First step towards Scottish Personal Ordinariate?

Having like others assumed that the first personal ordinariates for groups of former Anglicans might emerge in Australasia / United States, does the following press release from Forward in Faith indicate that it may in fact be in Scotland?

The great generosity of the Catholic Church in Scotland in this would certainly seem to bode very well for those Anglicans in Scotland who prayerfully await the establishment of a Personal Ordinariate there.

Traditionalist Anglicans in Scotland celebrate Christmas

Traditionalist Anglicans in Scotland are setting up a new community in Edinburgh. This is being made possible because of a generous offer from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh to provide a place of worship for their first service this Christmas Eve.

Canon Len Black, Regional Dean of Forward in Faith Scotland, the organisation which represents orthodox Anglicans world-wide, said, “This move has come about because of the rapid drift of the Scottish Episcopal Church away from the traditional faith, morals and practices of the universal Church. We are most grateful to Cardinal Keith O’Brien for the generosity he has shown us in making a place of worship available, not just for Christmas but in the months ahead, as we seek to serve those Episcopalians who look to us for spiritual and sacramental support.”

“When the Scottish Episcopal Church first decided to ordain women as priests some 15 years ago we were assured of a ‘valued and honoured place’ within the church ‘for all time to come’. That promise has not been honoured and today some of our people even find that they are being told they are no longer welcome in the churches in where they were baptised as infants. Now we find that the provision we were hoping for from our own Church is being offered to all disaffected Anglicans by the Catholic Church.”

“Episcopalians in Scotland have a long and rich history and liturgical tradition and the offer from the Catholic Church to enable us to take this tradition with us is something we and all traditionalists must consider carefully.”

Cardinal O’Brien commented, “I am delighted to help provide a place of worship for these Traditionalist Anglicans, taking the lead from Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor Pope John Paul II.”

The first service – a Christmas Vigil Mass - is being held on Thursday 24th December at 7pm in the Chapel of the Convent of Mercy (St Catherine's), 4 Lauriston Gardens, Tollcross, Edinburgh EH3 9HH  - www.forwardinfaith.info/scotland.

Canon Len Black
Forward in Faith Scotland Regional Dean

O Sapientia

St John of the Cross & The Sacred made Real @ the National Gallery, London

In his Ascent of Mount Carmel, St John of the Cross, whose day it is in the Church’s calendar, likens the process by which a soul is perfected to the process by which a sculpture is carved and painted. The inspiration and significance of that metaphor is made clear by the present special exhibit in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery – The Sacred made Real: Spanish Painting & Sculpture 1600 – 1700 – and a smaller companion exhibit in the main part of the gallery – The Making of a Spanish Polychrome Sculpture, which has as its centrepiece a polychromatic statue of St John.

Between them, the two exhibits demonstrate a craft that, because its creations continue to reside mainly in churches as the focus of devotion rather than in galleries, has had its artistic merit neglected, and give a window onto the formation of at least part of the spirituality of St John of the Cross.

Polychromatic statuary combines the the carving of wooden statues, often life size, and intended to be carried in procession – for example in the Holy Week processions in Seville - with intricate and multi-layered painting to produce as near a life-like an impression as possible, be it of flesh or of fabric  – described as Encarnación (incarnation).

In the context of the exhibition, the statues are stationery, but the effect, especially when viewed from a distance through an arch or between other visitors is uncanny. Viewed close up also, the effect is remarkable.

The image above, of St John of God, carved and painted by Alonso Cano around 1600, is a case in point. On turning towards it from another exhibit, my wife instinctively stepped back as if she had suddenly found herself standing slightly too close to another visitor to the exhibit.

The eight-year old boy that Jeremy Clarkson insists is in all men will delight at the detail in the neck of the severed head of St John the Baptist; but even the non-devotional context of the exhibition fails in fact to deprive these powerful images of their devotional impact.

The statues and images of the passion are particularly captivating, and made me think of the objections made a few years back to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ – for being too real, too horrific. These were and are the Passion of the Christ of their day. If anything, because the horror is there before you to be studied at length and in detail, its effect is the more profound.

 The Sacred made Real is a stunning exhibit. Go. You have until January 24th.

The Church is CATHOLIC – a homily for the Third Sunday of Advent

‘We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.’

+ In the name of the Father …

Today, in the third of my Advent homilies on the Church in the context of the Pope’s pastoral response to groups of Anglicans who wish to enter the full communion of the Catholic Church, I address what it means that the Church is Catholic.

As in previous weeks, I have provided a Lectio Divina commentary on today’s readings on the Sunday sheet.

As I have said before, that I am dealing with these four interdependent characteristics of the Church on four separate weeks should not lead anyone to think that we can regard any of them as more or less important than the others.

They stand together.

I started each of my previous homilies in this series – on the Church is One, and the Church is Holy – by acknowledging that many people might instinctively think that those statements were not necessarily true.

And in each case, I have made the point that in fact they are and must be true, otherwise the Nicene Creed would contain lies.

That many Christians might not see these things as a true and present reality is a failure in human perception, reason and behaviour – not a failure in the teaching of the Church, nor a fault in the Church herself.

My problem, I suspect, in asserting that the Church is Catholic might be rather different.

True: there are Christians who regard the whole notion of being ‘catholic’ as undesirable. I have found in an Anglican context, the Nicene Creed being unsubtly altered to read: ‘We believe in one holy universal and apostolic Church,’ and I shall come back to that later.

But it is true to say that presented with the statement: ‘The Church is Catholic’, the problem in general would not be denial, but rather a variety of word-games and mental gymnastics by which people mean by it not the truth that Creed itself expresses, but rather something that conveniently describes their own position in relation to the Church founded on Peter and to the wider community of all those who have been Baptized; the two, as I have said before, not being quite the same thing.

And to begin to illustrate this point, I should like to read a short account, concerning Fr Bertrand Wilberforce, grandson of William Wilberforce, who famously campaigned against the transatlantic slave trade.

Once, when visiting an ancient church in the south of England, [Fr Wilberforce] was accosted by a strange gentleman who asked him if he were the vicar of the parish. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘by the mercy of God, I have the great honour of being a Catholic priest.’ ‘Ah,’ said the other, ‘I suppose you mean Roman Catholic.’ ‘There is not the least necessity,’ [said Fr Wilberforce], ‘of using the word [Roman], since there are no Catholics who are not Roman.’ ‘Humph,’ answered the gentleman, who turned out to be a curate belonging to the neighbourhood, ‘that is a matter of opinion, I suppose.’ ‘On the contrary,’ said Fr [Wilberforce], ‘it is a matter of Divine Revelation,’ upon which the stranger withdrew.

To many Anglicans, who would not see themselves primarily as ‘catholic’, Fr Wilberforce’s statement that ‘there are no Catholics who are not Roman,’ might seem arrogant, but, because they hold to a very minimal definition of ‘catholic’, not fundamentally difficult.

I would suggest, however, that for those who regard themselves primarily as being Catholic members of the Church of England – often but not exclusively referred to as ‘Anglo-Catholics’ – his statement may be more troubling, and demand some serious reflection.

I mentioned a few moments ago to those who find the notion of being Catholic so difficult that when they recite the Creed, they substitute ‘universal’ for the word ‘catholic’. Such people may be in a minority, but they are doing in word what many do in thought.

True: look up ‘catholic’ in a dictionary, and you will find that amongst other things, it is listed as a synonym for ‘universal’.

In purely linguistic terms, that which is ‘catholic’ is ‘universal’, which those who make the substitution of universal for catholic in the Creed take to mean simply that the Church is everywhere, and so it is universal.

What matter if you use the one word rather the other, especially if it means that you are not identifying yourself with practices and teachings that you consider to be ‘repugnant to Holy Scripture’?

Well, in point of fact, it matters quite a lot.

Because in the context of the Church, ‘catholic’ does not just mean ‘present everywhere’ – universal, although the Church is that; rather, to say that the Church is catholic is to say that always and everywhere she is fully coherent and consistent to herself, faithful to God and faithful to the deposit of Faith received from the Apostles and Saints.

Where the universality of the Church is part of her catholicity – her catholic-ness – is in what she has been called into being by Christ to do. Her mission, as delivered by Christ to St Peter and his companion apostles, is: ‘Go … make disciples of all the nations, baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey all the commands I gave you.’

The catholicity – catholic-ness – of the Church is an expression of and expressed by her Oneness. Where communities of Christians have broken from communion with the Church because they have rejected her teachings, and so are not fully coherent and consistent with her, they have broken from her Oneness and also ceased objectively to be catholic.

And here I shall take the opportunity to mention something else that is not Catholic, but is often treated as its synonym – ‘High Church’, as in a particular style of liturgy.

Catholic worship is that which is oriented towards and for God – not oriented towards or for us; it may have bells, smells and splendour, but not for their own sake . That is not intended as a comment on which way the priest faces at the altar, or on styles of liturgy, formal or unstructured, that seem to be more about entertainment than worship – but it could be.

As I have asked before, does this mean that Anglicanism, and that part of it which is variously described as ‘Anglo-Catholic’, ‘Catholic Anglican’, or ‘Anglican Catholic’ – and one or two other things, not always polite – is fake?

Some people hearing this homily, or reading it in the coming days on the Internet, may well take it that way – I am certainly asking questions today that Anglicans generally, including ‘Anglo-Catholics’, bristle at.

But, in the same way that in my first homily I said that although as Anglicans we are outside the Oneness of the Church we are not a fake Christian community but an incomplete one, I would say that the Anglican claim to be Catholic is not fake, but rather a real and heartfelt expression of something that we know profoundly – moved by the Holy Spirit – we need to be, even if objectively it is not yet what we are.

And this is expressed very well in a phrase which may well have been used elsewhere before, but which I am first aware of coming across in a book entitled: The Realm: an Unfashionable Essay on the Reconversion of England, published in 2008 and written by the Catholic Dominican author, Fr Aidan Nichols, who has taken some trouble to understand Anglicans and Anglicanism in general.

And that phrase is: ‘Catholic minded Anglicans’. As opposed to the more usual ‘Anglo-Catholic’ / ‘Anglican Catholic’ / ‘Catholic Anglican’ labels that seem to be asserting as true in the present something that we should in humility acknowledge is not so certain, to describe ourselves as ‘Catholic minded Anglicans’ acknowledges two important facets of the kind of Christian we are.

First, how did the Oxford Movement begin, other than that in the apparently rather arcane question of whether the British Parliament had the authority to abolish Irish bishoprics, lay the seed of the realization that a church cannot be made subject to the State.

But that was precisely what had happened under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I. The affairs of the Christians of this land had been placed under the ungodly and unjustly assumed authority of the monarch and the State.

It has been a short but slow step over the last hundred and fifty years or so for Oxford Movement Anglicans to acknowledge that the only earthly authority under which the affairs of Christians should be is that authority under which they were placed by Christ – St Peter, the first among the apostles and the first Pope, and his successors in that role, together with the bishops who are in communion with him.

In that sense, and in a certain body of theological reflection, pastoral vocation and spirituality, Oxford Movement Anglicans have become ‘Catholic minded Anglicans’, inasmuch as their mind is oriented on where the Catholic Church is. And that, as St Ambrose said, is where St Peter is.

And second, feeling their separation from St Peter, this group of Anglicans – in whose tradition this parish sits, and always has sat – is Catholic minded also because it understands that it cannot only be oriented on where the Catholic Church is, in the manner of a compass needle pointing towards the North Pole, but in the manner of the crew of a ship who seek a destination that they have not yet reached and use the compass to plot and sail their course.

Anglicanorum coetibus, Pope Benedict’s offer of a place of respect and welcome in the Catholic Church not just for groups of Anglicans but also for those elements of Anglicanism and its heritage that are Catholic minded in the sense of being in accord with the Catholic Faith, acknowledges with generosity that to be Catholic minded but outside the Catholic Church is possible, certainly not fake, but nevertheless not the same as ‘being Catholic’.

We have I think to take to heart, as Fr Bertrand Wilberforce implied, that for as long as we need to describe ourselves not simply as Catholic, but as ‘Anglo-Catholic’, ‘Catholic Anglican’, ‘Anglican Catholic’ or even ‘Catholic in CofE’; or need to describe others, with perhaps that certain tone in our voice, as ‘Roman Catholic’, like the local curate with whom Fr Wilberforce spoke, that within us there is a Catholic potential that is genuine but not yet completely realized.

And finally, because so much of this homily has been in terms of a fairly hard-edged distinction between ‘Catholic’ and ‘not Catholic’ that might give a wrongly off-putting impression about how Catholics themselves regard those outside the Catholic Church who experience an as yet unrealized inward Catholic potential, I recall a conversation I had with someone who had been Catholic almost from birth and in which we talked about those who had been received into the Catholic Church.

Responding to the idea that someone ‘became Catholic’ in the instant that they were received into the Catholic Church, he said: ‘I shall be ‘becoming Catholic’ at least until the day I die.’

+ In the name of the Father …

The Muppets’ Bohemian Rhapsody

Why there might be a point to ARCIC3

In the wake of Anglicanorum coetibus (Ac) ecumenical dialogue between Anglicanism and the Catholic Church continues, and there is to be a third round of ARCIC. Why bother, one might ask?

If you are an Anglican interested in the Ordinariates provided by Ac, why would you be interested in ARCIC3?
To Anglicans who welcome Ac either on their own account or on the account of others to whom it might be helpful, why the Catholic Church should continue to bother with Anglicans not moved at all to respond positively to Ac might seem a bit of a mystery. Ac provides for the organic and visible unity that Archbishop Michael Ramsey pledged that Anglicans would work and pray for, and in service of which ARCIC was established. ARCIC has done its work and / or been superseded.

If you are an Anglican not interested in anything that might call itself ‘catholic’, why would you be interested in ARCIC3?
For those Anglicans who want nothing to do with the Catholic Church beyond a polite-ish nod across the Methodist Chapel at the monthly ‘Churches together’ meeting, ARCIC’s conclusions are unlikely ever be ratified by the General Synod of the CofE, so who cares? And if it did look as if organic and visible unity really were on the cards, then a quick push for something along the lines of lay presidency at the Eucharist would quickly do the requisite contra-ecumenical damage that the ordination of women and the homosexual agenda have so far successfully done and are doing. ARCIC never was going anywhere, so why flog a dead horse?

If you are a liberal / AffCaff Anglican awaiting the next Pope (who will surely be a liberal, and will of course ordain women and embrace intercommunion &c), why would you be interested in ARCIC3?
For Anglicans who actively don’t welcome Ac but nevertheless like to talk about being (reformed and / or liberal and / or affirming) catholic, the continuance of ARCIC shows that the Catholic Church is still listening to Anglicanism, and so might one day see the liberal-protestant sense that ‘Rowan’ (with whom all Anglicans seem to be on first-name terms) recommended at the Willebrands Symposium. ARCIC doesn’t actually need to be productive, just going on.

So what is the point for the Catholic Church? – a theory
While it is in the nature of Anglicanism that members of its competing groups give up on each other when we don’t espouse the right line on the particular neuralgic issue of the moment, the Catholic Church by nature cannot give up on any of the Baptized who are presently outside her

Let us not forget that ARCIC is by no means the only ecumenical dialogue in which the Catholic Church is engaged. The main show in town is undoubtedly dialogue with the East, but even so conversations with Methodists, Lutherans and others continue.

This is because the ecumenical vocation of the Catholic Church is unitive – aimed at drawing back into her communion the multiplicity of schismed groups of the Baptized which have broken from the Catholic Church and each other over the last few centuries.

And so I suggest this is why ARCIC3 might have a point; whatever their view on the point of ARCIC, many (most?) Anglicans see it as bi-partite negotiation hammering out formulae to reconcile Catholic and Reformed doctrines. Is it, in fact, the long-term and slow-moving catechesis by the Catholic Church of an entire separated ecclesial community?

Ac is capable of receiving into the full communion of the Catholic Church relatively small parts of the Anglican Communion with immediate effect – and something similar could theoretically do the same for the Lutherans et al. It could also in time welcome in the provinces of Canterbury and York, and even the entire Anglican Communion – at whatever point in time they became ready for it.

Might history realize that the contribution of ARCICs 1, 2 and 3, despite their apparent unproductiveness, was that they incrementally re-catechized the Anglican community for reconciliation to the Church from which its forebears schismed 400–odd years ago (and counting)?

Feast of the Immaculate Conception – necessity or luxury?

I don’t propose here to post a long theological justification of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. If that is what you are looking for, then this or this might be helpful, as hopefully might the text of the Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus.

Rather, I would like to pick up on something in the ‘Reformation Sunday’ homily by Stanley Hauerwas that I posted a little while back, in which he said:

‘Protestants look over to Christian tradition and say, ‘How much of this do we have to believe in order to remain identifiably Christian?’ That’s the reason why Protestants are always tempted to rationalism … In contrast, Catholics do not begin with the question of “How much do we need to believe?” but with the attitude “Look at all the wonderful stuff we get to believe!” Isn’t it wonderful to know that Mary was immaculately conceived in order to be the faithful servant of God’s new creation in Jesus Christ! She therefore becomes the firstborn of God’s new creation, our mother, the first member of God’s new community we call church.’

As Anglicans of various hue ruminate over Anglicanorum coetibus, and agonize about whether they can personally get their heads around the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption &c, they may find Hauerwas’ wise words helpful – remembering of course that he is a Methodist.

And to answer my original question: ‘Immaculate Conception – necessity or luxury?’ I would confidently answer BOTH.

The Church is HOLY - a homily for the Second Sunday in Advent

‘We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.’

+ In the name of the Father …

For the benefit of those who were not here last week, I am preaching during Advent not on the Gospel and other readings of the day, as one ordinarily should, but on the profession that we make weekly in the Nicene Creed that ‘We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.’

And the point of doing so is as an aid to reflect on what our individual and corporate response should be to Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Constitution that offers a place in the Catholic Church to Anglicans who wish to enter the full communion of the Catholic Church while retaining that which is both Anglican and in keeping with the teaching of the Catholic Church.

We need to be confident in our understanding of the Church in order to discern the place in relation to it that God intends us to occupy.

But so that we are nevertheless properly able to reflect on the Gospel and other readings of the day and carry them with us into our lives as we should, I am publishing in the weekly sheet the Lectio Divina meditations written by Mgr Anthony Abela and published by the United Bible Societies.

In today’s homily, I am considering what it is we mean when we say that the Church is holy.

And just as last week, when I considered what we mean by saying the Church is One, I have to start by acknowledging that the first reaction that might be made to the assertion that the Church is holy is: ‘But, it isn’t, is it?’

‘Look,’ someone might say, ‘at all the awful things that the Church has done. How can you call it holy?’

They might point at the crusades.

They might point at the various forms of sexual and other abuse that the media have delighted in focussing on in the context of the Catholic Church, although that abuse has in reality been present across all denominations, and indeed all of society, particularly in the context of what we call the ‘caring professions’ – as a direct consequence of and in direct proportion to, as is now beginning to be acknowledged, the increasing sexual ‘freedoms’ in which our ever more godless society has ‘delighted’ over the past half-century.

They might also point at the bitterness and divisiveness of the behaviour of Christian groups towards each other in political and church spheres – whether it be in the Catholic–protestant divide of the Reformations or, in recent years at least, in the Irish Troubles; or the way in which General Synod might seem to treat those members of the Church of England who do not wish to follow its liberal-protestant trajectory.

But as last week I made a deliberate contrast between ‘the Church’ on the one hand and the Christian community of all the Baptized on the other, so I make a similar distinction today – and it is fundamentally not so as to duck any uncomfortable truths, but to acknowledge and account for them.

Christians are certainly capable of behaving abominably towards one another and others – but when they do so, they are behaving as sinners separated from God, from one another – and the Church – by their sin; it is not the Church that is acting.

It is not the Church that is being un-holy; it is individual members of the Church, or of the wider Christian community, who are being un-holy. That is what sin is – being unholy.

And if we are to ask why the Church or individual Christians aren’t being holy, shouldn’t we have some idea of what ‘holy’ means? We cannot after all define what is holy only in terms of all the things that we think aren’t good and wholesome. We have to have some positive understanding of what ‘holy’ is.

My dictionary defines ‘holy’ in three principal ways.

Firstly, it is to be ‘morally and spiritually excellent or perfect and to be revered.’ That is certainly the general sense in which many people would understand the word, and is arguably the standard against which so many – perhaps almost all at some time or another – Christians and adherents of other philosophies or systems of religious belief fall short.

But secondly, my dictionary says, ‘holy’ means ‘belonging to, devoted to, or empowered by, God’, and thirdly – meaning almost the same thing, I think, ‘consecrated, [or] sacred.’

‘Belonging to, devoted to [and] empowered by God.’

When we say in the Creed that we believe the Church to be holy, we are not making some unrealistic assessment of the behaviour of its members; rather, we are making a statement about what the Church, founded by Jesus Christ on the Rock of St Peter is and what, and who she is for.

And there is a particular reason for referring to the Church as ‘she’, not ‘it’, that I shall come back to in the context of why she is and has to be holy, despite the behaviour of some of her members.

The Church is holy, and can be nothing other than holy, because she was founded by the one who was without sin, to carry on His work as His body after He had returned to His Father in heaven. And His work was and is salvation, by the sanctification and redemption of human nature into which sin had entered at the Fall.

And we see in certain cases just how full that redemption of human nature can be when someone commits themselves wholly to God. The most complete examples we have being Our Lady’s ‘yes’ to God at the Incarnation, and the examples of the saints whose days we celebrate throughout the year.

They have come from many and diverse backgrounds, times, places and circumstances, but what they have in common is that they have committed themselves wholly to Christ and so become saints; those whom the Church has recognized as holy (and others whom perhaps she has not).

If we say that the Church herself is not necessarily always holy, we are not only denying that the Creed is true, we are saying that Jesus Christ, God made man, was capable of imperfection – which is itself to deny His Divinity.

So we know immediately (I hope) that if our reasoning is leading us to the conclusion that the Church is not necessarily holy, there is something very wrong with our reasoning.

The Church is holy because she is of God, made by God, called into being by God, for God’s purpose. And as that dictionary definition says, she: ‘Belong[s] to, [is] devoted to [and] [is] empowered by God.’

The Church is also understood to be in an ongoing and particular relationship with God. It isn’t enough to say simply that Jesus founded the Church 2,000 years ago and then went off and left it to evolve as a human institution at the risk that it might slide gradually off the rails.

In John 14, Christ tells the apostles – who are the basis from which the Church grows – that He will ask the Father and the Father will send another advocate to be with the Church to the end of time. That advocate is the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, who descends in tongues of fire at Pentecost.

And the Holy Spirit, whom we know to be God, is with the Church now, and will be until the end of time, because that is what Christ promised. So we know that the Church was founded holy by the Son of God who is without sin and incapable of imperfection; and we know that God continues to be with the Church, keeping her holy until the end of time.

But what about that particular relationship with God that the Church has that means, as I said a few minutes ago, that it is right to refer to the Church as ‘she’ rather than ‘it’?

‘It’ implies the Church is like any other human institution – the Civil Service or the management structure of Marks & Spencer – which she is not.

In Ephesians 5, St Paul describes the relationship of Christ and the Church as being a mystery that is like the relationship that is between a husband and his wife. The Church is also commonly referred to as the bride of Christ – a bride that remains faithful to her husband because of the love that is within in her through the Holy Spirit.

The love of the Church for Christ expresses her holiness, expresses the life of the Holy Spirit in her.

The Church is holy – must be holy, and can only be holy – because she was founded by Christ to be the place in which sinners may learn virtue and become ever more like him – as best shown in the examples of Our Lady and the saints – and is sustained, nourished and empowered until the end of the world by the Holy Spirit who calls Christians to unity and holiness in Christ.

But last week, I said that as Anglicans, though we say we believe that the Church is One, we are by no original fault of our own, separated from the Oneness of the Church in which we believe.

It would be dishonest of me not to examine the implications of that statement for what I am talking about today. If as Anglicans, we are outside the completeness of the Church founded on St Peter; does that mean we are also beyond holiness, beyond the help and action of the Holy Spirit?

The answer to that must also at least in part lie in what I said last week – that we are not as Anglicans a fake Christian community, but we are an incomplete one. We are a community of the Baptized; we have received Baptism by water and the Holy Spirit.

How can we, if we have been baptized by water and the Holy Spirit be beyond the action and the love of the Holy Spirit, through whom God gives us what we need in order to do His Will?

That the Pope sees in our Anglican community ‘liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions … as a precious gift … a treasure to be shared [within the Catholic Church]’ is a pretty clear indication that Holy Spirit is seen from the outside as active amongst us.

As Anglicans, I think it is fair to say, we are not beyond the extent of works of the Holy Spirit, but we are perhaps part of a community that has not yet responded fully to the Holy Spirit’s call to Unity. That we are outside the fullness of the Church’s Unity may not be our original fault; that we might choose to remain so would be a sin against the Holy Spirit and His call to Unity.

If the Holy Spirit were restricted in His action to the Oneness of the Church founded on St Peter, we would have to ask ourselves what it is that acts when someone of a non-Christian philosophy or religion comes to recognize who Christ is – the Son of God – and to have Faith in Him, and is drawn into the Church.

We know that Faith is a gift from God, a gift of the Holy Spirit. For someone to stand at the font, while not yet a Christian, and say on their own behalf that they understand what Baptism is and that they desire it demonstrates the action of the Holy Spirit in them – while they are still beyond the boundaries either of the Church, or of the wider Christian community.

They are being called, drawn into the Church; the Church that is one and holy; the Church that I shall discuss over the next two weeks as being catholic and apostolic; the Church in which we say we believe; the holy Church from which the Holy Spirit reaches out, that none may be lost and all might be saved.

It is not of course only non-Christians who are drawn in by the action and love of the Holy Spirit; it is the vocation of the Church that is one and holy to draw all people who are not fully of her communion, whether they be separated either by their own sin or by the sins of history, to herself so that they may be made one in the Spirit, ever more like Christ, and brought to sanctification and salvation.

+ In the name of the Father …

Pope Benedict’s Prayer Intentions for December 2009

Children - that children may be respected, loved, and never exploited.

Christ, Light of the World - that during Christmas the peoples of the earth may recognize the Incarnate Word as the light that illuminates every person, and that every nation may open its doors to Christ, the Savior of the world.

The Church is ONE - a homily for the First Sunday of Advent

‘We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.’

+ In the name of the Father …

Every Sunday, week by week, and on certain other feast days, we recite the Nicene Creed, and during this Advent, I shall preach on each of its four Sundays on the Church that we say in the Creed we believe to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic.

For those who are quite properly expecting the homily to be preached on the Gospel and other readings of the day – as it ordinarily should, I have printed in today’s sheet, and shall do for the next three Sundays, the Lectio Divina mediation on the readings of the day published by the United Bible Societies.

And I am preaching on the nature of the Church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic not just as an exercise suggested because Advent conveniently has four Sundays, but in the context of the prayer and discernment which are needed with regard to the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus that has offered the equal and honoured place in the Catholic Church that Anglicans – some Anglicans anyway – have prayed and worked for over many years.

My reason for doing this, to put it as simply as I can, is that in order to discern where our relationship to the Church lies and where it should lie – which is at the heart of a proper response to Anglicanorum coetibus, we need to be confident in where and what we believe the Church to be.

So I start by examining the statement that we believe that the Church is One – although it is very much the case that every part of ‘We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church’ supports and is supported by each of the others. It is one statement, not four.

We believe that the Church is One.

‘But,’ might come the immediate response, ‘it isn’t, is it?’ And looking, for example, just at Kenton, we might see upon what that challenge is based.

A multiplicity of Christian denominations – Anglican, Orthodox, Catholic, congregational, Methodist, Baptist – rarely worshipping in common, certainly not celebrating the sacraments in common, not believing entirely in common – is something that could be taken as a visible expression that the Church is anything but One.

Indeed, one might think that if the Church were one, it might not need eight Christian places of worship in Kenton – at least not under eight separate managements – in such close proximity as can be seen within the boundaries of this Anglican parish. Of course, if the Church were One - ‘that the world would believe’ – it might need at least eight!

But Kenton seems not short on evidence that the Church is not One, despite what we say we believe. And so we are presented with a problem: either we are saying in the Creed something that is manifestly not true … or something that we have manifestly misunderstood.

Hopefully we can all (here at least) agree that wiping away a clause of one of the Catholic Creeds as false is not an acceptable way to proceed; so we had better go back and find out why this seemingly inaccurate statement is in fact true and worthy of its at least weekly profession.

It is certainly true to say that the Christian community in Kenton (like everywhere else) is not One; but we may ask whether that the same as saying that the Church is not One? It is the purpose of this homily to provide at least some of the answer to that question.

There are those who account for the multiplicity of Christian denominations by means of something called the ‘branch theory’ of the Church. Might this be of help to us?

Imagine a tree. The trunk that emerges from the ground is said to be the early church. About half way up the tree, there is a major division into two branches: representing the Great Schism between the Orthodox East and the Latin West just after the turn of the first Millennium.

Leaving the eastern bit of the tree aside, and proceeding up the Western branch, there is with time further branching that accounts for the many Christian groups not in direct communion with one another, of which the Catholic Church is the largest, followed at some distance in terms of relative size by Anglicanism and then the others.

Everyone, the branch theory would have it, is equally legitimate, all part of the Church, leaves on different parts of the tree, and as long as we can co-operate in ‘Christian mission’, that is unity enough.

But is that an adequate explanation? Or can we see in the existence of denominations believing contradictorily that Christ’s prayer in John 17 that we might all be one that the world will believe in his Truth is manifestly not served?

The unity for which Christ prayed had a point, and that point is the evangelization of the world - ‘that the world would believe’. The branching of the Church into competing denominations preaching more or less different ‘truths’ does not seem to serve evangelization, and so we must question whether the ‘branch theory’ serves us at all well, other than perhaps as an historical diagram of who split from whom.

We need an account of the Church as One that is more than simply an effort to explain away the evidence of our eyes.

And so I ask my question again: ‘Is the disunity of Christians the same as the disunity of the Church?’, bearing in mind that to answer ‘yes’ could be to deny the truth of the Creed.

So if the Creed is true, the Church is One, does posses unity, but that unity is not seen to be shared amongst all Christians in the terms of the ‘branch theory’, where do we go from here?

Perhaps we should return to Scripture.

As I have already said: Christ prayed in John 17 for the unity of Christians, to a particular point – that the world may believe. But it would be a great mistake to think that the Church is One only for utilitarian reasons.

Perhaps we need to consider whether the Church is One because for the Church to express what she is, the Church must be One – she cannot be anything else?

Let us turn to the moment at which Christ declares that he is founding His Church.

St Peter, by Divine Revelation not human thinking, demonstrates his place as first amongst the Apostles, the focus of their unity in Christ, by being the one who declares on behalf of them all that Christ is the Son of the Living God.

And Christ responds by declaring that it is on St Peter that His Church is founded. There can be no mistake – by Divine Revelation and declaration, St Peter, despite the human failings he demonstrates from time to time, has been made crucial to the unity, the Oneness of the Church. That is his vocation.

Winding forward about four hundred years, we find this famously and simply expressed by St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who says: ‘where Peter is, there is the Church’.

‘Where Peter is, there is the Church’.

By the time that St Ambrose said it, St Peter was obviously long dead, so to what was he referring, if not what St Peter left behind him in the Church that Christ founded on him?

St Peter became the Bishop of Rome, the first Pope, and his diocese, of Rome, became established as the centre of the Church – the focus of its unity, its oneness – not by accident, but by Divine Will.

And with that, we encounter the truth that may feel inconvenient for us as Anglicans that full communion with the Pope, and the Oneness, the Unity, the fullness of the Church are inextricably and by God’s Will bound up together.

And we Anglicans – in common with Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, URCs, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Presbyterians – do not have that full communion with the Pope, and so by this ancient understanding of the Church are separated from the Oneness, the Unity, the fullness of the Church.

It is worth noting briefly at this point that I did not include the Orthodox in that list of those who are separated from the See of Rome, and therefore the fullness of the Church, because their position, arising from the schism at the end of the first century is somewhat different to that of Anglicans and protestants in the West, and there is neither space nor time to discuss their different scenario this morning – I need really to stick to the question as it applies to us.

To put it succinctly, we are certainly Christians because we have been Baptized, and we are certainly a community of Christians in which, in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church talking about Christians outside the Catholic Church, ‘many elements of sanctification and of truth’, and ‘the written Word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope, and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit’ may be found.

But nevertheless we are challenged that we do not have the fullness of the Church because we do not have full communion with the rock on which the One Church is founded.

To take a final swipe at the ‘branch theory’, the various denominations of the Church do not exist by a process of organic branchings, such that what we are part of is a flourishing and diverse tree; but by a process of violent breakings off, each of which is a wound in the body of Christ that is made up of all the Baptized.

Our particular breaking off, Anglicanism – at the combined hands of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I – happened, as most of these breakings off have, because of political expediency and human wilfulness against the Church, not theological principle.

So what might that say about us as Anglicans? Are we as a Christian phenomenon a complete fake, a grainy Tudor–Elizabethan facsimile of the Church, or are we rather a Christian community that by no original fault of its present members is separated from the Church and her unity, and so is incomplete?

On the one hand, it is certainly the case that the clergy and people of the Oxford Movement experienced a growing sense of incompleteness because communion with the See of St Peter was missing – seeking the full communion of the Catholic Church is something that ‘Anglo-Catholic’ Anglicans have been doing for the greater part of the 150 years of the Oxford Movement and its successors.

And on the other hand, it seems that Pope Benedict does not regard Anglicanism as a bad fake – despite its many problems and apparently innate inability to solve them, but rather as a community of Christians that very much needs to share in the full unity of the Catholic Church – just as all Christians do, but can also bring to the Catholic Church (and here I am quoting Anglicanorum coetibus directly): ‘liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion … as a precious gift … a treasure to be shared [within the Catholic Church].’

We have as Anglicans – and I mean all Anglicans, not just us here, or ‘Anglo-Catholic’ Anglicans more generally – to consider that our problems as a Communion arise directly from our incompleteness as a community of Christians presently outside the very Church that we say every week we believe to be One.

And having allowed that the Creed is true – the Church is One – we are called to consider why we should not join that Oneness. And again, this applies to all Anglicans. Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Constitution did not come addressed to a particular set of Anglicans whom he would like to poach – as the media continue to misrepresent it, but to all Anglicans. Not for nothing, in this as in his conciliatory approach to the traditionalist Society of St Pius X, has Pope Benedict acquired the so-far informal title of ‘Pope of Christian Unity’.

Explanations such as the ‘branch theory’ of the Church, and understandings of ecumenism that let Christians continue in parallel with one another rather than seeking the union of all the Baptized do no-one, I would suggest, any favours.

We will say in a few moments that we believe the Church to be One. The time is now coming, indeed perhaps it is already here, for us solemnly and prayerfully to consider as Anglicans how it might be that we can regularly state our belief in the Oneness of the Church, apparently content to remain outside that Oneness.

+ In the name of the Father …