Well it so happens that Thursday Thoughts is back and will be the site that hosts essays for the blog, Barchester.

O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer to you my continual obedience, pleading that all Anglicans seeking union with the Apostolic See of Peter may have fruition of their hope. By the power of your Divine Spirit so guide the Holy Father in Rome that this union will be accomplished; and that what is good and true in the Anglican heritage may be preserved to the benefit of the Universal Church. Grant that Anglican bishops and priests longing for this union may be granted continued exercise of the priestly ministry in an Anglican Rite under the authority of the Roman See and that Christians everywhere may once again know the Chair of Peter as that rock upon which your Church on earth is founded, against which hell cannot prevail. Amen.

A Prayer from Fr. Alan Hawkins

by The Rev. John Hunwicke

My little piece seems to have acquired threads of comments in various places. Since I took up blogging, I have been intrigued to discover that the most decisive negative comments generally seem to come from those who haven't read the piece concerned and/or know very little. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there is very little point in replying, because if they haven't read the first post, they probably aren't going to read a painstaking reply from me either. So I won't. The other thing that strikes me is that there are some people out there who quite desperately want Anglican Orders to be invalid. That somebody could regretfully come to such a conclusion, compelled by the facts, I could understand even though I disagreed. But the animus ...

Instead, I will attack the question from a different angle. In the bona fide attempts of the Anglican episcopate (back in the days when, whatever their failings, they believed in Christian Unity) to solve this question and establish that Anglican bishops are bishops in the same sense as Roman Catholic bishops, we seem to have been dogged by bad luck. The procedure used after 1933 was that the schismatic Dutch bishops executed and sealed Latin documents declaring their intention to convey, as principal consecrators, the episcopate they had received; and then imposed hands, at the same moment as the Archbishop of Canterbury, saying aloud the Form of Episcopal consecration. Or rather, they used the words which were once commonly held in manuals of Sacramental theology throughout the Western Church to be the Form. The Dutchmen deemed this to be safe, assured, and secure.

It wasn't. In the 1940s Pius XII declared that the words previously considered consecratory were not; instead, that a sentence in the long quasi-Eucharistic prayer in the Pontifical was to be held to be the essential Form. In fact there were good scholarly and theological reasons for this, but, for us, it had the unfortunate result of weakening the foundations of the procedures in use since 1933. Subsequently, in the aftermath of the Council, the Vatican apparently decided that the quasi-Eucharistic prayer concerned did not itself express terribly well the theology of the Episcopate; in the grotesque Bugniniesque passion for discontinuity of the time, the whole prayer was dumped and replaced by a prayer of questionable and oriental provenance (which has led the some of the more extreme members of the Lefebvreist tradition to wonder whether bishops consecrated with it are validly consecrated ... what a tangled web we weave ...).

We Catholic Anglicans face a future in which it is essential that we sever ourselves from the ministerial mass damnationis of the main ecclesial body. Within a few generations, the Anglican mainstream, with womenbishops as well as womenpresbyters, will be a body in which nobody will know whether a 'priest's' orders are valid without going through the chancellries checking an endless successsion of who-consecrated-whoms. We need, not as a luxury but as a basic survival-necessity, an episcopate separate from all this. The sooner we face up to this, the better. I am not certain that we are wise to be so singleminded in our struggle to secure some minimum structure for toleration within the mainstream that we leave this question on one side, for a later period of leisure that will never come. There are rumours that there is a retired bishop willing to be the first to brave the wrath of Henry VIII's wraith by committing the ultimate sin of 'illegal consecrations'. In my view, this cannot come soon enough. Apart from the theology, it would show that we really do mean business.

But there is something else that is necessary. The brave and careful attempt after 1933 to relegate Apostolicae curae to the history books foundered for the reasons I have skipped through above. The most that Rome - officially - will acknowledge, as in the case of Graham Leonard, is that the invalidity of some Anglican Orders is now a matter of doubt. We need to do '1933' again, and this time we need to get it right. I do not believe it would be impossible to find a bishop out there of impeccably valid orders who would be prepared to give us, so to speak, a hand. We should put the matter beyond question by having consecrator and consecrands signing documents giving a careful theological rationale of what is being done and, using a bit of deft overkill, perhaps the consecrator could use all three of the Forms which Roman Catholics have, over the last century, regarded as essential! And would there be any objection to all of us in ministerial office receiving a sub conditione reordination? Certainly not on my part.

Thus we could firm up our ecclesial identity as a preliminary to the most exciting ecumenical step forward since Cardinal Pole absolved this realm from schism on the Feast of S Andrew in 1554.

(Originally published 16 December 2008)

by The Rev. John Heidt

Not long ago I was having lunch with some of my fellow priests and as so often happens these days we eventually started talking about the Anglican Communion. I suggested that instead of worrying about the Anglican Communion we needed to think more about Anglicanism. When one of the priests asked me what I meant by Anglicanism, I told him that it was a mental attitude, a point of view, a way of thinking. He answered that this was sheer spiritism and ignored the incarnate nature of authentic Christianity.

Embodiment
He was quite right. Anglicanism seen simply as a mentality or point of view will not carry the load I was trying to place upon it. We are embodied creatures who need a religion that is more than pure spirit or mental attitude. We need a religion that is embodied. We need the Incarnate Son to save us. Anglicanism, like every other authentic expression of Christianity, must be embodied; it must belong to something concrete, physical, particular, if it is not to end up as nothing more than an ideological ism. Anglicanism as a way of thinking must be embodied somewhere.

We used to assume that it was embodied in the Episcopal Church and beyond that in the Anglican Communion. But now we find that these bodies are no longer Anglican nor a Communion nor a Church, but rather a disembodied collection of floating ideas in conflict with one another. That’s why so many people are fed up with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.

Many who are fed up are looking for the embodiment of Anglicanism in some other institution. Anglo-Catholics look to Rome, Protestants to Geneva, Evangelicals to mega churches, and liberal revisionists to the remnants of The Episcopal Church. But institutions cannot embody anything because they are not bodies. They are legal constructs, perhaps under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but nonetheless supported only by paper laws and bylaws, not by flesh
and blood. As Newman pointed out in a different context, by themselves they can only support a paper church.

Secularism
Where then are we to find the Incarnated Son and the embodiment of our Christian Faith, or even the embodiment of Anglicanism. Not, I would suggest, in institutional constructs but in the church’s sacraments and apostolic ministry. We are embodied in the visible apostolic church of Jesus Christ by baptism, not by signing up in a parish register. When the Book of
Common Prayer first said that baptism made us a member of the church, the word “member” meant an organic part of a living body and little else, a body fed by the sacramental Body and Blood of Jesus. Only later was the word secularized into meaning a part of an organization or institution.

The process of secularization has affected our understanding of the apostolic ministry and of the church herself. The word “corporation” once meant a living body and referred primarily to the church. Now it has been secularized to mean a legal or economic organization, so that we are all tempted to look now at the church as one organization among many. Also because the word “profession” now makes us think of careers rather than the taking of religious vows, many of the clergy are tempted to become careerists instead of apostolic pastors.

We must beware of looking at our religious life, Anglican or otherwise, from the perspective of our secular world. The embodiment of the church is sacramental not juridical or institutional, as necessary and important as these may be.

The Papacy
Anglo-Catholics above all ought to know this. Certainly all Christians of good will and Anglo-Catholics in particular should be praying for our re-union with the Bishop of Rome and through him and with him for all other apostolic bishops. But the pope in himself does not embody the church. The church is embodied in the whole college of bishops by the laying on of hands at ordination, much more embodied than the ballot papers used in the election of a pope. Paper ballots in themselves only lead to a paper church. Reliance upon them alone treats the church as a modern corporation rather than the Body of Christ. The apostolic ministry transmitted through ordination embodies our Christian faith. It is union with all apostolic bishops that we seek.

(Originally published in Forward in Christ, December 2008.)

by The Rev. John Hunwicke

I do meet clergy, sound and thoroughly orthodox men, who are disturbed by the Bull Apostolicae curae Leo XIII declaring Anglican priestly Orders to be null and void. And one meets nice young laymen, fairly recently received into full communion with the Holy See, who make a point of addressing one as Mr So-and-so. And some rather fierce RC traditionalists fume and foam at the thought that we can give the impression of being so sound when, in their view, we are not even priests. Let me share my own thoughts.

I am not in favour of criticising and trying to unpick Apostolicae curae. That would simply put us in the same position as all those other people who are so totally loyal to the Holy See ... except in one particular matter. The only point I would make is that that the actual bull sealed for Leo XIII described the question as hoc caput disciplinae, and this is what was first officially published. It appeared to situate the question in the area of discipline and not of dogma. Pressure from the English RC hierarchy resulted in the removal from subsequent editions of the word disciplinae.

Moreover, in Apostolicae curae we got what we deserved. For more than three hundred years we, as a faith-community, had behaved as if we were a Protestant sect intent on harrying, persecuting, sneering at, and murdering Roman Catholics. After all that it is rather bad form for us to make a fuss about Cardinal Vaughan's success in politicking his way, against the views of the leading RC scholars of the time, to getting this condemnation.

What has to be pointed out is that Apostolicae curae no longer applies. Some sixteen years ago I coined the phrase 'the Dutch Touch' to describe the participation after 1933 of Dutch schismatics with indubitably valid orders in Anglican episcopal consecrations (the technical details are in my paper in the volume Reuniting Anglicans with Rome). The secret archives in Pusey House, Oxford, make absolutely clear that the intention of the very highest levels in the Church of England and the Dutch Old Catholic Church was to introduce the 'Dutch Succession' into the Church of England and so, after two or three generations, render Apostolicae curae obsolete. Remember that in 1662 the Cof E had made the formulae in presbyteral and episcopal ordination (which Leo had asserted were insufficiently clear), more explicit. Although the plotting of 1933 was done in private (so that nobody could say'Ah, the Anglicans do realise they are not real priests'), it clearly represents a formal and ecclesial act.

The Dutch Touch started in 1933. It must by now have reached those parts which other Touches cannot reach. Rome has not reinvestigated the question. But when Bishop Graham Leonard became a R C, the CDF did look at photocopies of the Pusey archive and recommended that there was enough doubt about the invalifidity of Bidshop Graham's presbyteral ordination for him to be ordained only sub conditione and not absolutely. John Paul II disagreed only to the extent that he ordered Bishop Graham not to be subjected to the indignity of diaconal reordination, either conditional or absolute. Rome specifically did not investigate the question of the validity of his episcopal orders, because of the problems which would have followed the discovery that the RC Church now had a married bishop!

Now, of course, we are nearly in agreement with Rome about the dubiety of Anglican Orders anyway. We believe that a large and growing percentage of Anglican Ordinations are invalid: the purported ordinations of women, and of both men and women by 'women bishops'. That is why, if we are to hang on in the C of E, we need a separate episcopate and clear mechanisms for the reordination of men who come to join us having been invalidity ordained within the 'mainstream' Church.

(Originally published 14 December 2008)

by The Rt. Rev. Andrew Burnham

The most painful part of the pilgrimage, it has to be said, was the feeling of praying apart from Peter. We were a surreal Anglican delegation: all the Church of England bishops were from the Catholic tradition, nearly all 'traditionalists,' in the usual sense of that word; nearly all the pilgrims, it seemed, were 'traditionalists,' even those from parishes in the West and South-West that apparently had not heard of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet! Cardinal Kasper must have been aware that most Anglicans would not come on pilgrimage to Lourdes on principle and that, of those who would, most Anglicans would be happier if women clergy had played a full part. He must have been aware too that even those of us who, as Anglicans, accept the doctrine of the Immaculate Conceptions do so not because that is what our church teaches us but because it is what the Church - to which we do not fully belong - teaches us. Just over fifteen years ago - and certainly thirty years ago - it all felt very different. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) was encouraging heady optimism and, at last, it felt as though there was general convergence. It seemed likely, as recently as 1982, when the Pope came to England, that the Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions would unite before the millennium.

Nevertheless a pilgrimage of 500 people, ten of whom were Church of England bishops and one of whom was the Archbishop of Canterbury, was something of a milestone in the larger pilgrimage, the People of God in search of God's Kingdom. I was reminded of the Walsingham Festival in York Minster a year or two ago: the House of God, on that occasion, was overflowing with people of what is wretchedly known as 'both integrities' 7 and, for a moment, we could see what it might mean to belong to one another once more. That was certainly the experience of the Society of Mary Pilgrimage to Lourdes: drawn by Mary into faithful and obedient discipleship, Catholics and Anglicans could walk and worship together. Nonetheless, honesty requires that it be seen and known to be a flashback to an earlier vision and that more radical steps will be needed by Anglo-Catholics if we are to recover the impetus and urgency of the ecumenical quest. Flashback to an earlier vision it may be - that is what all reflections are, not least these 'Reflections on an Ecumenical Pilgrimage to Lourdes' - but flashbacks and reflections can also give a glimpse of what might be. Will the day come when those bishops, priests, deacons and lay people, presently apart from Peter, gather with the Church throughout the world and throughout time, not only to stand at the Lord's table but to share in his banquet?

(Originally a part of Reflections on an Ecumenical Pilgrimage to Lourdes published on 12 November 2008.)