Strong words from A.N. Wilson, the prominent Anglican revert, about Pope Benedict's overture to disaffected Anglican conservatives. Excerpts:
The numbers of practicing Catholics in England is greater than the number of practicing Anglicans. Within a generation, there will probably be more Muslims than practicing Anglicans in the British Isles. Britain will no longer be able to endure the absurdity of the laws relating to the religion of the monarch, the Act of Settlement and Royal Marriages Act, which among other things forbid the sovereign to marry a Catholic. Or the Coronation Oath, which promises to uphold the Protestant religion.Britain has gone through a truly prodigious change in the last 30 years. It has moved from being a largely white culture with Christianity as its background religion to being a completely secular, multicultural society. The ease and good humor with which this revolution has occurred has made Britain -- and especially London -- an amazingly interesting place to be right now. A genial secularized liberalism is the new norm. ...In such a climate, the Church of England had no chance at all of surviving.
He goes on to explain that the C of E will have to be disestablished, because almost no one believes in it anymore. He goes on.:
The paradox is that a move by a conservative pope to ease the tender consciences of conservative-minded Anglicans will actually be a move toward the complete secularization of Britain, and an acceptance of its new multicultural identity.
It's a bit unclear exactly where Wilson stands on this. It seems that he's a liberal in politics and religion both, and so can't decide whether the pope has done a good or a bad thing. The headline on the NYTimes piece blames the Pope for splitting the Anglican Church. Writers don't choose their headlines, but if indeed that's what Wilson is saying, I think he's wrong. The Church of England was badly split before Pope Benedict offered a hand to traditionalist Anglican Christians. The Pope's move was a bold one, and, I imagine, one seen as hostile by more than a few Anglicans. But Benedict is doing what he can to save what can be saved of Christianity in Britain, and in Europe, or so it seems to me.
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As The Wittenburg Door noted, in observation of the anniversary of Henry Newman leaving the Anglican church for the Roman, "Yeah, like that's a big difference."
Re: Who would you rather have teach your children at Sunday School or Vacation Bible School -- Pope Benedict or Gene Robinson? Pope Benedict or Katherine Jefferts-Schori? Pope Benedict or John Shelby Spong?
What a silly question.
Pope Benedict, of course. Without question. While there are many issues where I disagree with Pope Benedict, he is without question a good, learned, and holy man.
But I'd probably rather have my priest from back home teach Sunday School rather then Pope Benedict. He is _also_ a man of tremendous faith, learning, and compassion (and a former schoolteacher, actually) who is traditionalist and conservative on many matters (he's a single issue pro-life voter, for one) but is a liberal on the gay issue (having had a change of heart a few years ago). He's also a voluntary celibate, passionately devoted to Our Lady, and generally Anglo-Catholic down the line. Someone who, in other words, can't easily be categorized as either a liberal or conservative Anglican.
And I think Rowan Williams is also a perfectly good man and that it would be a close thing between him and Benedict, maybe with a slight edge to Fr. Williams. Rowan Williams is not the hipster postmodernist some take him for, and he's no Spong and no Schori.
You've simply taken the worst elements of the present-day Episcopal Church and tarred the entire Episcopal Church and Anglo-Catholic tradition (which will survive outside the US, and outside the Episcopal Church, even if it doesn't survive inside) with that sorry brush. The unpleasant and contemptible Spong is not typical of the Episcopal Church- if he was, then he wouldn't have been such a scandal.
I don't have children, for what it's worth, but I do hope to have children someday (three, ideally).
Hector, I hope everybody thinks as deeply about this as you, and is as honest with themselves in their answers and as honorable in their ultimate decision.
I don't like to do confessional disputes online, especially with somebody I've "been to battle with", however tangentially, in the wilds of the internet. At the point somebody starts getting upset, I get queasy. I love my Church, you love yours. I respect that. I'd love to have you on my side of the Tiber some day, if we can agree right down the line on essentials; it would be unprincipled to do it any other way.
NAO,
Thanks. I appreciate that you love your church, there's a lot to love about it. And I do respect it, a lot.
Hector,
My point is that it says something -- and not something good -- about the Episcopal Church that even you, a loyalist and a vocal skeptic toward Anglo-Catholics leaving for Rome, would still rather have Pope Benedict teach your children Christianity than the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church or the Episcopal Church's most famous clergymen or its most famous (a)theologian.
I think you generalize too much from your own atypical experience in the Episcopal Church. Or rather you cite your own anecdotal experience as refutation of any negative generalization anyone makes about the Episcopal Church, even when those generalizations are made on the basis of experiential evidence much broader than your own.
The reason most Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals -- most Anglicans in other words -- have already left the Episcopal Church is not because they aren't "stickers" like you.
It's because their circumstances in the Episcopal Church were worse than your own and/or they were less willing to compromise on doctrine and dogma to accommodate the liberals than you yourself have been, being something of a liberal and/or a leftist yourself.
You need to recognize that you may soon find yourself in circumstances much more typical of the average Anglo-Catholic or Evangelical Anglican than yours have been so far, and, at that point, you may see people's decisions to leave instead of stay in a whole different light -- and likewise your own decision to stay instead of leave.
And this will be especially true if you have children by then. It's one thing for an adult already formed by orthodox Christianity to "stick" things out in a church in which a terminal virus of liberal revision has set in. But it's quite another thing for an orthodox Christian to submit his or her children to "Christian" formation by those who see their job as passing that terminal virus along to children who have never had the chance to be formed by the orthodox Christianity that serves as a vaccine.
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