Church Times Opinion

“CANNOT you give us something definite to cling to in parishes where the Church is hardly ever mentioned and where the Faith is never taught?” A priest at the Forward in Faith event last weekend referred to lay people who had spoken to him gratefully after he had preached in their church. Like other isolated Anglo-Catholics — and perhaps like others in the early years of the Oxford Movement, when the meeting of routine spiritual needs now more generally recognised among us might entail a journey across country — they feel starved of the spiritual nourishment of a tradition that has endured in the Church of England until now and can be located within the breadth of its historic formularies.

The words quoted above are not from today’s laity, however, but were used by Fr Vernon SDC, the early Anglican Franciscan. He was quoting in 1927 an appeal “repeatedly” made to him. His response was to write about the Blessed Sacrament, because, he said, once you understood the Church’s teaching about it, you were “more or less independent of the personality of the priest”. But, as he wrote encouragingly of what would now be called sacramental assurance, he was already on a spiritual journey towards Rome. In 1924, he had read the autobiography of St Thérèse of Lisieux, and reflection on her example ultimately persuaded him of the papal claims. In 1930, he explained himself in One Lord, One Faith; and, quite properly, Eric Milner-White and Wilfred Knox penned an Anglo-Catholic reply, One God and Father of All. It was not in those days the custom to treat the scandal of reordination lightly.

All this lends a welcome quality of déjà vu to the otherwise unprecedented events of the past fortnight. If not all can agree with Bishop Andrew Burnham that the Apostolic Constitution is a “shower of roses” from St Thérèse, his words may still give pause for thought about the apparent effect of this little nun on members of a sister Church to her own. Not all saints are leaders in the world’s sense. But the holiness of obscure lives can be potent; and it is not only potent, but precious. That is why we celebrate All Saints’ Day next Sunday. It is also why the consciences of the clergy, whatever their sex, allegiance, or jurisdiction, are not the end of the matter. The priority of making Christianity credible to unbelievers provides no support for abandoning any of Christ’s flock, should they prove hard to label. It is also wrong to assume that the ninety-and-nine are safely in the fold if you put obstacles in the way of their reception of the sacraments that the Church officially teaches to be “generally necessary” for salvation: no fine words about ecclesiology let a bishop or a priest off the hook there. It has been an Anglican rebuke to Rome that she raises the bar unreasonably high for communion. Let it not be possible for any Christian who accepts the faith of the undivided Church to lay the same charge against the Church of England.