dallashistory

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An unholy battle for the market share of our souls
By David Gardner

Published: October 23 2009 22:25
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As takeover bids go, it cannot be said to lack ambition. In some respects it bears more the hallmarks of a coup d’état than the acquisition of market share. Pope Benedict’s all-but-unilateral publication of an Apostolic Constitution to bring high church Anglicans into full communion with the Roman Catholic church should “in no sense at all” be seen as “an act of proselytism or aggression” said Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, his body language belying his soothing tone.

Yet, this head of a church that withdrew from the Catholic fold nearly five centuries ago was not given even five days warning of the papal decree. “I was informed of the planned announcement at a very late stage”, he told the Anglican faithful apologetically. No one saw the Roman tanks until they had ringed Canterbury.

The Anglo-Catholics of the Church of England, increasingly disaffected with the social liberalism of bishops (who might soon be women) and distressed at the empty pews of their echoing churches, disappeared in a puff of white smoke into the bosom of the Vatican. Is the Holy See’s move in answer to the prayer of Jesus for the unity of his followers in the Gospel of John (17:11) “so that they may be one”? It looks, on the face of it, a bit more like a well-organised defection.

For sure, Anglo-Catholicism has a long history of dalliance with the Roman variety, providing a distinguished list of high-profile converts over the past century and a half. Easy to caricature as an amalgam of reaction and aestheticism – the whiff of incense, the cadences of the Roman liturgy, the gorgeous vestments and the transport of the sung mass – the high church has deep roots the English Reformation never quite reached.

But all that is supposedly covered in the ecumenical dialogue pursued in established bodies such as the International Anglican Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission. Pope Benedict, by contrast, worked through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body he headed as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and the successor to the Inquisition. While this will provide a frisson for the anti-papist spirit still abroad in corners of English society, the real point is that he side-stepped not only the English bishops but the Vatican officials who do ecumenical work, presumably as too liberal and all too accommodating.

His initiative will be crowned with a papal visit to England next year, when Cardinal John Henry Newman, greatest of English converts to Catholicism, is due to be beatified.

While the details of his decree have not been published, the Pope seems to have made no concessions: even the transfused Anglican bishops will now take the title of Ordinary.

It can, of course, be argued that Anglicans are no strangers to the mergers and acquisitions business. They do, after all, face fierce competition: there are estimated to be 1.13bn Catholics, not to mention 1.57bn Muslims, as opposed to a mere 77m Anglicans worldwide, the same number as there are Catholics in the US. Thus, there have been local mergers with Baptists and talks with Methodists (in the UK), fusion of the Anglican and Uniting churches (in Australia), or a merger between US Episcopalians and Evangelical Lutherans.

Mergers are becoming as common as schisms were in the past. Yet, whereas the splits were often over big theological or social disagreements (evolution, say, or slavery), the modern Anglican urge to unity seems to be as much about administrative rationalisation and dwindling congregations as faith and belief.

The interpretation of Catholicism offered by Pope Benedict instead offers the dogmatic doctrinal certitude and muscularity of a church militant – red meat rather than thin gruel.

This goes to the heart of the differences in outlook between the two churchmen. When Dr Williams looks, for example, at Islam, probably he sees first the ease with which its message reaches the public square. His February 2008 speech at the Royal Courts of Justice on Islam under English law was covered sensationally in terms of his tentative suggestion that certain legal functions might be delegated to Muslim religious courts. The bigger idea embedded in his dense argument was his belief and dismay that – paradoxically for a church still under state patronage – religion had been driven out of public life into the private realm of individual choice.

When Pope Benedict looks at Islam, by contrast, probably he admires most the undiluted forthrightness of its message. As he charts a path through the swamp of moral relativism he sometimes appears to equate with pluralism, hard-edged clarity is his guide. In the competition with a vigorous Islamic revival, moreover, he appears to believe strongly that ethics can be hollowed out by any compromise.

The Pope’s incendiary remarks on Islam in September 2006 at the university of Regensburg – quoting a Byzantine emperor describing Islam as violent, evil and inhuman – were, he said subsequently, merely part of a lecture that “in its totality” was an invitation to a frank and sincere inter-faith dialogue. Quite. No doubt in the same spirit that Lenin used to discuss whether contradictions were being sharpened or blunted.

Anglicans really should not be surprised at what has happened. This pope is not just a scholar, but a student of power. In January this year, he reintegrated excommunicated followers of the fundamentalist Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre – who led a rebellion against the opening up of the church started by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 – even though one of them, the English-born bishop Richard Williamson, was openly a Holocaust denier.

Pope Benedict’s notion of Catholic unity puts the embrace of Anglo-Catholic traditionalists or Lefebvrists above respect for other religions. And, if he is willing to offend Muslims and Jews, why not Anglicans?
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