What it means to be Anglican

Father Anthony Chadwick has a most interesting analysis of what it means to be Anglican.

Well, as soon as you move over, you’ll cease to be Anglicans. I deliberately misquote, because I am not interested in polemics against a Catholic cleric who said something of that kind about Anglicans contemplating joining a future Ordinariate. Of course, this ceasing to be Anglican (to become a Catholic) is full of ambiguity, so I feel I should clarify things a little.

I can see three essential ways of being Anglican, and this will determine what we would keep or let go on finding ourselves under Roman Catholic authority.

Go on over and read the whole thing. Very interesting. Of course, he nails it with the third way:

3. Cultural / ethnic definition: We are Anglicans like French Catholics are Gallicans. See some of my old articles: Gallicanism – Erastianism – The Counter Reformation and Anglican Patrimony – Jansenism – Anglo-Jansenism and Immobilism. We refer to our ethnical roots as English people or English-speaking people living in countries like South Africa, Australia, the United States, Canada or other places where the sun never set on the British Empire in the old days. For the most part, we originated in a family belonging to the Anglican Communion. We only ever learned about the existence of the 39 Articles if we read for Orders and went into the Ministry. None of us took all that very seriously, and moved with the various Catholic and ritualist movements that evolved in our Church. We are cradle Anglicans like cradle Catholics! This upbringing gave us a feeling of attachment that is no different from the sense of belonging experienced by Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Serbs and people from all cultures and sensitivities. On discovering the Catholic view of everything, we become aware of our roots in the pre-Reformation Church, and why an Englishman can feel that he belongs when living in Normandy.

On being incorporated into an Ordinariate, it is obvious that we will no longer be members of the Anglican Communion or jurisdictions in formal and canonical association with the Lambeth Conference or the Queen of England. It is also obvious that we will believe in the Catholic doctrines rather than give credence to the 39 Articles and the Black Rubrick. We may continue to love the cultural value of our Prayer Book, Cranmer’s English prose, and our morning and evening choir offices in particular, but we will continue to follow our Catholic pilgrimage we began as Anglicans. Becoming Catholics (in the institutional sense) would be fulfilling what we already are as Anglicans in this third way of understanding the word. This is to be a hermeneutic of continuity and not one of rupture.

I think we should be very clear in our use of words and concepts. Many of us, in the Continuing Churches in particular, have not been Anglicans for years in the institutional meaning. We left the Church of England, ECUSA or others a long time ago. Many of us ceased to have the least interest in doctrinal formularies that developed in the thick of the sixteenth-century dialogue of the deaf between two sets of men who believed that Tradition was static and everything had to be proved to be explicit in the New Testament and early Church history.

Catholic clerics are famous for narrow-mindedness and wanting to assimilate all cultures into doloristic Spanish and Italian counter-reformation Catholicism, against which the reaction after Vatican II was massive, and Indian Catholicism has become a pastiche of Hinduism! There is a moderate position between forcibly latinising Lebanese Christians in the seventeenth century and Latin American syncretism mixing Voodoo, Santa Muerte, rosaries and holy images in one shop window! Crusty old British army officers in the nineteenth century, swaggering around with handlebar moustaches and bull whips, used to say about the “wogs” that they would understand English if you shout at them loud enough! Portuguese Jesuits in sixteenth century Kerala behaved no differently with the Thomas Christians. For information about these historical events, I recommend reading Dr Geoffrey Hull’s The Banished Heart.

I have difficulty in believing that we live in a more enlightened period. We have had Latin imperialism for centuries, which even physically persecuted East Syrian and Byzantine Catholics. Then we had the excesses of inculturation in Africa and Latin America – still the Jesuits, and I would hope we are coming to a moderate position between Scylla and Charybdis.