Category Archives: Catholic Tradition

Vain Repetition?

24 Wednesday Feb 2021

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Book Club, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Julian of Norwich, Lent, Marian devotion

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In the Facebook Lent Book Group one member has noted that Sheild Upjohn is very reluctant to take sides in the various theological issues she herself raises. In the chapter on “prayer” this is clearest on two issue which readers of this blog will recognise – praying the Rosary and praying with the Saints.

Our old correspondent, Bosco, was very hot on these issues. Like many Protestants of an Evangelical bent (if that is what he was), Bosco objected to praying the Rosary, reminding us that we had been warned against vain repetition, adding for good measure that we shouldn’t pray to the Holy Virgin (whose virginity he, in rather poor form even for him, denied) or the saints. Ms Upjohn’s delicacy is perhaps understandable. New readers here need only to put “Bosco” into the search bar on the blog to find some prime examples of prejudice uniformed by knowledge, allied to a firm refusual to rethink once informed. It’s a way of being, but not one which commends itself to anyone who does not already hold such views.

Catholic actually pray “with” the Saints, not to them; the same is true of the greatest of the Saints, Our Lady. If you do not believe there is a “great cloud of witnesses” then so be it, but at least do fellow Christians the courtesy of informing yourself what they say they believe. Can devotion be misinterpreted? It can, and those Anglo-Saxons who feel uneasy with overt displays of emotion, may well find themselves feeling that way about some of the devotions practised by those whose culture makes them very easy with such displays; but they might like to reflect that understanding requires more than observation uninformed by knowledge. Empathy matters, and before we rush to judge others, we might think to exercise it.

It raises the issue of what prayer is for? Mother Julian is a good guide here, writing in chapter 41:

Our Lord himself is the first to receive our prayer, as I see it. He takes it, full of thanks and joy, and he sends it up above, and sets it in the treasury, where it will never be lost. It is there before God and all his holy ones – continually heard, continually helping our needs. When we come to heaven, our prayers will be given to us as part of our delight – with endless joyful tasks from God.

chapter 41

I have found praying the Rosary whilst walking an excellent way of taking two forms of exercise, and I know Jessica has found it useful after I recommended it to her. In so praying it helps my mind focus on the Scriptural passages behind each part of the Rosary. The idea that it somehow raises Our Lady to divine status could, I suspect, be raised only by one who brought it with them because of a suspicion that Catholics do that. There has been a very long history of anti-Catholicsm in the Anglo-Saxon world, and even though we are now in a more secular age, traces of it linger, and added to that we have the aggressive secularism which finds all religion a survival of what it dismisses as medieval superstition, without ever understanding it.

Here, again, Julian is helpful. In chapter 25, Jesus offers her a vision of the Blessed Virgin in heaven:

And with this very same expression of gladness and joy, our good Lord looked down on his right side and brought my mind to where our Lady stood during his Passion, and he said, ‘Would you like to see her?’ … as if he had said, ‘Would you like to see how I love her, so that you can rejoice with me, in the love that I have for her and she for me? … Would you like to see in her how you are loved. For the love of you I made her so exalted, so noble and of such worth; and this delights me, and I want it to delight you.

Chapter 25

Sheila Upjohn’s approach is irenic in the best way. Experience has taught he what it has taught others, which is that you cannot really argue about this issue, all you can do is to try to enter into an understanding of why, for so many of us, Our Lady is so loved. That is not a bad pattern for us during Lent.

#lentbookclub is on Twitter as #LentBookClub, Facebook as https://www.facebook.com/groups/LentBookClub, and is using The Way of Julian of Norwich by Sheila Upjohn which can be bought here rather than Amazon. It runs from Ash Wednesday 20210219 to Easter Sunday-ish 20210404 and we are doing a chapter a week, roughly. Folk who are blogging about this are: Graham, at https://grahart.wordpress.com/, Andrew at https://www.shutlingsloe.co.uk/, Eric at https://sundrytimes2.wordpress.com/, Soobie at https://soobie64.medium.com/, Ruth at https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/. Come join the pilgrimage with Julian to Norwich!

2021: Year of Hope

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Christmas, Faith

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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.

Great Expectations

24 Thursday Dec 2020

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

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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.

From Fundamentalism to Catholicism

07 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith

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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.

Church with a mission?

25 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition

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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.

Saturday Jess: Taking sides?

14 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State

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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!

Of Books and more and yet more …

13 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition

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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.

Leo the Great

10 Tuesday Nov 2020

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

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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.

The Catholic Church?

09 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by 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!