Sitting down to write this article closer to the generous deadline than I first imagined, I was delighted to learn that The Lamp shares a name with the long-defunct publication of the Society of the Atonement, founded in the Episcopal Church by the Reverend Paul Wattson in 1898. From its origins, the Society of the Atonement had a mission to promote the visible unity of Christians. The modern-day Week of Prayer for Christian Unity was founded by Wattson and his fellows as an octave of prayer, quite intentionally located between the old feast of the Confession of Saint Peter (January 18) and the Conversion of Saint Paul (January 25). The Society and its prayer established a definitely Romeward direction of travel, and so it was only logical that Wattson and his community were received into the full communion of the Catholic Church in 1909.
The story of the Society of
the Atonement and its journey to the Catholic Church is one of countless tales
of groups of Anglicans becoming Catholic. Some of these ramshackle outfits
achieved their goal admirably, whilst others achieved it only in part, and
others still languished and failed. But the prevailing narrative in formal
ecumenical circles has for many years been uniform in condemning them all as
eccentrics, embarrassments even, who obstruct the real work of ecumenism. One
ecclesiastical historian described their endeavors as “the fantasy of reunion.”
I would like to make the case that the truth is, in fact, rather more nuanced.
For the
past sixty years or so the ecumenical movement has approached the reunion of
Christians with what we might call a “church to church” model: the restoration
of full, visible communion between the historic bodies of Christians, East and
West. It has rightly seen the divisions between Christians as a scandal to the
proclamation of the Gospel, and justly sought to bind up the wounds that mar
the Bride of Christ by bringing about a new kind of consensus between the
Christian communities. A fruit—and cause—of these efforts has been the various
formal ecumenical dialogues intended to identify discordant doctrines, to
discuss them, and to discover positions of agreement, which in turn lead to
greater unity.
The
dialogue between Catholics and Anglicans has been one of the most visible. It
began around the time of the Second Vatican Council, intensified during and
immediately after it, and took on an unusually high level of publicity in the
1970s and ’80s, not least with visit of John Paul II to England in 1982 and the published work of the
Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, often known simply as A.R.C.IC.
Anglicanism entered this
conversation from a rather privileged position. The council attributed to
Canterbury a special place amongst the ecclesial communities of the sixteenth
century because so many of her traditions, rejected by continental Protestants,
are of obviously Catholic origin. Unitatis redintegratio even spoke of these Catholic institutions which “in
part continue to exist” within Anglicanism, despite separation from Rome.
It likely had in mind a
threefold ministry, ecclesiastical law, dioceses, parishes, and cathedrals, and
formal liturgical rites, the presence of which constitute a distinctive
Anglican polity. On the one hand, Anglicanism distances itself from Calvinism’s
outright rejection of the Church visible. On the other hand, by its separation
from Rome, it necessarily rejects any claim of uniqueness on the part of the
Catholic Church. From this arose the so-called branch theory, which allows
Anglicans to claim to be a visible
manifestation of the universal Church. As the Declaration of Assent puts it:
“The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic
Church.”
These external institutions,
still visible to some extent in Anglicanism today, have often been deployed by
its apologists as proofs in claims of apostolic and Catholic authority, in
contradiction once more to Roman claims, and also in distinguishing Anglicans
from European Protestants, as well Presbyterians and Puritans. Many Anglicans
to this day dislike being called “Protestant” for that reason. And the texts of
the seventeenth-century Anglican divines are replete with what to the Catholic
ear at first sound like completely unobjectionable ideas in this regard. It is
only by examining the ecclesiology that underpins these ideas that we come, by
Catholic standards, to see their fundamental limitations.
The writings of Richard
Hooker are a case in point. Hooker understood ordered liturgical worship to be
a necessary part of the Christian religion and wrote of it in the splendid,
richly sacramental language that would have made Calvinists wince. Such
worship, he wrote, is “the Splendor and outward Dignity of our Religion, and
are forcible Witnesses of ancient Truth; are likewise Provocations to the
Exercise of all Piety, and shadows of our endless Felicity in Heaven.” Whether
such expressions are the vestiges of genuine Catholic feeling or the mere
political appropriation of Catholic ideas (or both at once) is a matter that
can be debated. Regardless, it can be said that the survival of such views
within the Church of England allowed its adherents to develop them and to make
them into something coherent enough to be revived in the nineteenth century.
This
was the task of the Oxford Movement, the Tractarians, and their inheritors in
the Anglo-Catholic revival of the early twentieth century. Pusey, Keble,
Newman, and their followers sought to revive Catholic principles in the Church
of England. They did this in the hope of promoting their understanding of the
Anglican project, and after Newman’s conversion, some made the case for
corporate reunion with Rome. These efforts led not only to a rediscovery of
Catholic ideas among Anglicans, but to a fervent desire to see a convergence
not just of opinions and attitudes, but of structures.
During
the next century, the Anglican Communion would depart substantially from what
had once been considered the settled answers to basic questions of the Catholic
religion. The ordination of women and an equivocal understanding of same-sex
unions not only eroded the Catholic sediment upon which the bedrock of
Anglicanism had rested; it also effaced relations with Rome. In a recent
interview, Father Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican bishop of Rochester
and a member of A.R.C.I.C. recently ordained for the
Ordinariate, said that these developments had undermined the ecumenical
agreements made since the Second Vatican Council. Walter Kasper has gone
further, describing the ordination of women as bishops as “a turning away from
the common position of all churches of the first millennium.” The ecclesial
body that had once been perhaps the closest to Rome on many questions is now
further from rapprochement than at any time since the sixteenth century, and
the ecumenical springtime that was in the air after the council has given way
to winter. What had formerly been the ultimate goal of Anglican-Roman Catholic
dialogue—the restoration of full and visible ecclesial communion—as well as the
level and seriousness of what can be pursued by such exchanges, is
fundamentally and forever changed.
Cardinal Kasper made his
rather robust point at the Lambeth Conference in 2008, on the eve of the Church
of England’s decision to admit women to episcopal ministry. He was invited to
speak by Rowan Williams, then the Archbishop of Canterbury. He concluded his
address by recalling precisely the Catholic institutes and traditions found
within Anglicanism to which, some fifty years earlier, the council had itself
alluded:
Anyone who has ever seen the great and wonderful Anglican cathedrals and churches the world over, who has visited the old and famous colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, who has attended marvelous Evensongs and heard the beauty and eloquence of Anglican prayers, who has read the fine scholarship of Anglican historians and theologians, who is attentive to the significant and long-standing contributions of Anglicans to the ecumenical movement, knows well that the Anglican tradition holds many treasures. These are, in the words of Lumen gentium, among those gifts which, “belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.”
For many Anglicans, hope for ecclesial reunion continues
despite these developments. The failure of institutional dialogue has in no
small way led to a realization that the old way of doing ecumenism is
irretrievably lost. Instead, those who remain faithful to the cause of
reunion—the cause of the ecumenical movement and the council, no less—have been
left to take up this task themselves. The original intentions of
“church-to-church” dialogue has now been unofficially handed on to rather more
amorphous groups within the various Christian communities, made up of those who
remain faithful to the original roadmap and its definite direction of travel.
It was against this
background that Pope Benedict XVI issued the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum
coetibus in 2009, providing for
personal ordinariates; structures equivalent to dioceses for the reconciliation
of precisely such groups of Anglicans with the Apostolic See. More than just
receiving such groups, Anglicanorum coetibus went further than
anyone had predicted in retrieving also their patrimony; the riches of the
Anglican tradition which were not only Unitatis redintegratio’s “Catholic traditions and institutions” but also Lumen gentium’s “forces impelling toward Catholic unity.”
The working out of what
this Anglican patrimony is and is not has now been going on for a decade and
will need to continue for many more. Pope Benedict saw it as a triptych:
liturgical, spiritual, and pastoral. For its constitutive elements to be
identified demands the passage of time as former-Anglicans-turned-Catholic
settle into their new ecclesial home and come to see for themselves, and have
others see in them, what makes them distinctive. But at least some of the more
tangible of its elements can be ascertained more readily. The most significant
is undoubtedly the Anglican liturgical heritage, which the Holy See inherited
with alacrity in a set of liturgical books known as Divine Worship. Rites for baptism, marriage, and funerals were approved
in 2012, a Missal in 2015, rites for the sick and dying in 2020, and more
recently still the Divine Office has been published.
The Office is perhaps the
best known and loved form of Anglican worship. Cardinal Kasper’s lauding of
Evensong as “marvelous” is neither unusual nor unique. For Louis Bouyer it was
“not only one of the most impressive, but also one of the purest forms of
Christian common prayer to be found anywhere in the world.” Evensong in
particular, still broadcast weekly on the B.B.C.,
continues to be a cultural reference point for a diverse crowd. Christopher
Hitchens frequented it; Roger Scruton played the organ for it. Now, with the
publication of Divine Worship: Daily Office, this
uniquely English treasure of the Christian patrimony has been shared in a new
way.
I started this essay referring to the Society of the Atonement. Father Paul, its founder, spoke of atonement as “at-one-ment,” the reconciliation through sacrifice of God and man. Death to self for the good of another is the essential pattern of the Christian life, informing everything from law to worship and ethical living. The fruit of such sacrifice, then, is not loss, but gain. The reception of these traditions within the fullness of Catholic communion neither depletes them nor dilutes the Church. For this reason, as Pope Benedict hoped, these elements of our now common patrimony can enrich us all, and with greater lamprophony proclaim Jesus Christ to the world.
Father
James Bradley is a Priest of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham
and assistant professor of canon law at The Catholic University of America in
Washington, D.C. Divine Worship: Daily Office (Commonwealth Edition),
containing the Office from the Anglican tradition newly approved for use in the
Catholic Church, is available from The Catholic Truth Society of London at
ctsbooks.org.