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All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Category Archives: Catholic Tradition

2021: Year of Hope

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by cath.anon in Catholic Tradition, Christmas, Faith

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Catholic, Solemnity, Tradition, Virgin Mary

This past year, 2020, has felt like one enormous Lenten season. I know that is not technically accurate, but it seems Easter came and went with hardly a ripple. We have all been slogging through month after month of lockdowns and restrictions.

It has also been a time of reflection for me. What am I doing with my life? How is my family? How is my spiritual life? Is God pleased with where I am heading?

All of these questions are characteristic of Lent. It seems like even in 2020’s Ordinary time and Easter season, God was trying to pull us all back to deeper meditation on what it is we are doing individually, communally, and even globally.

But yesterday was different for me, maybe for the first time in months. In the Catholic calendar, January 1st is the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God.

Over Christmas, I could not be at Mass. My wife had tested positive for Covid the week before (no symptoms, she’s just fine, thankfully). So we all quarantined over Christmas Eve, Christmas, and any other Masses we might have been able to go to. But our quarantine ended Wednesday this last week.

So I sat outdoors with my parish at Friday’s Mass, seeing some faces I haven’t seen for weeks, others months. I was cantoring, and legally speaking, I am supposed to be singing alone. But we have a rebellious parish, and everyone joined in anyway, probably because they were Christmas songs. How can you not join in singing a Christmas song?

January 1st fell on Friday this year. And just like Lent has it’s own set of weeks, Fridays are set aside in the Catholic calendar as days of sorrow. We are meant to think on that Good Friday and fast from something – maybe meat or coffee, whatever is a sacrifice for us. Lent is a special time to do this, but really, Catholics are encouraged to make every Friday a little Lent.

But Feast Days trump these sad Fridays. Despite it typically being a day of sorrow and mourning, the church, in the providence of God, called us to celebrate instead. Mary is our mother which means Jesus, the Son of God, is our brother.

I am no prophet, but I think that’s a fantastic omen for the coming year. We’ve all gone through an extended season of Lent. I’m not ready to call 2021 an “Easter Year”. But on the Feast Day of a mother and child who brought light to a very dark world, I refuse to call 2021 another year of Lent.

I choose to call it a year of hope.

©2021 Catholic Anonymous

You can read other stuff I write at catholicanonymous.blog.

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Great Expectations

24 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by chalcedon451 in Advent, Bible, Book Club, Catholic Tradition, Christmas, Faith, poetry

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Paradoxes, Poetry as theology, St Ephrem

It is easy to see why the Israelites of old did not spot the Messiah when He came. As we read through the lectionary for Advent, it is hard not to be struck by the image which predominates. It is not the only image, Isaiah’s “suffering servant” is also there. But there is a longing for the Messiah to come, and he will be strong, mighty, he will smite the foes of Israel, he will restore the Temple, he will purify the Levites, he will set all things right. The long-suffering Chosen People will get their reward, and the unrighteous will be smitten hip and thigh and consigned to the “pit”. It’s a very human concept we see here. A desire that one’s enemies should be confounded and that you, because of course you are among the righteous, should prosper.

God had other ideas. To our expectations He posed paradoxical opposites.

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Without losing His divinity, or mixing it with our humanity, the Word became human – fully human. The Word came not with a loud crash of thunder, shaking the heavens, but silently. He who created the heavens and the earth was a babe in arms, totally dependent upon others – and silent except for cries of hunger and need. He was one of us in every way. It is understandable that one of the earliest heresies was docetism. The idea that God could be fully human was not one easily digested. There is in us, a longing that says flesh is weak and spirit is the thing that matters. But that is not what God says. St Anthanasius helped us understand what St Peter meant when he wrote:

3 as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, 4 by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the [a]corruption that is in the world through lust.

1 Peter 2:3-4

As St Athanasius put it: “‘The Word was made man so that we might be made God”. This concept of “theosis”, common in Eastern theology, is less familiar to many in the Western tradition (though less unfamiliar than it once was). That is why the Church rejected docetism, the idea that Jesus merely “assumed” a human form. Even after the Resurrection, many found, and still find, it hard to believe that the Messiah lived a fully human life and died a fully human death. The Creed tells us that “he died and descended into hell”. So He did. All that He did for us. Our sinful bodies are washed clean with His blood; He restores our spirit.

This is all a far cry from avenging troops of angels. It also sits uneasily with our most common Western method of doing theology.

Jessica, in her marvellous series of posts on the Advent Book, Frequencies of God, has called R.S. Thomas an “Apophatic Poet“. That is an apt phrase and one appropriate to my theme here.

In the Weast we have inherited a theological tradition based on Greek philosophy, which seeks to locate and identify the central point in an argument, setting boundaries and pathways on the way to better definitions. But there is another, and perhaps better way of doing theology, which is why poets and musicians can make the best theologians. Definitions, whilst we think them necessary, can be dangerous. Thomas writes about the problems we face when writing and talking about God because the very tools we use are finite and limited. In using such tools, in devising such definitions, we run the risk of unconscious blasphemy. Setting limits to the subject of enquiry, when that subject is the human experience of the Infinite, can have a deadening and even fossilising effect. In trying to “define” God, we are attempting to contain the Uncontainable and Limit the limitless. It is here that poetry can be far more useful to us than prose, as it is better as sustaining a dynamic and fluid sense of God.

The poems chosen by Mother Carys upon which Jessica is commenting, provide examples of what I am talking about here. Let me illustrate in with an apt poem by that great theologian/poet in the Syriac tradition, St Ephrem, where he uses paradoxical pairings of opposites to give us a dynamic sense of God.

Your mother is a cause for wonder: the Lord entered her
and became a servant; He who is the Word entered
—and became silent within her; thunder entered her
—and made no sound; there entered the Shepherd of all,
and in her he became the Lamb, bleating as he came forth.
Your mother’s womb has reversed the roles:
the Establisher of all entered in His richness,
but came forth poor; the Exalted One entered her,
but came forth meek; the Splendrous One entered her,
but came forth having put on a lowly hue.
The Mighty One entered, and put on insecurity
from her womb; the Provisioner of all entered
—and experienced hunger; He who gives drink to all entered
—and experienced thirst: naked and stripped
there came forth from her He who clothes all 
(Hymn on the Nativity 11:6-8).

For Ephrem, God’s identity is both revealed and concealed. He is the Hidden One who becomes Revealed; the Almighty One, who becomes weak; He is the Immortal One who suffers death; He is the Great One who became small. This method of doing theology avoids the danger of our sounding as though we have worked out God. Poetry, and music, can be better ways of descrbing the indescribable.

I would like to wish Jessica, Neo, Nicholas, Scoop, Catholic-Anon and all who have written here, a peaceful and holy Christmas, and to extend that wish to all our readers. With His birth, all things were made new, and as we approach the Christ-child this Christmas, perhaps above all others, may we find there the peace and love He alone can bring us.

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From Fundamentalism to Catholicism

07 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by cath.anon in Catholic Tradition, Faith

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Catholicism, Christian, Fundamentalism

Hello everyone! Jessica has been kind enough to allow me to post on this blog, which I am excited to do. I’ve been enjoying reading her posts, as well as others here on a regular basis.

That’s not just me being pleasant. The site has pulled me back to it a number of times and has given me a lot of food for thought.

I wanted to share a little bit about my own faith background in my first post here (and would love to read any of yours). I am a convert to the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). My wife and I, along with our children, converted around the time Pope Francis became pope.

I grew up what you might call a Fundamentalist, though we never labeled ourselves anything. “Nondenominational” or “Baptist” might be a better description, actually. I don’t know for sure.

Whatever I was, though, I grew up in an environment that had no warm feelings for the RCC. A few misconceptions I had included the following.

1. The pope was probably the anti-Christ (or would be in league with him whenever he showed up).

2. Roman Catholics worshiped Mary. Worship of her echoes the worship of some goddess in ancient Egypt.

3. Everything written in Chick Tracts about Roman Catholics.

I ended up falling in love with and marrying a young woman who grew up Anglican, which is a bit ironic. I was as clueless about Anglicanism as I was about Roman Catholicism. I somehow missed the memo that, as she put it later, Anglicans are basically Roman Catholics, just without the pope.

When we got married, she followed me into the nondenominational, happy-clappy church I was a part of, trying to be the dutiful wife. But secretly, she missed the smells and bells of liturgical life.

The Eucharist also meant a great deal to her, which I did not understand at the time. After one of our church services, she was shocked and horrified when a friend of ours took some left over bread we had used for communion (which we considered entirely symbolic), and used it as a snack afterwards, dipping it and chewing right in front of her.

On another front, my sister and brother-in-law shocked us by leaving their nondenominational (gosh, that’s a long word) church to join the RCC. My brother-in-law had spent ten years flirting off and on with the idea of converting. Finally he did, and it was like a nuclear bomb went off in our extended family.

So many nights, all of us were up late debating Mary, the Eucharist, the pope, everything. I was not as vehement with him as others in our tribe, but I did take it upon myself to convince him he was wrong. Anybody who understood the Bible could not possibly become Roman Catholic, right?

Well, as I did my own research, visiting sites like Catholic Answers and especially delving into articles on Called to Communion, I found, to my surprise, that Roman Catholics actually do read the Bible – very much so. They had very good reasons not to believe in Sola Scriptura and to view the Gospel differently than I did.

What really threw me across the Tiber, though, was the idea that to remain a protestant, I had to believe that God abandoned his church for 1500 years until Martin Luther came along. The more I thought about this, the more it unsettled me.

Imagine the priests, theologians, and saints coming together for Ecumenical Councils through the ages, seeking to know the Holy Spirit’s mind on issues of Christology, the Bible, icons, and all sorts of other issues that were rending the church in two. The Apostle James says that if we ask for wisdom, the Holy Spirit will give it to us. Am I to believe these holy men, and by extension the church that relied on their teaching, were abandoned by God in their hour of direst need?

That was too much. It took an unbelievable amount of hubris on my part to think that fervent, praying Christians for the first millennia and a half got it wrong while we “modern” Christians for some reason managed to get it right.

It came down to Easter Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism in the end. I would go into what made us veer west, but I think I have gone on long enough for one post.

At any rate, that is my story. Again, thank you for allowing me to write here. I look forward to continuing to read what everyone else posts!

On a side not, my own blog is catholicanonymous.blog if you want to check that out.

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Church with a mission?

25 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition

≈ 27 Comments

I can hardly say how much I wanted the current discussions at Synod on the Church of England to inspire me. The title of Archbishop Cottrell’s Report, “A Vision for the Church of England in the 2020s ‘Christ centred and Jesus shaped. Simpler, humbler, bolder’,” struck a good note, although the subtitle ‘A commentary to accompany the picture’ gave cause for concern. I recognise such diagrams. I have worked with enough ‘consultants’ to recognise the genre.

By sheer serendipity, I was reading my copy of the Church Times over morning coffee, and a review of a book whose title interested me God’s Church in the World: The gift of Catholic mission, which finished with a sentence that resonated in the light of the document:

Just at the moment, when we might be tempted to streamline and rebrand the way in which we market the Anglican operation, the contributors to this book invite us to pause and take stock. The mission of God is entrusted to us as a gift, not a commodity. This is a book that might inspire us to talk, walk, and eat more slowly, in order to be attuned to a redemptive encounter with the Word who speaks our language but in the cadences of eternity.

How I wish that the Bishop of Chichester, had had more say in the report. Our mission is a ‘gift’ and not a ‘commodity’. We have not been ‘given’ the power of ministry, we have been lent it and, as stewards, we have to account for it. How often do we appear to be like that steward who buried the talent and was intent on escaping punishment by hoarding it so he could hand back what he had been given?

I am all in favour of our being ‘bolder’, and there can be times, especially out here in the country, when we seem like a club, but I am unsure, to put it mildly what is ‘bold’ about this report. It seems more like a meditation on how to manage decline.

It may, of course, be that it is laywomen like me out in the community who are out of touch with what our leaders see as essential, but I’d love to know more about the sources of this vision. It reminds me of my time in teaching, where ever and anon some ‘expert’ would pop up with a vision for the future which looked to those of us in the class-room so remote from our lived reality that it was little wonder that nothing much came of whatever it was. Focus groups have their place, but I cannot help think that the Bishop of Chichester is right. Pausing and taking stock is necessary, but if this is the result?

There is much in it with which no one would want to disagree, but my question is what does it add up to? Of course I want a

a younger and
more diverse church, a church that serves
children and young people and involves
them in its leadership and ministry; a
church where black lives matter

but if we are going to do lists to signal our virtue, why aren’t women and LGBTI+ people on it? If anyone really thinks our Church fully reflects women’s voices, they aren’t listening, and as for the gay, lesbian and transgender voices …?

Yes, it is obvious we are ‘not as big’ as we used to be. But what does that mean other than the obvious? Smaller and more faithful and missionary can be better than numerically large and lukewarm. There seems little sense here of how we got from there to here and the lessons to be learned. Where were the historians in this?

I am not sure what a ‘Jesus-shaped’ Church looks like, but I do know what a ‘Management consultant shaped’ Church looks like, and I think I know which this looks more like.

As the discussion proceeds, perhaps there will be things to cheer me up – I was ever an optimist.

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Saturday Jess: Taking sides?

14 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State

≈ 47 Comments

Tags

Church & State, church politics, Culture wars, saturday Jess

As some of you know from my occasional contributions to Neo’s blog (what do you mean you haven’t read it! Golly, here’s the link, though those of a liberal frame of mind may need a trigger warning, but more of that in a moment) I am by way of being an Americanophile. I spent a year in the mid-West when I was ten, and fell in love with small-town America. There were no fewer than ten churches in a town of about ten thousand people, and I loved the Episcopal Church at which we worshipped. But there is one aspect of American culture which I wish we had not imported – the so-called “culture wars.”

I suppose I come at this from what I’d call a Church of England direction. I was brought up to believe that the Church of England has a mission to the whole country. As I grew up I came to value that side of things more and more. Regardless of creed, class or colour, the doors of our churches are open to all who want to go there (well, okay, they were, but don’t start me on Mr Johnson and his government). I don’t take the view that religion has no place in public life, and I value the role that the Church plays in this country. It is not just (although it is also) the work done selflessly and quietly locally through foodbanks, or through hospital and university chaplains, it is that local presence.

As a politcal näif, it came to me but slowly that there were “parties” in the church. At university I went along to some Christian Union meetings, but soon retreated to the calm of the College Chapel. I’ve never been one for jumping up and down and proclaiming my thanks for my salvation. C 451 tells a story of a politican who, on being asked by a Street Preacher whether he was saved, said “yes”, only to be asked “why are you not proclaiming it?” To that he responded as I would: “It was a close shave so I don’t like to shout about it.”

College chapel was like home – Alternative Service Book, decent sermon, seemly and, well, for me, a bit boring. Being an inveterate church hopper, I found one which was not boring. The Blessed Sacrament was reserved, there was incense, and the Book of Common Prayer was used. It wasn’t long before I’d bought my first mantilla and Rosary, and I asked Father to bless the latter – and he blessed the former too. I found a spiritual calm there which neither the College Christian Union, nor the Chapel gave me. But it never occurred to me to think that my preference was somehow “better”; it was different, and difference was, I thought, and still think, good.

Some at the Church I attended would refer to what had happened at the time when the Church of England had ordained women in the way that you might refer to a great disaster. As I came to know more, I realised that my Church was part of a group called “Forward in Faith“. There was considerable hostility among some of my fellow worshippers to those who, in their view, had “betrayed” the Church by agreeing to the ordination of women. Meanwhile, talking to friends at College, where I still attended early morning prayers in the Chapel, I encountered a similar hostility to the “dinosaurs” who opposed the ordination of women. As a woman, I was expected by my peers to share that view, and I was asked more than once “how I could bear” to “worship with those people?” I had a very good (male) friend in another College who was a keen Evangelical, and he used to ask me how I “could bear to worship in Laodicea”; he never darkened the door of the College Chapel.

It may just that I am a wishy-washy liberal sort of woman (guilty as charged by the way, and proud of it), but I did not see then, nor do I now, why they could not all “live and let live.” My other half (who only takes an interest in these things insofar as living with me requires it) asked me last night why I ran a “conservative blog” if I favoured the ordination of women and thought that LGBTI+ Christians should always be made welcome in church. I tried to explain that my Catholic views on the sacraments and the nature of the Church were not “conservative” to me, and constituted no bar to an inclusive view of that Church. I am not sure they were any the wiser, or even better informed.

On both sides of the Atlantic we seem to be living in sharply divided political cultures where the traditionally intolerant attitude by conservatives to things like gay rights are reciprocated on the left by a “cancel culture” to anyone with non-progressive views. This does seem to be an import, and it exacerbates existing divisions. In my own church it can seem, sometimes, as though those taking a traditional view of marriage and other social issues, are being marginalised. I was struck, as I thought and prayed about this, puzzled as to what a Church which has a national mission should do, by what Canon Angela Tilby has written in the latest Church Times: “we can take on that protective task only if we resist a too-easy identification of progressive causes with the values of “the Kingdom”.

It is a timely reminder that balance is one of the great virtues of Anglicanism, and so I leave you this Saturday, with her wise words:

We should nourish more diversity of thought, a wider theological intelligence. Scriptural truth, after all, is multi-layered. We misread our mission if we think that it is all about us and our personal preferences. In the same spirit, we should ensure that the conservative-minded among us are not driven to the edges, not only because this could encourage animosity, but because they retain insights that we need. We will engage effectively with secular society only if we know where our roots lie

Enjoy your Saturday!

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Of Books and more and yet more …

13 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Book of Common Prayer, Common Worship

When it comes to buying books, as my other half would affirm, I am a one-woman ‘keep independent bookshops open’ dynamo. As most of what I want is secondhand, and as an affectionado of the usual internet sources (I use Amazon only when I have no alternative), I can usually keep within budget, but birthdays and Christmas are easy for family and friends – a booklist is provided. So when I say I am not in favour of more books, it is clear I must be referring to something other than my habit.

When I first went to church as a girl, the Rector was a firm “Book of Common Prayer” man. It came as something of a shock when I first encountered the mysteries of the Alternative Service Book. I liked Rite B, mainly because of the resonances with the BCP, but really couldn’y quite greet it with enthusiasm. But it was what was on offer, and being a good girl, I got on with it. Language mattered, but if this was the language my church wanted to use, best get on with it. What mattered more was who I encountered in the Eucharist.

I found the advent of Common Worship a change for the better, but still preferred to go to eight o’clock services where BCP was in use. I got used to Common Worship, and use it in my personal devotions, but there is a good deal of leeway given as to how one conststructs Communon Services, which I know some priests find a creative opportunity and others a “challenge’, but not ina good way. At last count, examining the Rector’s shelves, there were eight different books. At what point is enough, enough? For me, as for others, it’s time for well, frankly, a Book of Common Prayer.

There’s no reason why a revised single volume could not have modern and traditional language versions as the 2000 Common Worship has. I think the American Episcopal Church has a single volume, and maybe Audre could enlighten me?

This isn’t a call for some sort of liturgical reform, this is hardly the most important issue at the moment, but I think Cranmer got it right – a single Book of Common Prayer which we can carry with us and whose language infuses our own was a good idea in his day – it remains one. There are, I have discovered, situations in which you can have too many books.

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Leo the Great

10 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by chalcedon451 in Catholic Tradition, Early Church, Faith, Pope

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Papacy, Pope Leo the Great

Today is the feast day of St Pope Leo the Great. As we have had some excellent posts recently on the themes of authority and catholicity, this might be an opportunity to say something about the role of Leo the Great in the process of establishing the place of the Papacy in these matters.

It is easy (which is why it is ao often done) to assume that from the beginning the Papacy based itself on the Petrine verses in St. Matthew’s Gospel. The Eastern Orthodox like to point out that those claims were cast in terms of ‘primacy’; they are correct. But what did that much-disputed word mean to those who used it in the early Church? If we are to understand this, we need to understand something about Roman ideas of inheritance and authority – ideas which were shared across the whole Empire – including Constantinople.

St. Leo the Great made two main contributions to the developing understanding of what ‘primacy’ mean. The first amounts to an assertion that the past existed in the present, not just because he was Peter’s successor, but in the form of a direct and present link between the Apostle and the Pope. As he put it in his sermon on 19 September 443 (Sermon 3.4)

Regard him [Peter] as present in the lowliness of my person. Honour him. In him continues to reside the responsibility for all shepherds, along with the protection of the sheep entrusted to them. His dignity does not fade even in an unworthy heir.’

This is what Leo understood by the saying of the Chalcedonian Fathers: ‘Peter has spoken through Leo. (See here also W. Ullmann, ‘Leo I and the Theme of Papal Primacy’, Journal of Theological Studies 1960, pp. 26-28).

Under Roman jurisprudence, a person was supposed to be present in his legal representative, even as the deceased was in his heir. The same jurisprudence was present in the eastern empire, so to argue that anyone in Constantinople would have been ignorant of this conception of what it meant for Leo to have said what he had said seems to strain credulity. Indeed, as K. Shatz puts it in Papal Primacy From Its Origins to the Present (1996), Leo made ‘the “church of tradition … into the church of the capital city that extends its laws to the whole world.’ (pp. 33-36 for the argument).

On this understanding the Pope was not simply Peter’s representative but his living successor – Peter spoke through him. Thus, Rome’s judgments and decrees were rendered universal because the Holy Apostle was understood to be present in Leo and in the system of justice he administered. As Leo put in in that same sermon on 19 September 443 (3.3):


Persevering in the fortitude he received, blessed Peter does not relinquish his government of the Church. He was ordained before the others so that, when he is called rock, declared foundation, installed as doorkeeper for the kingdom of heaven, appointed arbiter of binding and loosing (with his definitive judgments retaining forces even in heaven), we might know through the very mysteries of these appellations what sort of fellowship he had with Christ. He now manages the things entrusted to him more completely and effectively. He carries out every aspect of his duties and responsibilities in him and through him whom he has been glorified.

So, if we do anything correctly or judge anything correctly, if we obtain anything at all from the mercy of God through daily supplications, it comes about as the result of his works and merits. In this see his power lives on and his authority reigns supreme. This, dearly beloved, is what the confession has obtained [Matthew 16:18]. Since it was inspired by God the Father in the apostle’s heart, it has risen above all the uncertainties of human thinking and has received the strength of a rock that cannot be shaken by any pounding.

It is Peter’s presence that brings about the Christian universalism that Leo envisoned himself exercising. If we look at his letter to the bishops of Illyricium, 12 January 444, placing them under Anastasius, the bishop of Thessalonica, and telling them that serious disputes must be referred to Rome, we see him exercising that power of which his sermons spoke.

The primacy of Rome was not simply the result of Apostolic succession, or of inhertance from St. Peter, but of this very special relationship which ensured that Peter spoke through the Pope. As Leo says in a sermon given on 29 September: [Sermons 5.4]


our solemnity is not merely the apostolic dignity of the most blessed Peter. He does not cease to preside over his see but unfailingly maintains that fellowship which he has with the eternal Priest. That stability which he received from Christ the rock (by having himself been made ‘rock’) has poured over onto his heirs as well. Whenever there is any show of firmness, it is undoubtedly the shepherd’s fortitude that appears.


Leo’s views are set out in fuller form in a sermon preached on 29 June 443 (Sermon 83.1) in which he makes it clear that since Peter exercises the Lord’s power on His behalf, so too does the Pope exercise the powers of Christ Himself, as Peter speaks through him.

This is not a claim made by any other Bishop. It was made in public by Leo in his sermons and letters, and it was based firmly upon Scripture, patristic testimony and the common law of the Empire. Leo deserves to be called ‘the Great’, not only for what he did in his time as Pope, but also for the rich legacy he left us. His sermons are well worth acquainting yourselves with.

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The Catholic Church?

09 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition

≈ 8 Comments

Sometimes we Anglicans don’t help ourselves. Not long before lockdown mk.1 I welcomed a newcomer to the Church. He arrived just as I was beginning to set things up, so we had a good talk. He was, he told me, an ‘agnostic’ who had become interested in Christianity whilst involved in discussions at university to “prove” it was wrong. That was a good start. The Rector came in and said hello before she went to vest, and he turned to me shocked – “oh,” he said, “I thought this was a Catholic Church.” I assured him it was, but after he referred to the fact that “the Catholic Church does not ordain women”, I told him I’d take it up afterwards over coffee and a biscuit. I did, and he is still coming, I am pleased to say.

Talking with the Rector afterwards, she said it was “our own fault” for not being clearer about such matters – hence my first sentence.

I did us a little leaftlet to explain, and I want to set some of it out here.

“Catholic” comes from two Greek words meaning, literally: ‘according to the whole.’ In the Latin used by the Church Fathers, it means universal – as St Vincent of Lerins put it, ‘that which has been believed everywhere, always and by everybody.’

Now, unless one takes the view that the Oriental Orthodox and the Eastern Orthodox are not holding to what was believed from the beginning (a hard one as they have changed far less than we have in the West) then they are ‘Catholic’. That, following the schism of 1054, the Latin Church chose to arrogate the word to itself, does not mean that anyone else agrees, or had to agree with it.

After the Reformation some churches, including my own Church of England and the Old Catholics, continued to use the noun as it was the best description of the historical tradition of which are part. In the nineteenth century, especially under the influence of the Oxford Movement, the idea of the ‘branch theory’ became popular, the idea that the ‘tree’ of the Catholic Church had split into three branches (or more). Those who like that sort of thing will do so, but it seems to me and many other Anglicans, an interesting but unnecessary idea.

We are Catholic because we inherit from the past the historic doctrinal formulations agreed at the first five ecumenical conferences. We inherit the view that the consecrated bread and wine ARE the body and blood of Christ; the how and the why are deep mysteries, and wisdom suggests that we just accept what Christ said. We venerate saints, especially Our Lady. We understand the priesthood as needing an episcopate.

The former Archbishop of York, John Habgood, expressed it best when he wrote: ‘True catholicity belongs as much to the future as to the past. It entails the creative development of tradition as well as humble respect for it.’

We welcome, of course, that at Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church recognised the existence of other churches, even if it has occasionally to call them ‘ecclesial communities’, and that it wants to talk ecumenism. Naturally we hope it will work towards a better understanding.

I finish though, with our newcomer, who said afterwards that what, with kneeling at the altar, altar lights, the reserved sacraments, communion of the tongue and statues of Our Lady, our church seemed “more Catholic” than the one hae had attended, which had had none of those things. In the spirit of ecumenism my response was that we were both Catholic!

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Living Faith

07 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith

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Catholic social teaching, Pope Francis, William Temple

There’s been a lot here recently about worship and ecclesiology and Anglicanism, as well as, yesterday, a protest about faith illiteracy in the public square; it seems time to draw some of these threads together – here goes.

In Christ’s time … there were some who were so earnest about the washing of the chalice and the paten and the tithing of mint and anise and cummin that they neglected justice and mercy and faith.

We argue over liturgy, doctrine, ecclesiology, and we wonder why governments feel free to ignore us or treat us as marginal to society? The wonder is that we wonder? Have we not taken ourselves there?

That should not be taken to mean I do not think these things are not important – they are, but it does mean that we need to focus on the things Jesus said a lot about – and there’s not a lot (in my ‘red letter’ Bible) about liturgical practice. There is a lot about justice and mercy and helping what Jesus called the ‘poor’ and we would call the ‘marginalised’. It’s one reason I am quite keen on a church leader others here are very much not keen on – that’s the Pope.

Pope Francis seems to me to be trying to right the balance. The last Pope was very good on theology, liturgy and the like, his precedcessor was a great man in all sorts of ways, a real leader, but the balance seemed, when Francis became Pope, to be on matters which were of great concern to people in the Church, but of marginal concern to others. Pope Francis saw the need to re-emphasise Catholic social teaching and the many ways in which it impacts on the wider world – that is what Fratelli Tutti pulls together.

In some quarters, by which I mean parts of the American Church and the more conservative parts of Christianity, it has been taken as almost socialist. I wonder how many of the critics have bothered to inform themselves about Catholic Social Teaching? This, from Cardinal Nichols, stresses the need to put our faith ‘into action.’ The areas covered by this are listed here, and are: Human Dignity; Community and Participation; Care for Creation; Dignity in Work; Peace and Reconciliation and Solidarity. This is not an ideology or a third way between Marxism and Capitalism, it is, rather, a Christian way of viewing the world, informed by the values Christ and the Church teach us.

Pope Francis is building on work which began in modern times, with Rerum Novarum where Pope Leo XIII sought to bring a Catholic lens to analyse the various social ills of the age. There were twelve other encyclicals dealing with areas covered by Catholic Social Teaching before Pope Francis’ pontificate, so anyone supposing him to be some kind of Peronist really needs to be explaining how what he writes is out of line with the work of his predecessors.

Catholic social teaching, whilst best set out by the Roman Catholic Church (which as anyone would, I hope admit does this work of setting things out systematically best) is not unique to it. There has always been a radical social element to parts of Protestantism, and Anglo-Catholicism flourished in the slum parishes of industrial England with priests committed to living out their faith by ministering among the poor and the dispossessed, some of whom found in the beauty of their churches an antidote to the grim realities of life in industrial slums.

In the Church of England the best-known exponent of Catholic social teaching was William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury for a tragically short time (1942-44). He was deeply committed to extending educational opportunity across society and to trying to reform the structures of society to ensure a fairer deal for those left behind in the race for prosperity.

Temple began from the place all Catholic Social Teaching has to begin, that it its origins. It originates not is some Marxist view of the world but, to quote Temple (The Faith and Modern Thought, 1910, p. 148 – thank you C451!!) in the belief that if Christ is the Incarnation of the Divine Word, that is ‘the principle by which God rules the whole of existence and thorugh which he made the world’ then we, as Christians, can never ‘be outside’ it.

What did that mean for Temple, and what might it mean to us? Religion, politics, art, science, education, commerce, finance and industry are all connected by being ‘agents of a single purpose’. (The Church Looks Forward, 1944, preface). That purpose is neither the end that the State may decree, nor the end that the individual might desire, it is neither social engineering, nor consumerism, it is ‘the divine purpose’ or, as Temple put it: ‘the coming down out of heaven of the holy city, the New Jerusalem.’

I owe this little-know fact to C451 – the first person to use the phrase ‘the Welfare State’ in modern British politics was William Temple. By that he meant a State which, in contrast to what he called the ‘power State’, in which the State coerced its citizens for ends it thought good, focussed on serving the needs of all its citizens, including those at the margins – especially those at the margins, as they were dear to Our Lord’s concerns.

Temple was a major contributor to the Beveridge Report which founded the Welfare State. He held, passionately, that out of the horrors of the Second World War had to come not the ‘home for heroes’ promised by Lloyd George, which turned into homes you needed to be a hero to inhabit (thank you for that one too, C451, I do listen!) , but a society where equality of opportunity should be offered. Temple did not believe you could ever get equality of outcome, he believed in original sin, but he did hold that if Christian teaching permeated society, it would be for the best – both for the Church and the State.

Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of that, and that’s one of the many reasons the State finds it so easy to ignore the Church. Pope Francis is simply the most prominent of those reminding us of the truth that if this is God’s world, then God’s Church needs to be active in it, and not just in church.

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Authority?

06 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Early Church, Faith

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Papal Authority

The Council of Jerusalem

One of our commentators, Cath.Anon raised the issue of ‘authority’ in a searching and penetrating comment on my post of ‘catholicity’; it’s a jolly good question and one to which I had been (sort of) coming. He has encouraged me to get my skates on and brace myself to do it – so thank you Cath.Anon, both for the excellent comment and the nudge!

He is right to say that there needs to be authority. The quickest survey of church history shows this has been a problem from the start. However one wishes to interpret the claims of Rome that its Bishop is more than primus inter pares that is not how things operated for most Christians for most of the history of the faith.

We know from Acts and Paul’s letters that when Peter drew back from table communion with Gentiles under pressure from the church in Jerusalem, the matter was resolved only by what we have seen as the first council – and there Paul told Peter he was wrong – and the majority agreed with him. That set the precedent for the next four hundred years or so.

No one seeks to deny that the Bishop of Rome had a prominent place in terms of authority, but that authority was as a presiding bishop over those bishops in the western part of the Roman Empire. Alexandria, the most fertile intellectual and cultural centre of the Roman Empire was far more prominent in terms of the development of doctrine and theology, and its Bishop, like his counterpart in Rome, had authority over bishops in north Africa and to the south. The Bishops of Jerusalem and Antioch also had an authority which stemmed from their historical importance, and with that a right to be heard. The establishment of the new imperial capital at Constantinople created a tension and a dynamic which became important once Christianity was recognised by the Emperor.

Prior to that, in cases of theological controversy, local bishops did what the Apostles had done, got together, when they could, to sort things out. The establishment of the See of Constantinople and the official recognition of Christianity changed things decisively – as we see at Nicea and after. As C451 has written extensively on this (just follow the link), I shall confine myself to the question of authority.

The decisions reached at Nicae followed the template of that first council – except for the presiding of the Emperor. Rome sent representatives, but no one asked the Pope whether he approved or not. The pattern which developed across the next few councils is interesting. Rome and Alexandria had a common interest in trying to contain the upstart claims (as they saw them) of Constantinople. We see the apogee of this alliance at Ephesus in 431, where Cyril of Alexandia’s alliance with the Bishop of Rome saw off Nestorius. This alliance broke down in the unskilled hands of Dioscorus at Chalcedon in 451, where Constantinople was able to win the support of Rome. But the dynamic was the same.

None of this is to deny the theological and doctrinal issues that were at stake, but it is to suggest that the church dealt with them by dialogue and discussion as between equals; the Pope in Rome mattered greatly, but his imprimatur was not decisive (or even, sometimes needed), and ecclesiatical politics often resembled coalitions in countries with a system of PR. Where there were three major sees, two against one would always win, and Rome was skilful. The demise of Alexandria, first after Chalcedon and then the Muslim conquest, left only Rome and Constantinople. The latter refused to recognise the claims of the former to primacy, and indeed tried to claim the same for itself (follow the link to C’s posts). This led to the schism of 1054, which was never healed, and helped lead to the downfall of the great imperial city.

In the four centuries which followed, both Sees faced encroachments from secular power, but where Rome was dealing with kings who were Christians and, while sometimes disputing the extent of it never denied its power, Constantinople was dealing with Islamic invasions which were to leave it a shadow of its old self, a decline not helped by the Catholic Venetians sacking the city in 1204 in an act of disgraceful vandalism.

After 1453 Rome alone remained of the old five major Sees of Christendom, at least in terms of freedom from Muslim domination. However, within a century, it managed to create schisms within its own domain by its ham-fisted response to calls for change. Of course, further east, and as far as China with the Nestorians, there remained Christians who had never acknowledged the claims of Rome. In the end, Rome reformed itself, but not before the unity of Western Christendom had fractured.

In terms then of ‘authority’, where should a Christian wanting certianty look. Rome? I look acros the Tiber and see warring tribes, with many Catholics claiming not only to be more Catholic than the Pope, but that the Pope is not even a Catholic. If that’s ‘authority’ I can have that, without the nastiness, in my own Church. Of course, you can decide to convert and take the view that the Pope is right on matters infallible, but you can do that anyway, and as I understand it, there is even dispute on how many infallible pronouncements the Popes have made. I am sorry, none of that would be comfort if I needed the security of a single voice of authority.

What then, is the alternative for those of us who do not find the claims of Rome convincing? In a way it is the same as for those who are Catholics but do not find the Pope very convincing oin the environment or what some wags call “tutti frutti”, which is to make up our own minds – reason and scripture working on how we interpret authority. I suspect most of us do that anyway.

In terms of ecclesiology, there are bishops and a synodical system with lay participation for Anglicans which are our equivalent of that meeting at Jesusalem – and the Archbishop of Canterbury, like Peter, can find himself challenged. Its better for all of us than a system where the Pope is challenged only by some bishops, priests and laity after the event, and where people genuinely spend weeks and months trying to work out what he actually said and then what he meant by that.

In the end, we make up our own minds as guided by the Spirit which moves us. I respect those who find their destination in Rome and ask no more than respect for those of us who find it in Canterbury – even if the architecture is not so grand and ancient.

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