Fr. Aidan Nichols talks in Mississauga

Here's an except from Part One over at The Ordinariate Portal:

In terms of theological method, what was seen in the seventeenth century as the Anglican ‘threefold cord’ of Scripture, Tradition and reason (sometimes called the ‘three-legged stool’), now mutated into something rather different, a trio of Scripture, Tradition and contemporary experience. I shall return to this mutation in connexion with Pope Benedict’s own thought but can at least note here how it is the source of many of the problems of the Anglican Communion today owing to the claim that contemporary experience mandates us, requires us, to alter the reading of Scripture found in Tradition in such matters as the ordination of women and sexual ethics. Here, appeal to experience not only displaces reason but trumps Scripture and Tradition.

I cannot claim that distinguishing thus between the three streams represents some sort of highly original work of analysis on my part. It is a fairly obvious kind of grid to place over the data. Sorting out the various movements in Anglican theological history is, indeed, relatively easy in principle though in practice it may not always be easy to place squarely this or that figure: for example, the late Elizabethan Richard Hooker whose Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity has often been hailed as the quintessentially Anglican theological treatise has been claimed as their own by all three of Catholics, Protestants and Latitudinarians.[3] Still, this sort of broad categorization remains serviceable, not least in the perspective of Anglicanorum coetibus.

So conceived, the ‘Noah’s Ark’ quality of Anglicanism makes it difficult to give a blanket endorsement to the Anglican tradition in a comprehensive way, since too many internal contradictions lie within. That is not just a problem for the Pope of Rome. Anyone with even a mildly developed sense of logic would feel the same. So when the 1981 Final Report of the first Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC I) declared in its twenty-second paragraph, ‘Anglicans are entitled to assurance that acknowledgement of the universal primacy would not involve the suppression of theological, liturgical and other traditions which they value or the imposition of wholly alien traditions’, we have to ask, Well, which Anglican traditions, specifically, do you have in mind? This is one important sense in which we need to focus our lens when seeking to understand what is involved in Anglicanorum coetibus III which speaks of the maintenance of ‘the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church’. With which of the theological sub-traditions of Anglicanism are we supposed to be working when we consider that same liturgical, spiritual and pastoral inheritance?

In practice, however, in the context of the Ordinariates, this problem is somewhat more malleable than at first it might seem. Almost exclusively, those who are seeking communion with the Holy See are what we can call the heirs of the Oxford Movement, rather than a cross-section of Anglicanism as a whole. This makes things easier, though not altogether plain sailing. After all, the Oxford fathers (I mean Keble, Pusey, Newman, and their epigones), did not see themselves as initiating something entirely new. Rather, they saw themselves as building on the Catholic element in Anglicanism from the beginning of its continuous life under Elizabeth I. And this is where we have to revert to the history of that element, which initially I cut off with the death of Henry VIII. Looking back at the Elizabethan settlement, such Anglicans could find signs of Catholicity in features of the Prayer Book, notably its calendar, lectionary, and collects, so often taken (with adaptations) from the Sarum Missal, and the Ordinal with its important preface which committed the Church to continuing the three orders of bishop, priest and deacon.

It is arguable that a clearly defined Catholic party first emerges with James I and William Laud, who became an influential bishop in James’s reign. There is a famous conversation with James’s minister the Duke of Buckingham where Laud was asked to run his finger down a list of prominent clerics and write by the side of their names either the letter ‘P’ or the letter ‘O’ – ‘Puritan’ or ‘Orthodox’.[4] In the succeeding reign, that of James’s son, Charles I, amid an emerging emphasis on the importance of a ceremonial appropriate to a sacramental religion, the ‘Orthodox’ or Catholicising party embarked on daring measures: notably the 1639 imposition on Scotland of a more Catholic edition of Cranmer’s Prayer Book and the marginalization of Puritanism by invoking the juridical powers of episcopal courts. The once popular Calvinist doctrine of grace was edged out in favour of a theology that looked towards the Fathers not simply for apologetic reasons – to argue that the Fathers took the same view of Scriptural teaching as had the Reformers (this was the position of such Elizabethan apologists for Anglicanism as John Jewel[5]) – but for their own sake, as expressions of Tradition valuable in and of themselves. Here lie the seeds of the notion of Anglicanism as a reformed Catholicism, equidistant between radical Protestantism and Rome.[6]

-snip-

Newman had predicted that the adoption of the non-negotiable imperative to catholicize the Church of England would turn out to be the Achilles’ heel of those heirs of the Oxford fathers who remained in the Church of England. It would never be possible to gain the National Church as a whole for the Catholic cause. Accordingly, that cause – as understood by Tractarians and Anglo-Catholics, though not by the old High Churchmen, was doomed to ultimate frustration. What Newman did not see was that the seal on that frustration would come with the abandonment of the apostolic shape of the ministry: that is, with the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate. But he divined correctly that, as he put it in his lectures on the ‘difficulties felt by Anglicans’, the natural outcome, or, in his words, the ‘legitimate issue’, of the movement of 1833 would be union with the Holy See.[12] This brings me conveniently enough to the topic of such union. Interest in unionism, it may be said, does not begin with the Traditional Anglican Communion or with Forward in Faith or indeed with the twentieth century ecumenical movement. Although the evidence comes mainly from private papers, such as reports sent back to Paris by French ambassadors or the correspondence of James I with his son, there can be little doubt that some sort of feelers were put out by the Stuart kings about possible terms of reunion, and by the court of Rome to them. As two modern Anglican commentators, a husband and wife team, put it, writing in the 1970s, ‘The Stuart monarchs never completely lost sight of the ideal of the one Church, whose unity should be restored, nor did the popes resign hope that the English, through their sovereign, should be drawn back into the papal fold’.

The picture shows Anglican Catholic Church of Canada Metropolitan Bishop Peter Wilkinson passing Fr. Nichols a CD of his recently completed Altar Missal that is already being examined by the liturgy committee for the Ordinariates outside of England and Wales, which will have a different liturgy as the Anglo-Catholics there use the modern Roman Rite. Fr. Nichols was also in the midst of signing a book for Bp. Wilkinson, who is, like probably everyone in the ACCC, a big Aidan Nichols fan.