One of the great theologians of the Church of England wrote of the crisis in doctrinal authority which led to his
reception into the Catholic Church several years ago. Re-reading this piece may be of encouragement
to others who are now on the ‘journey home.’
It is not joining the Catholic Church which is
intellectually or emotionally difficult: it is leaving the Church of England
that is hard. This is not because the Anglican understanding of Christianity is
particularly consistent or persuasive, very much not, but because over the
years loyalties accumulate, friendships are established and styles of worship
become fixed. How could it be otherwise?
. . . It was from books, and from a study of Christian
thinkers and apologists, that my knowledge of the faith derive.
Among a fellowship of believers a sense of shared faith can
also bring palpable blessings, but in the end these things (Church members
being humans and not angels) are a fragile basis for a sustained adhesion to a
religious life. What is needed, in some form of words or other, is a clear
Doctrine of the Church, a sacramental view of the relationship between Christ
and his followers on earth [what Newman called the dogmatic principle].
At its simplest (and therefore most useful) expression the
Church is the body of Christ in the material world.
The unfolding truths were first delivered to fishermen of
Galilee, and were to be received, as Our Lord himself declared, by such as
little children. Christ did not entrust
his message, and the gift of salvation, to a body of writings, or a
philosophical formula, or a prescribed order of society: he entrusted himself
to a people the People of God, the Church. By very definition, as a result, the
Church must be universal, and there can be no such things as a National Church.
The essentials of Faith cannot differ from place to place, or culture to
culture, although particular rites or interpretations of practice may
legitimately vary, not in essentials but in applications.
The problem for the theologians and theoreticians has always
been to determine which things are essential and which are not. There is also,
as the Catholic Church teaches, a hierarchy of truths, some of which are more
applicable in some circumstances and times, than in others, but which are all
nevertheless truths. And there are errors which, because of the ease with which
humans allow their passions and enthusiasms to correspond too closely to their
desires, are only too readily misunderstood as authentic developments of the
exhortations of the Saviour.
Now the main
difference between Catholic Christianity and Anglicanism is the nature of the
Doctrine of the Church itself. It is not that Catholicism has one
understanding and Anglicanism another; it is that Catholicism has such a
doctrine and a very clear one and that Anglicanism does not really have one at
all.
Far too much was left unattended at the Reformation, when English
Christianity was detached from the centre of unity and from the Magisterium of
the universal Church, leaving the Church in England without a means of
determining its own doctrines. No one could have foreseen at the time that the
split with Rome was to prove permanent. And so for the next three and a half
centuries doctrine in the Church of England was determined by the Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council [Today in many places in the Anglican Communion
doctrine is determined by majority vote in synods by people.]
. . . Anglicanism has
no basis for its authority which links it to a universal body. The consequent
effect has been that every section of it and, in these days of spiritual
individualisation, every person in it feels free to make up faith for themselves
and deem the result to be Christianity. How
can the Church be the body of Christ in the world when its confession varies
from place to place and person to person, not only in minor but in the most
essential teachings about faith and morals? At the centre of Anglicanism is a
great void.
Catholic readers will perhaps find this all very obvious. It
is not. However, the way things are seen in the Church of England where there
is actually very little consciousness of any need to think about the authority
of Christian teaching at all. Moral issues are determined, where they are
determined at all, on the basis of data furnished by media presentation or the
findings of surveys of opinion. Doctrinal questions do not in reality get much
airing, largely because there is so little common ground for precise
formulations or any stomach for debating them and, anyway, there is no
authority for determining the basis of authority, short, one supposes, of
legislation in Parliament. As for Christian morality, there is a procession of
tawdry public controversies. With every compromise the truths of which the
Church of England purports to be the guardian mean less and less.
Seeking to join the Catholic Church, after the experiences
of years of exposure to these ecclesiastical inconsequences in the Church of
England, induces not only a feeling of coming home but a sensation of
cleansing. Humanly speaking, nevertheless, gratitude to Anglicanism is still
experienced, and a large degree of lasting affection. The Church of
England provides a
master class in equivocation; it also, however, is the residence of very many
good and faithful Christian people who deserve respect for their perseverance
in so many incoherent spiritual adventures. To leave their company is a wrench;
to adhere to the Catholic faith is to join the encompassing presence of a
universal body of believers in whose guardianship are the materials of authentic
spiritual understanding. After lengthy preparation I have immense gratitude.
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