystifiers and ultra-subjectivists, and while I could go on at length at how this has betrayed the Church’s patrimony – including all the saints, theologians, and faithful through time who have lived according to the great and mysterious Icon of the Liturgy – as well as her ecumenical commitment to the Orthodox, whose own liturgical traditions have never been treated with such callous insensitivity, I must also acknowledge that her clarity of thought and her comprehensiveness is such that these liturgical (and so theological) errors can be counted as nothing but lapses.

An Ecumenical Proposal

I am well aware that from a traditional Anglican’s perspective, such problems in the Catholic Church will be seen as reflective of precisely the same difficulties and frustrations faced by those seeking to maintain some semblance of faithfulness in Anglicanism. My arguments regarding the subjective nature of Anglican theology notwithstanding, they quite simply are not. It may be that one could argue in favour of shared experience between Anglicans and Catholics were the old ‘branch theory’ to apply, but that is an ecumenical metaphor used by no one except Catholic-minded Anglicans. In other words, if both the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church are under threat from the Enemy, it is from entirely different positions on the battlefield; not as part of the same organic unit.

The picture I would propose as an alternative to the ‘branch theory’ is that of a castle. (Bear with me. I live surrounded by three major ones!)

At the centre of every castle is the keep. The keep is the main repository of stores, and the ultimate safe-haven of the castle’s inhabitants. Outside of the keep are all sorts of sheds, storehouses, and shelters, each serving different purposes within the castle grounds. Well beyond them are the exterior walls of the castle, on which are positioned all those who keep watch over the castle’s well-being.

As an ecumenical model, the keep houses the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Within the keep, these are separated by a curtain drawn across the building, unfortunately cutting each of the Churches off from the other. The curtain, however, is soft and permeable, proffering hope to those inside that it is not a permanent fixture. The sheds and houses outside represent the various Protestant communities. Well within the safety of the Church, in their desire to serve the Lord of the castle faithfully, they have cut out for themselves a variety of niches. Some are positioned in closer proximity to the keep than others, but all are of the same intent. The Anglican Church, in this case, may even be the structure nearest, but that would be for the Anglican Church to decide. Manning the exterior walls are the theologians of every group in the castle, keeping watch on the horizon for signs of trouble, and surveying the castle itself for places where it might be strengthened.

In this respect, it seems to me, Anglicans and Catholics may be said to be at one in the same war. And that is no small thing. But the difference in perspective it implies for the various battles waged is roughly equivalent to the difference between the Novus Ordo and the modern Anglican liturgies of North America. Kind of similar. But not exactly the same.

Implications

What convinced me of the fundamental difference between the Catholic Church and my own Anglicanism, and of the fact that Catholic problems (even when they shared superficial similarities with Anglican problems) were of a very different nature, was in my experience of the Novus Ordo in numerous Catholic churches and monasteries around Britain, as well as in the Ukrainian Catholic Church my wife and children attended up North. Whether it was the Requiem Mass for Pope John Paul II in Westminster Cathedral, the Easter Vigil at Church of the Holy Name in Manchester, or even Mass at my parents’ local parish church, such exposure helped me to see that the essence of Catholicism was a very different thing from Anglican perception. As mentioned in Part VI, the nature of the Novus Ordo Missae as an evolutionary, as opposed to a revolutionary Liturgy, became clear to me. And as I realised this, my understanding of what happened at Vatican II also began to change.

One important thing I came to see is that what I had always loved about Orthodoxy – the almost chaotic liturgical affirmation of people’s folk culture – was one of the hallmarks of Catholicism as well. For me, this was, and is, a Christological issue. I first witnessed its power when I attended a friend’s ordination to the priesthood in a Russian Orthodox church, and saw it again in the context of the two Ukrainian churches and one Roman Catholic church in the town of my own former parish. And here I am not talking about the inclusion of people plucking away on poorly tuned guitars, or (God forbid) liturgical ‘dancers’. I am talking about the genuine freedom of people within the Liturgy to respond to God as naturally as the Liturgy is supernatural. When this works, it is a testament to the Incarnation; the juxtaposition of ancient ritual with people’s need to shift feet or sit down; the fusion of sublime formality at the Altar with reverential human informality in the Nave. We can see it in medieval paintings of Western liturgical scenes, we can experience it in the Orthodox Liturgy, and we are re-presented with it in the documents of Vatican II.

I think it was either Kendall Harmon or Peter Toon who said that the reason they could not become Catholic, even while many other orthodox Anglicans were, was due to the fact that, in spite of what people may assume about the Catholic Church since Vatican II, in light of reading the Breviary, the Missal, and the Catechism together, it was clear that the Catholic Church had not changed its theology at all. Whoever it was that said it, the statement was made as a reason not to become Catholic. For this reader, however, nothing could have brought a bigger smile to my face. Precisely. The Second Vatican Council may have constituted an aggiornamento, a bringing up to date, but it did not constitute a change in belief. The documents attest to this. However the Council has been interpreted by theologically nescient priests, its clear intention was to direct the Church in a constructive engagement with the modern world, and in the process to enliven people’s faith by inviting them to live again within the Liturgy.

Conclusion

Having said all that I have, I quite accept that what the Catholic Church is may not always be easy to see. The radical iconoclasm of the last forty years in some parts of the Church would obscure the vision of the most clear-sighted person. But this iconoclasm is a lapse, and one that is being addressed all over the world even as I write. What matters is that adherence to Scripture, the teaching of the Fathers, the continual engagement with Tradition, and the manifestation of a full, resplendent Christology in the Liturgy and the Magisterium is all intact in the Catholic Church, and that the people of God are able to enter in, offer what they have, and become swept up in the graceful heavenward movement of the Body of Christ. She remains the living vessel of our Lord’s exitus et reditus: a vocation she has always enjoyed, and which she retains until the end of time.

In this were my former difficulties with becoming a Catholic resolved, and now I wait with happy impatience to learn what Christ would have me do in response.

There can be nothing in the world so likely to put a serious theological inquirer off the nature of Anglicanism than the mother of worldwide Anglicanism – the Church of England – herself. Before leaving Canada, I could not have imagined it possible that such a noble ecclesiastical experiment as Anglicanism could go so horribly wrong as it had among Blake’s mountains green. For all the brilliant minds that the Church of England had produced through the centuries, and for all the admirable examples of Christian faith and practice, it quickly became clear to me that this community might possibly have been destined to foster a few individuals in Catholic life, but it could never know any kind of real communion of belief.

A Snapshot of the Church of England

Before proffering any sort of description of the Church of England, I must reiterate how sincerely impressed I have been, and continue to be, by the examples of many of its members. Although their theology may be different to mine, for example, I am especially impressed by the personal integrity of the current Archbishop of York, as well as by the prayerful thoughtfulness of the current Archbishop of Canterbury. In such a tumultuous time as this, I can not really imagine better leadership for the Church of England. And there are countless historical figures as well. Everyone from Richard Hooker – that veritable genius of the Elizabethan Settlement – through the Caroline Divines, to the Oxford Fathers, up to and including Michael Ramsey and even Robert Runcie: together, if in different ways, these men embody much of what it is to be a Catholic Christian.

The problem is, of course, that these are individuals. And no matter what their genius, their personal holiness, how many hymns they translated from Latin, or their individual theological perspective, at best they represent their own laudable aspirations. They do not represent the fullness of what the Church means by Catholic. Which, as I have tried to illustrate in previous entries, is what I found impossible to live with. No matter how Catholic we are as individuals in Anglicanism, as individuals we are by definition not Catholic.

On which note, we turn to the Church of England.

As I mentioned in the closing paragraph of part V, I made the decision to leave the Anglican Church of Canada for the Church of England [at least partly] in order to explore Anglicanism as fully as possible before making any final decision about where I would make my spiritual home. If there was anything I could find to convince myself that the communion to which I already belonged was essentially Catholic, I would then try to reconcile with Anglicanism and continue ministering in the way I had been for the previous six years. So I celebrated my last service in Saskatchewan (a glorious Liturgy of the Holy Eucharist according to the Book of Common Prayer, sung to Merbecke, with all the best hymns) and left the best experience I had ever had of Anglicanism behind.

The parish I came to in England purported to be Anglo-Catholic. In fact, it was three parishes in one: a parish church that had all the right ‘anglo-Catholic credentials’, including a framed ‘papal blessing’ in the sacristy, and two ‘chapels-of-ease’ that were by history and reputation ‘lower’ in churchmanship than the parish church, but in my mind, more authentically catholic than it by far. My experience of this parish was supremely illuminating, and probably more representative of the corporate state of the Church of England than I could have imagined at the time.

Above all, it was an ecclesiological mess. It lived simultaneously under the pastoral oversight of the so-called ‘flying bishop’ and the legal oversight of the area bishop, all by the grace of the diocesan bishop. Some of the people were liturgically traditional while others were happy with all sorts of liturgical innovations. Very few were aware that the Roman Missal was being used one hundred percent of the time across the churches. Many in the parish objected to the ordination of women to the priesthood within the Church of England, although on the part of a significant minority, all that was really wanted was a sincere vicar whom they could relate to.

We had a cycle of ‘masses’ in the parish that would put a medieval monastery to shame, totalling 17 per week with a normal weekday attendance in the single figures, and a maximum Sunday attendance at the ‘thriving’ parish church of about 150. What kept us going were the occasional offices which, as a state Church, we were obliged to perform. In the case of our parish, this would have meant anywhere from 30 to 50 weddings per year, and well over 150 legitimate funerals. I have a hard time even remembering this, as the thought of visiting all those families which had never had contact with the Faith in their lives before, then standing before them at the Crematorium and declaring our Lord’s unmitigated mercy and love as it related to their loved ones, is painful to bear. I felt as if I was no minister of Christ at all; I had become a mere pawn in the business of marrying and burying.

In a small town in Northern Saskatchewan I had learnt to be a priest. I was given the opportunity to guide, to teach, to counsel and to celebrate the Liturgy. In a huge modern city in England, whatever I had learnt before, and whatever I had to offer now, quickly became subordinated to the agonizing burden of political, pastoral, theological, and social issues that make up the Church of England. Everything I had ever loved about the Church – the Liturgy, the community, the continuity with Tradition – had become closed to me in the Church of England, and in the process, I lost a part of myself.

So finally, after many years’ of prayer, thought, reading, and discovery; after influences both positive and negative, I knew it was time to go.

to be continued…

There is enough to say about my Anglican past that I could probably dedicate an entire work to it. I am conscious, however, that it is all too possible to descend into unhelpful polemic, and so to undermine one’s own argument in the process. Besides, there is so much good material available on the history of Anglicanism and its theology that there is really no need for me to reiterate things. Works of particular relevance to me included that of Aidan Nichols, who, in The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism, first caused me to realise that there might be more than one reading on the subject of Anglicanism than I had so far encountered. Like the Zahl book, whatever criticisms one could make of Nichols’ writing, it would still have to be admitted that he proffers significant points to ponder. Above all, I realized that everything I had heard of the Protestant - and of the English - Reformation, was heavily biased.

Implications

But of course it was. Where would I have learned my history of Anglicanism if not from Anglicans (and other Protestants)? Yet in no other field would I have considered such a one-sided presentation of major historical and theological questions adequate. As obvious as it may seem to some, the very fact that an equally legitimate Catholic interpretation of the Reformation (and more particularly, the English Reformation) even existed was new to me – and quite revelatory. As a result of this discovery, I began to question whether or not it was entirely legitimate to assume that the Church of the Middle Ages was as greedy and corrupt as it was traditionally portrayed.

In this regard, to visit Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire is very telling. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, its beauty is outstanding in an already beautiful country, and its status as an ancient holy place is almost palpable as one walks through the grounds. Equally striking, though, is the Tudor manor at one end of the park. Called ‘Fountains Hall’, it was built with stones from the dissolved abbey: a standing testimony to the religion of the theological mercenary. The difference in atmosphere between the manor and the abbey ruins is nothing short of disconcerting. What makes it particularly so, however, is the Orthodox adage: ‘The Church is only as healthy as its monasteries’. Fountains Abbey, like all the monastic communities of England, was shut down, the religious dispersed, and the assets sold for next to nothing to accomplices of the Tudor regime. This is a very different picture of the English Reformation than the one I held as a Catholic-minded Anglican, when I alternately believed beyond reason that the iconoclasm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was either a momentary aberration, a necessary purging of a corrupt Church, or at least transcended by the retention of Catholic spiritual tradition in the Prayer Book.

A New Dawn

Once I had discovered some of the compelling weaknesses of my Anglican paradigm, I felt I had no choice but to explore them and follow wherever they might lead. And once I had realized this, two things of importance happened in my mind: 1) I came to see that the worthy worship of God was not dependent on the extreme effort I was putting into using the Prayer Book on a daily basis, and 2) I read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Roman Missal, and saw that many of the reservations I had continued to hold toward Catholicism were entirely comprehended by the Church, or misconstrued in the first place. I will deal with these in order.

Questions surrounding the Liturgy

There can be no doubt that Anglican Liturgy, according to the traditional rites, can be exceedingly beautiful. What it has done to inform the Church as a whole is immeasurably valuable, and something that I continue to make appeal to as a Catholic. Anglican history may be such that from time to time the icons got smashed, but in the Book of Common Prayer enough was retained that believers could at least count on being reminded of them. Due to my influences, however, I came to mistake these resonances of Catholic tradition as the fullness of Catholic tradition.

For this reason, when I found the best of Anglican practice was being everywhere disputed (just one of the battles being fought in the Anglican front of the broader ‘Culture War’), I began first of all to wonder if the gates of hell might not in fact prevail against the Church, and then to dig myself in for the fight. I invested everything in traditional Anglican practice because I saw it as the best possible repository of Catholic faith. For the innovators to assault the Prayer Book was tantamount to assaulting the very Person of Christ it conveyed. The Book of Common Prayer, with its spiritual orderliness, sublime language, beautiful – albeit implied – musical tradition, became for me a sort of papacy: a touchstone of Christian faith, grounded in Holy Scripture and faithful to Tradition.

Was I ever surprised, then, when listening to an English-language recording of Eastern Orthodox music celebrating the North American saints, to realise that the Catholic Faith I desired so much to live and uphold could be expressed in such a wonderful way outside of the Prayer Book. The idiom of the recording, so far from the poetry of the Prayer Book, was almost vulgar; yet musically and linguistically I had never heard anything that communicated the beauty of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints like it. As an Anglican who professed a belief in this doctrine every time I recited the Creed, I had longed to make it an explicit part of my own devotion. Yet according to the Prayer Book I was bound not to. As a result, when I heard this celestial idea being sung in such an accessible and musically wonderful a way, I was left hungry for more and I knew I was not going to get it, even in the most Catholic-minded of Anglican communities.

So I worked hard to make everything I could of what I had. I sought to manifest in every Liturgy I celebrated, the mystery of all those beautiful doctrines of the Creed. From how I vested to the gestures I made with my hands, I was scrupulous in making sure that everything was right and according to Tradition. Now, this is probably a good thing to do anyway, insofar as a celebrant who does it is ideally subordinating his own idiosyncrasies to the objective practice of the Church, but that was not my whole motivation. For me, being liturgically precise was also about doing my best to manifest in as explicit a way as possible the Creedal doctrines that were but implied in Anglican liturgy. And it was not easy. It was not easy because to do so as an Anglican priest is to do so both alone and in defiance of both wider practice and the straightforward intent of the Prayer Book itself. Which is when I began to see that the manifestation of the entirety of Catholic doctrine at every celebration of the Holy Mysteries is not the prerogative of the Catholic priest. His is simply to make present the Body and Blood of Christ for the people, and when he does so (at least ideally), all the music, and iconography, and collegiality, and behind-the-scenes catechesis, along with everything else, lends itself to marking the Body and Blood and revealing its cosmic implications.

Encountering the Sources

The other great revelation I experienced in light of my exploration of Catholicism occured when I read the Catechism and the Missal.

First of all, I remember when the Catechism was first released in English. Its appearance on the shelves of the bookstore in which I was working at the time was a Godsend, in that it pushed our sales well up for a number of months running. People were buying it in droves, but I failed to look inside. I assumed that it was full of those overdefinitions of questions of faith for which the Catholic Church was famous, and that it constituted merely another dry document: fit for the shelf but not for the coffee table. I had to learn alot more before I would finally pick it up.

Learn I did, though, and so it was that early in the ‘naughties I finally picked it up to read with a friend. We plodded through it some way before we left it to each other to carry on alone. Which, over time, I did. My great realisation in reading the text, though, rested on no one detail in particular. It was simply that, after many years of assuming the Catholic Church to be laden with a legalistic, almost forensic, worldview, it became clear to me that the mystical approach to doctrine I had more associated with the Orthodox Church was very much present in the Catechism, and that all of those pages were simply infused with the reality of Tradition and the necessity of Love. This document, about which I had held so many preconceived notions, was actually a document unlike any other I had read. I would later come to understand that this was my first glimpse into the real operations of the Church. It was all so comprehensive.

Likewise with the Missal. As something of a liturgical traditionalist, I had always assumed that the Novus Ordo Missae was a revolutionary Liturgy, fundamentally disconnected from its ancient parent liturgy. My perception, after all, had been formed entirely on my experiences of liturgies in average parish churches, and parish churches in North America no less. Such appalling examples of the celebration of the Mass were sure to confound an historically-minded inquirer! But then I read the texts in Latin and saw that they diverged very little from their predecessors. Yes, there were differences in order and (in certain instances) practice, but what was clear is that there was no difference in intent. This meant everything to me. With an vested interest in historical theology, I am always suspicious of developments without precedent. For this reason, I can still not abide liturgical disobedience and innovation; they smack too strongly of subjectivity, personal pride, and a callous disregard for our forebears – whom, we believe as Catholic Christians, are as alive and present in Christ as we are ourselves. But it meant that what some priests did with the Order, and what the Order actually said, were not necessarily the same thing, and I could see then that what the Novus Ordo represented was an appropriate evolutionary development, and not the revolutionary one some people had created.

The Result

Of course, now that I knew these things, I could no longer stay away. All of my traditional objections to the Catholic Church were quickly tumbling down. Even my vascillation between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church was resolved in light of the two discoveries described above. First of all, because of my reading of the Roman Missal, I could finally understand that what the Eastern Liturgies and Roman Liturgies were trying to do was the same thing. Then, I could see that the dichotomy of theological method I had perceived as existing between the two Churches was false. In fact, as a Western Christian with Eastern sympathies and interests, I felt that my position was far better comprehended in the Roman Catholic Church than it could be in the Eastern Orthodox Church. I liked Pope John Paul’s analogy of the two lungs of Europe, and came to believe that such an analogy sat better in the minds of Catholics than of the Orthodox. My direction was clear.

Still an Anglican, I now had serious problem. Should I become Catholic immediately and walk away from my job; my house; my history; my life’s work? Or should I give Anglicanism another chance to prove its Catholic nature? I came down in favour of the latter, and moved from Canada to England. I was going to the heart of the Anglican world, and I was going to test both its, and my, mettle.

to be continued…

As I suggested in part I, I become afraid when I talk about my experience of Anglicanism. There are so many brothers-in-ministry and living examples of a profound Catholic faith that I have left there, I would be loathe to think that any of them might consider these words an insult to their lives and various ministries. I can only re-iterate again and again that they are not. As I have tried to express in the preceding passages, it is simply a matter of me no longer being convinced that I could continue to live out an unapologetically Catholic life within the Anglican Church.

The Nature of the Disagreement 

In conversation once with a friend, the idea that the Catholic Church did not recognize Anglican Orders arose as a real source of contention. He considered it an insult to his ministry that the Catholic Church did not see him as a priest, to which I responded that neither did we regard Lutheran pastors as priests but their ministry was no less valid for being Lutheran ministry. As far as I know, Lutheran ministers (at least of the non-Scandanavian sort), never claimed to be priests. Rather, theirs is a clearly-defined ministry seperately established from that of the Catholic Church. I can not imagine a Presbyterian minister being insulted if told by a Catholic that he was not a priest. Yet Anglicans can get upset about this quite easily, for they hold – informed as they are by the Prayer Book – that the English Reformation did not constitute a repudiation of the priesthood.

Yet even while the Prayer Book uses the term, it became clearer and clearer to me over time that what it meant by the term was something different than what the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church meant. It seemed to me an Anglican conceit that, no matter what the Reformers did to dismantle and reconstruct the meaning of the term, as long as the term was still used, Anglican ministers were, in fact, priests. The problem as I see it is, according to its own formularies, the Anglican Church retained neither the form nor the intention of Catholic priesthood.

I am quite familiar with the arguments over the minutiae of the Anglican ordinal, and how it is that Anglicans have argued in favour of a priestly interpretation of its meaning (after all, I used to make them!), but I eventually failed to find the arguments convincing. The reason I came to find them unconvincing is that I failed to find evidence of an explicit intention that an Anglican, once ordained, is to be united with the priesthood of Christ in the offering of the Sacrifice of Calvary. In fact, had there been, I rather suspect that a number of my Protestant-minded colleagues would not have felt so comfortable in ordained Anglican ministry. Yet the fundamental union between the action of the ordained and that of Christus sacerdos is a sine qua non of priesthood. As the priest stands at the altar, he is making manifest in time an action that is eternal. If Christ is the Eternal High priest, then Christ must eternally do what priests do by definition. He must offer sacrifice; which of course he does, in that his work on the Altar of Calvary is eternal. In the end, no Anglican can rightly claim that they are ordained to say: Unde et memores, Domine, nos servi tui, sed et plebs tua sancta, ejusdem Christi Filii tui Domini nostri, tam beatae Passionis, nec non et ab inferis Resurrectionis, sed et in coelos gloriosae Ascensionis: offerimus praeclarae majestati tuae de tuis donis ac datis, hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam, Panem sanctum vitae aeternae, et calicem salutis perpetuae.

There is an intrinsic beauty to the Prayer Book, both linguistic and spiritual, that can hardly be said to have ever been surpassed. Yet theologically, for all we might employ Newman’s techniques as he brought them to bear on the 39 Articles in Tract 90, I think that we are hard-pressed to argue that this masterpiece of prayer and language ever intended to express the same thing that the Church has always expressed, if one takes serious account of Patristic and medieval developments. For if it did, the iconoclasm that is so rife in Anglicanism, the ecclesiology that has permitted so many bizarre innovations in recent decades, the liturgical theology that has permitted so many divergent interpretations and revisions from the beginning: these things would not have happened.

I am quite sure that in saying these things, I am simply exposing my own former misconceptions. I suspect, actually, that almost none of my most naive assumptions would have been shared by my brethren. This must be the reason that I felt the need to go as I did while they have not. We used to talk about the Reformers and assume that what they had to say to the Church in the 16th century was legitimate, so perhaps they were able to accept what we often referred to as the ‘reformed Catholicism’ that was Anglican with far less reserve than I was. For whatever Anglicanism was, or was meant to be, five hundred years ago, by the end of the 20th century, it was manifestly more ‘reformed’ than Catholic’.

On which note, I think I should give the final word to Umberto Eco. Most readers will have seen this before, but in a back-page article written for the Italian weekly Espresso in 1994, he offered some thoughts on the nature of personal computing and the differences between PC and Mac operating systems. His allusion to Anglicanism is most insightful. Enjoy.

Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It’s an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with meThe fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers.  I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant.  Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ‘ratio studiorum’ of the Jesuits.  It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic.  It allows free interpretation of Scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself:  a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

to be continued…

Ironically, it was precisely in the context of a place like the Diocese of Saskatchewan – a place where I was free (and encouraged) to be the Anglican I wanted to be – that I began to realize my time as an Anglican would necessarily come to an end.

Parish Life & Paul Zahl

I was blessed to have been in a parish where the people were patient with, and sometimes even receptive to, my theological (and so my liturgical) ideas. In so many ways, that parish enabled me to grow in my personal faith, and to learn what it meant to be a minister of Christ. At the same time, however, I was always conscious of how different their experience would be of the Church with me as their priest, in comparison to my various predecessors as well as whoever my successor might be. This bothered me, because I was ministering according to what I believed, and did not like the fact that what I was doing most likely diverged quite radically from the ministry of my colleagues. I was confident, at least, that in Saskatchewan there was little chance of anyone taking a line contradictory to the Church’s teaching on such things as the Trinity and Christ’s full humanity and divinity, but this did little to address the fact that in all likelihood I was going to remain very much alone in how I perceived the Church’s ministry, the Communion of Saints, and such Christological questions as the nature of icons.

Then a parishioner gave me Paul Zahl’s book, The Protestant face of Anglicanism. The book might be described as ‘entry level’, but its intended audience in no way undermines its essential content. As naive as it might sound, and as much as I had encountered the Protestant face of Anglicanism in many of my Saskatchewan brethren, it was still my assumption that Anglicans on the Protestant end of the spectrum had simply misinterpreted the formularies. To this day, I am not entirely convinced by all of Zahl’s arguments, either in that book or elsewhere, but that does not mean that one can dispose of his ultimate position. It finally struck me that either a) Zahl was entirely wrong in asserting the fundamentally Protestant nature of Anglicanism (highly unlikely), or b) Zahl was entirely right and the very basis of Anglo-Catholicism was a misconstrual of history (possible), or c) what Zahl asserted could be balanced with Anglo-Catholic claims, and so the ecclesial reality of Anglicanism was that two churches existed under one roof (most likely). Whatever the case, for someone who had never thought of himself as anything other than ‘merely Catholic’, I was now faced with a hard choice.

Implications

What I ended up doing was to get on with my parish work. My mind, however, would not be the same again. On one level, this was a positive thing. My new realization certainly caused me to proceed with greater caution when it came to implementing my ideas in the parish. Many of my earlier pastoral mistakes, born as they were of Catholic zeal, became apparent to me, and I was able to recognize the integrity of many in the parish whose pious instincts were very different to mine. At the same time, I became aware of how mitigated my Anglican Catholicism was. Every Catholic claim I made had to be hyphenated or conditioned. I realized that as an individual believer, I could lay claim to the Apostolic and Patristic tradition as interpreted by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, but that as an Anglican, I did so as a tiny minority: a minority that could in no way claim to have the only accurate interpretation of the post-Reformation English religious tradition. This made my position a subjective one, and subjective has no real place in serious Catholic theology.

There were practical implications to this. For one thing, while I continued to oppose the possibility of women being ordained to the priesthood, I realized that, in an ecclesial community more Protestant than Catholic, it only made sense that my theological reasons for opposing diverged significantly from the majority view. So while I maintained my own integrity, I gave up fighting for it. And while I certainly found that many Protestant-minded clergy and people thought hard about the questions surrounding human sexuality and anthropology, I knew that when I wrote about these issues in the local paper, any support for what I said was going to be voluntary instead of intrinsic. More often than not, there was no support at all (except from Catholics), and I was left explaining myself on the basis of personal conviction as opposed to magisterial teaching. Which is fine, but when a leader is trying to draw a group of people in a particular direction, it helps when those people can have the confidence that what the leader says is not his opinion alone. Teaching over a long period of time may address the problem, but as anyone knows, even a lifetime spent in a single Anglican parish can be undone with a new incumbent.

Observations

In addition to these considerations, certain observations also began to influence my outlook.

Mine was a parish made up predominantly of one ethnic group drawn from a single social class. This is not to take away from Ukrainian members who had become Anglican, often by marriage; nor is it to dismiss the significant Native Canadian (mostly Cree) population that played a role in the community. Likewise, it would not be fair if I neglected to give account of the unreserved welcome the people extended to everyone who passed through its doors. But the make-up of the parish, in terms of representing the people of our town, paled when compared to the Catholic Church. I am told that the average Sunday attendance at the Catholic Church was in the hundreds, including people of every ethnic background, and every economic group in the area. Even people who I thought would be Anglican by [historic] default went to the Catholic Church. Such diversity is what I had always imagined as truly Catholic, and I realized that there was no way an Anglican parish could ever reflect it.

The problem, as I saw it, went to the very heart of Anglicanism. As a religious system, Anglicanism claimed to be a branch of the Catholic tree. If that claim were true, then it seemed to me that, inherent in its very name was the implication of a sort of ethnic English chaplaincy. In England, it might have been more; but abroad, a chaplaincy not dissimilar to the Ukrainian Catholic Church (or some other ethnic Catholic enclave). That had never been the history of Anglicanism, however, as attested to by the nature of its expansion. Anglicanism did not merely serve the English and the peoples with whom the English had contact. It many places, it set itself up as a rival to the already-present Catholics. Which would be fine if the distinctive (read, Protestant) mission of Anglicanism was everywhere acknowledged, but in its polity and in its liturgical forms, it presented a Catholic face.

This is the contradition: An Anglican parish could never hope to reflect all of humanity in its composition of members because it is not a Catholic Church for all people. If it is a Catholic Church at all, it must be so for a distinct people (the English). On the other hand, in its self-promotion as a world-wide communion, it purports to be for all people. This is sometimes used to enhance its claim to catholicity. So we are faced with the question: Is Anglicanism Catholic for being a type of ethnic chaplaincy? Or is it Catholic for being a far-reaching communion? Perhaps it is Catholic for none of these reasons, but simply for its theology. Yet none of these suggestions could be possible. Anglicanism is too far-reaching to be considered an ethnic Catholic enclave. It is simultaneously not far-reaching enough to be considered a communion of all nations. And as for the last - that it could be Catholic by virtue of its theology - even if the events of the last fifty years were not enough to convince one of its inherent problems, Paul Zahl makes a convincing enough argument to give even the most ardent Anglo-Catholic cause to reconsider.

to be continued…

As I have already expressed, to read Neuhaus’s words as if they were mine should be to understand that I am deeply thankful for my Anglican upbringing. Regardless of what I may now understand about the Catholic Church, I am cognizant that I would not be the kind of Catholic I am without the spiritual, theological, and aesthetical education I received as an Anglican. In fact, this is worth expanding upon at length, as so much of my religious identity depends on it.

Early Experience

Years ago, when called upon to describe my vocation to the priesthood for the benefit of Anglican examiners, I said that much of my desire to be a priest was fostered by liturgical experience. I have since met just a few Church-folk, lay and ordained, who have experienced the desire to ‘live in the liturgy’ – that is, they have spoken of a sense that when they were in church, time was suspended, and they felt very much drawn heavenward by the mystery of what was unfolding around them. This led to them feeling as if they did not want things to end - as if such material beauty had exposed them to spiritual realities. And so it was with me. I have no idea what I was like as a child in church from other people’s perspective, but I recall being quite happy to be there. The candles, the colours, the vestments, the sounds: all of these things together made for a significant and happy experience, and whatever my age, they stuck with me.

In this respect, I might have been described as an instinctively religious child. But the religion did not end with the aesthetic. I was, after all, well-catechised; having had the benefit of a formerly-Orthodox, very conscientious Sunday School teacher, and a series of priests who took care to direct us in our religious education. I count myself fortunate.

For this reason it was that I first became attached to the Book of Common Prayer. However elementary my understanding, I had been instructed in its use and meaning (from an Anglo-Catholic point of view, of course!), and over time came to see it as a direct link between my own spiritual interests and the early, and medieval, Church that so attracted me. I believed very much that to use the Prayer Book was to use a living repository of the ancient Faith. It was to subordinate my own romantic inclinations to a corporate reality that extended through time to the Apostles. Seeing an early portrait of Saint Augustine in cope and mitre, and my own Ordinary vested likewise, only served to confirm this sense of connectedness. The language of Anglicanism appealed to all of my senses, and called on me to more deeply explore the Catholic Faith it expressed.

Meltdown and Recovery

As force would have it, I soon got the chance to explore as I felt called. In the early 1990s, I was virtually commanded by my archbishop to get myself off to Montréal for a theological education. This turned out to be a most propitious suggestion, and I will be forever grateful to him for making me go. But when I got there, my whole world disintegrated. A romantic boy left a cozy, Canadian Tire-catalogue life in Winnipeg and found himself facing all sorts of new ideas in an awfully big city. There was not a reference point I recognized, and I was distraught.

I took refuge in the Prayer Book, and planted myself in the city’s cardinal Anglo-Catholic parish where the priest at the time was of immense help. He never let me take shelter from the challenges with which I was faced – whether social, intellectual, or spiritual – but he did provide me with plenty of opportunities to confront them and understand them. Over time, I would come to realize just how important and liberating this was.

What is important to this story, though, is that in the process, I also came to understand my Anglican spiritual and theological inheritance, especially as embodied in the Prayer Book. The composition of the Divine Offices, the preservation of the ancient Eucharistic lectionary and collects, and the traditional elements contained in the Eucharistic Liturgy, were all explained to me in a way that helped me to understand their importance and to appropriate them for my own spiritual and intellectual edification. At the same time, the academic world was opening up to me, and though there was much I had to learn if I was to do anything legitimate with it, my interest was irreversibly inflamed.

Coupled with these gradual developments were various personal elements that lent themselves to a sort of inner reconstruction. Working in a bookstore surrounded by the best of Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox theology introduced to me the matchless pleasure of good books. Not being the busiest bookshop in Montréal also meant I learnt quite alot about research, as I was able to follow bibliographical trails from one section to another around the store. And the fact that my Orthodox manager there became something of a friend and mentor, continually pushing me in the direction of the Church Fathers, informed my Anglican outlook immeasurably. Of like importance was my good fortune at being introduced to a Carmelite spiritual director. His influence would become the thing that made me realize what my interests were actually all about. Through him, I was introduced to prayer in a way I had never been before.

I describe the context in which I was being formed as ‘pan-Catholic’. I already had Catholic presuppositions, but everything I was being exposed to expanded my scope, so that it would come to include the Faith from early medieval Britain and Germany, to modern Moscow and Athos. The whole picture was becoming more exciting and complex, yet all the while, I believed, remaining consistent with Anglicanism. It was on that note that I finally left Montréal to take up a position in Northern Saskatchewan.

It must be admitted that Saskatchewan forced me to engage with wider Anglicanism for the first time in my life. Prior to this startling move from Montréal streets I had come to love to the fields, trees, and lakes of Saskatchewan, the only alternative to my Catholic-minded Anglicanism I had yet encountered had been an über-liberal, North American Protestant sort. This, far from holding out any appeal to me, appeared intellectually disingenuous and spiritually bankrupt. As a result, I never took it seriously as a legitimate expression of the Anglican tradition, and so managed to stay the Anglo-Catholic course, with Newman, Pusey, Keble, and Neale – especially Neale - to guide me. Saskatchewan changed all that.

Moving to Saskatchewan was like stepping into the 19th century debates I had only encountered before in books. At my first meeting with the clergy, I imagined myself to be John Mason Neale sitting down to dinner with members of the Brighton Protestant Defence Committee. I loved the fraternity, but the vast abyss between my understanding of what consituted Anglican tradition, and that of the Evangelicals in the diocese, seemed insurmountable. Obviously our essential faith was the same, but our ecclesiology, our sacramental theology, and so ultimately our Christology, seemed very different. Yet for all that, I was afforded the opportunity in Saskatchewan of exercising my theological principles with the full support of the bishop, and I was deeply thankful. Such was the case when I first arrived in the diocese as a lay minister, and so too when I returned a year later to serve as a priest. It was in Saskatchewan that I would be able to try out the things I had learned in Montréal, and so it was there that I got to experience, as freely as one could in the Canadian Church, the beauty of the Anglican tradition as embodied in the Prayer Book: in the discipine of the Divine Office, in the application of the traditional lectionary and collects in a pastoral setting, and in the celebration of the Holy Mysteries according to a most venerable rite.

to be continued…

Apologies to those of you who expected something from me much earlier than this, but more than a year on, and numerous mitigating circumstances later, I think that I have finally come to a point where I might be able to say something helpful and interesting about my full, corporate entrance into the Catholic Church. This is something I hope to do in parts over the coming days and weeks. So bear with me, and enjoy….

In many respects, I would find it easy to point you in the direction of an article by Richard John Neuhaus, written for First Things, April, 2002, (http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2007), entitled ‘How I Became the Catholic I Was.’ This is an article written with mildness and profound insight into the catholicity of the author’s own Lutheran upbringing. It is equally an article where you could easily read ‘Anglican’ for ‘Lutheran’ and replace ‘Ottawa’ with ‘Winnipeg’, and find that my own spiritual history, including many of my own feelings, had been laid out faithfully before you. I am grateful to Neuhaus for this.

But of course, there are differences too. First of all, there are psychological dynamics involved in any spiritual conversion that the editor of First Things and former Lutheran pastor doesn’t touch upon. There are also political questions that, while they may comprise some shared experience, due to differences in chronology and location, inevitably take a different form. The fact that Neuhaus was a Lutheran of the Missouri Synod as opposed to an Anglican obedient to Canada’s General Synod would be an example of one such question.

Even now, though, it is not easy discussing with friends and former brothers-in-ministry about all of the elements that ended up contributing to my ultimate move into the Catholic Church. This is because for one thing, the move itself is too multi-faceted a thing to present fairly in the course of any single conversation; for another, I feel as if, in leaving it behind, I may be seen to have forfeited the right to comment on my Anglican past. This is one of the most difficult things to contend with as a convert. For a long while, one is too much a neophyte to comment on one’s new house; yet as a defector, nor is one taken seriously as a critic of the old one. And yet, there are surely things to be said about both, which in turn compels me to say them. Knowing, then, that everything I observe will almost certainly be construed in a way other than I might hope, I submit the following remarks to you and beg your indulgence.

to be continued…