Why is Anglicanism morally mute?

In today’s Daily Telegraph the Rev’d Brian Swabey, an Anglican, asks on the Letters page why it is that whenever a Christian voice is needed on some moral issue, it is a Catholic voice that speaks up. Why, he asks, the ‘thunderous silence’ from Lambeth Palace?

He is referring of course to the very necessary and proper words of the Holy Father in reference to New Labour’s Equality Bill during his address to the Catholic Bishops of England & Wales at their ad limina apostolorum visit to Rome this week. Some have suggested an implicit criticism that the Catholic Bishops had not said enough on the subject, so he had to. The secularists squealed, but New Labour – until next time – has backed down, noting the Pope’s intervention.

Lambeth is perennially silent on moral issues because it can’t be anything else – despite the occasional personal contribution of one or other Anglican bishop in the Lords. Anglicanism per se is morally neutered. In its liberal-protestant claim that it affirms everyone as children of God without discrimination on grounds inter alia of gender and sexuality, it has made an Anglican virtue of sinning out of human respect.

Anglicanism was founded not because of what are commonly rehearsed as ‘the pre-Reformation faults of the Roman Church’, but to provide the practical means for and an ex post theologized justification of an immoral act – Henry VIII’s desertion of Katharine of Aragon after 24 years of marriage – and it has been providing such ex post justifications ever since. It can’t help itself.

Whatever good we might discern in Anglicanism – and even the Pope manages to see some, we Anglicans need to acknowledge this negative dimension to our patrimony and be careful of what else we are determined to cling to in the context, for example, of Anglicanorum coetibus.