A Denomination Called Anglican

Edward Norman, the canon of York Minster, has written many books. I suppose my favorite is House of God, an intelligently annotated and magnificently illustrated history of Christian architecture. It was published some fifteen years ago and if you come across it in a used bookstore, don’t miss the opportunity of picking it up. Norman’s latest is Anglican Difficulties (Continuum), in which he concludes that Anglicanism has irretrievably lost what was once “a faithfully preserved deposit of Christian doctrines,” and announces that he is entering into communion with the Catholic Church. The book is reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement along with Anglican Identities, a collection of essays edited by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.

In his review, Father Peter Cornwell, a former Anglican who was vicar at the University Church at Oxford, writes: “In all honesty we have to turn back to the real questions which Edward Norman puts to the Church of England. . . . Ever since the national Church followed the Empire to become a worldwide communion, it has had troubles. Escaping from the authority of the Crown in Parliament, what now could hold this burgeoning body together and help resolve its inevitable disputes? Although Williams repudiates ‘the necessity of a central executive authority,’ pressure of events has moved his Communion in that direction, with the evolution of the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, the regular meetings of the Primates, and now what may emerge from the Eames Commission on gay clergy. The more complicated a game becomes, the more players are involved, the more you find you need a referee or umpire, not to create the game—only players can do that—but to serve the game, to let it move forward. Roman Catholics may be tempted to think that Anglicans will wake up one day to find that they have reinvented the papacy.”

If a new Anglican papacy is both pointless and impossible, Anglicans may be rescued from impending death by the existing papacy. But, Cornwell observes, “If the papacy is really to serve unity, then Catholics have to make sure that it is more clearly a gift which can enable Anglican gifts to flourish and not be crushed.” Much as John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint, with primary, but by no means exclusive, reference to the Orthodox. By the time this sees print, the Eames Commission may have issued its report. It is to address, inter alia, the fragmentation of the Anglican communion precipitated by the unilateral action of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. in installing as bishop of New Hampshire a married man who left his wife and children to live with his male partner.

I recently had dinner in Europe with a UK bishop who serves on the commission. He opined that the entire “unpleasantness” was due to the fact that bishops in Africa and elsewhere had not yet caught up to the Americans, and the cultural laggards would have to be told in no uncertain terms that they can’t hold back the entire communion. He predicted that the commission would “come down hard” on bishops from the Southern hemisphere who are engaged in “outrageous irregularities,” such as offering episcopal oversight to “fundamentalist Anglicans” in the U.S. What was striking in his conversation is that there was not a single reference to the possibility that the New Hampshire matter might entail questions of theological or moral consequence, never mind truth. It was entirely a matter of some slow learners making themselves a bother. Advised that, if he is right about the commission report, it almost certainly means the end of the “special relationship” between Canterbury and Rome and the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue’s hope for ecclesial reconciliation, the bishop seemed quite untroubled. Having abandoned even nominal adherence to Scripture and tradition, Anglicanism would likely be viewed by Rome as simply one more Protestant denomination. The prospect appeared to faze the bishop not at all. It would be a very nice denomination in which he felt very much at home. I hope, and rather expect, he was wrong about the report of the Eames Commission. We should know in short order.

Source: New books about Anglicans, Times Literary Supplement, July 9, 2004.