Articles
Posted on Thu 21 November 2024
Anglican patrimony: a gift to the Church - Catholic Herald - November 2024
The history of Ecclesia Anglicana, as the Church in England was referred to not just in Magna Carta but in correspondence even with popes, is important when we come to think about Anglican patrimony and what use it might be, through the Ordinariates, to the Catholic Church of our own day.
The English Church not only created the ecclesiastical and civil map of the nation, still discernible today, but also engaged in pioneering mission to the continent of Europe which helped to consolidate what was to become Western Christendom.
In Anselm, Scotus and Ockham not to speak of John Fisher and Thomas Moore, we find the creators of intellectual tradition. Even from the earliest period of its separation from Rome, there were people in the emerging Church of England who were looking to and writing in a way that suggested a direction towards Catholic unity.
For example, the Preces Privatoe of Lancelot Andrewes, a scholarly Bishop of Winchester, show that he believed what the Catholic Church believed about the Eucharist. At the same time, his devotion to the blessed Virgin Mary was very different from what other Protestants were willing to allow. Jeremy Taylor, in spite of his invective against the papacy - he was a Bishop in Ireland after all - gave much of his time to work on auricular confession.
Any Anglican who says that auricular confession is not important after the Reformation should read Taylor, at least in terms of providing for Pastors and what they should do. Meanwhile, Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells until he was disposed for refusing to swear the oath of allegiance to William the III and Mary II, wrote about the Assumption in metrical verse two hundred years before the dogma was defined: “Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced / Next to his throne her Son his Mother placed”.
Then we have the Oxford Movement, and particularly the work of St John Henry Newman. When Catholics read Newman, they often look for what Newman saw as lacking in Anglicanism which led him to the Catholic Church. That’s not wrong, of course, but much of Newman’s most significant writing was as an Anglican: his University Sermons, for a start, and his struggle against Erastianism - the idea that the church should be an instrument of the state - which defined so much of the movement’s central concerns.
Apart from Newman, others have also produced scholarship of abiding value. If we just look at a few Anglican biblical scholars in the 19th century, we might well be amazed at the work they undertook. Brooke Foss Westcott, who ended his days as Bishop of Durham, and FJA Hort devoted almost their entire lives to establishing the Greek edition of the New Testament in the light of the discovery of the new manuscripts.
And then there was JB Lightfoot, Westcott’s predecessor as Bishop of Durham, who debated learnedly with Charles Gore (who was later Bishop of Birmingham) about the nature of the Christian ministry. Gore’s book The Church and the Ministry would be of great use to any Catholic who wanted to learn more about the origins of Christian ministry.
The contribution to scholarship continued through the 20th century. Aidan Nichols, a great Catholic scholar of Anglicanism, has called Eric Maskell - Who died an Anglican - a teacher of Catholic truth. Mascall’s contemporary Henry Chadwick was an eminent patristic scholar whose preparatory work for the ARCIC conversations should never be forgotten; St John Paul II recognised it by presenting him with a stole. JND Kelly (who taught me personally), though his work on creeds and on early Christian doctrine, showed the kind of scholarship that we must acknowledge as part of the patrimony.
As for liturgy, Sarum, as well as the East were influential in Cranmer’s compiling of the Book of Prayer. In the Ordinariate’s Book of Divine Worship, we have the preservation of Cranmer’s marvellous English, perhaps more used now in the Catholic Church than in parts of the Church of England! Whether we agree or disagree with the Anglican Benedictine Gregory Dix in The Shape of the Liturgy, it cannot be denied that he changed forever the way we think about Christian liturgy. Where patrimony is concerned, there is a great deal to receive critically; we should not receive these things uncritically, certainly, but they have a great richness about them.
The Ordinariates might well model for the rest of the Church the old-fashioned Anglican commitment (particularly of the pastor but not only of the pastor) to the community that is round about, so that the clergy do not think of themselves simply as being Mass priests or as pastors of congregation that chooses to come to them, but are committed to the welfare of the community in which their church is set. The mission of the Church cannot be “hit and run”: where mission is concerned, the commitment to the presence is as important as the need to go out with the Gospel.
Fundamental values have been formed by Ecclesia Anglicana, understood in its widest sense. Their survival depends very much on our continued relationship with the narrative that has given them birth. Where cult is concerned, Anglican patrimony offers richness of worship, of music, of language, of resources that cannot be and should not be consigned to some kind of antiquarian Interest.
It has to do with liturgical scholarship; it has to do with an awareness of what the English Church has contributed to the wider Church in the past and what it can again now. The Ordinariates have been called to be a witness to this.
Through the generosity of Benedict XVI, the Ordinariates have already made a very important contribution to how the Catholics Church views its own diversity. The Church is very diverse: there are 23 Eastern-Rite- churches, for a start. All have their own Canon Law, their own liturgical traditions and so on. The Western Rite also has had diversity; The Mozarabs of the Iberian Peninsula, for example, contributed to the transmission of learning from the Middle East to medieval Europe.
The Mozarabic liturgy is still used; so is the Ambrosian Rite, the Dominican Rite, and now, of course, that of the Ordinariate. The whole process of a proper inculturation of worship will be hindered if we have a false idea that the West has some kind of liturgical and canonical unity which may not be necessary in the end.
The Eastern churches show us that it is possible to have diversity of many different kinds while still being in conformity with Catholic truth and teaching. There is no reason why that shouldn’t be the case everywhere, although of course there must be organs that determine where something is or is not in conformity with Catholic truth.
Recent ecumenical experience with the Orthodox and the Oriental churches has shown, moreover, that there is considerable flexibility in how that truth is understood and explained, and how it can make for the unity of the wider Church. Such understanding can contribute creatively to the need for inculturation in churches and communities of the Latin rite.
In this, the Ordinariates could play an important role. They are well placed to retain, nurture and enhance valuable traditions going back not only to St Augustine and his successors but also to the saints of the North who spread the faith and were not afraid to give up some of their precious customs in the cause of maintaining Catholic unity.