Born Anglican: how I got started

This is a Catholic church.

- Teacher, confirmation class 27 years ago

We have no doctrine of our own... We only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church enshrined in the Catholic Creeds, and these Creeds we hold without addition or diminution. We stand firm on that Rock.

- Geoffrey Fisher, 99th Archbishop of Canterbury

These and ‘we are first and foremost part of the larger church’ and even ‘our existence as a church [Anglican] is provisional’ vs ‘private judgement over all else’, the teaching and practice of a Protestant sect, were lessons learnt at the beginning of my life consciously as a Christian, as a churchman.

I’m barely old enough to have got the benefit of the old Anglicanism, at a parish that was middle-of-the-road (Morning Prayer was still the main service much of the time! ...hooray for the daily Office) but old-school - eastward-facing Communion and some form of the old Prayer Book. (This had the effect of ‘Vatican II’-proofing me for life.) Add to the mix high-church, even Anglo-Catholic teachers like the saintly Mr Pratt quoted above and you’ll start to understand what twisted my little mind. :) (Any Episcopal clergy reading this will probably never want to do ‘Rite I’ again for fear of creating more like me.)

Along with all that were informal lessons in tolerant conservatism and the importance of custom, of practice, of ‘rule of law’...

Another way of putting that: ‘Of course we’d like you to be Catholic but won’t pry; we are all sinners and understand if you don’t live up to all the demands but hold up the standards all the same.’

We wanted to offer the larger church and the world the Catholic faith in the idiom of our own culture including the treasures of Christianity in English like the King James Bible and the hymns, all with a bit of fun and even camp, but of course the faith was really no joke. A culture that was both objective and Godward on one hand and yet with a spirit of moderation (like the Burkean dislike of radicalism) teaching good stewardship, being fair, doing the right thing including one’s bounden duty and being a good sport like a gentleman...

We imagined some day all this would find its proper place in the larger Catholic world among the great churches there.

For some of us it was our home.

Also... my father was a lapsed Roman Catholic and a sister one of the original 1970s ‘Jesus Movement’ people, rebaptised in one of the Restorationist Protestant churches.

Discovering the Anglican Missal, the traditional Latin Mass, the Byzantine Rite (the Orthodox tradition) etc. as a teenager simply nurtured the growth of the seeds already planted.

All of which have pushed and pulled me in the direction I’ve been in for a quarter-century. Kata + holos = trying to grasp the whole = Catholic.

Like you [the man I was writing to] I’m profoundly influenced by the holy and venerable Church of Rome (the moral theology and traditional practice of the confessional are the gold standard IMO) but for reasons really beyond my control have found it impossible to live there. I’m actually something of a minimalist about the papacy but won’t try to manufacture history and write him out of the picture!

... our differences [with Rome] are due to our separation, not our separation to our differences.

- Spencer John Jones

The riches of the Anglican inheritance wait for their fulfilment in the whole Body of Christ.

- Fr George Guiver, CR, Faith in Momentum

I’ve always seen my own faith journey as not being a rejection of all the good things from the past but a kind of addition onto them.

- Fr Dwight Longenecker

Ancient and venerable Arab proverb: never spit in the well you drank from!

- Archimandrite Serge (Keleher)

So that is how/why I can be traditional and ecumenical (or try to anyway) at the same time.

Onward and Godward.