A Snub to the Catholic Hierarchy?

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In the aftermath of the Pope’s authorisation of personal ordinariates for ex-Anglicans the notion that it constitutes a snub to the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has occurred to some, such as Damien Thompson in the Telegraph. Thompson’s characterisation of the Catholic bishops as liberal and trendy and the Anglo-Catholics as worshipping in crumbling neogothic churches in industrial areas may be somewhat stereotyped (all of the ‘Forward in Faith’ parishes I have come across have been in rather attractive buildings in less than industrial areas), but it is certainly true that a cultural gulf exists between ‘more-Catholic-than-the-Pope’ Anglo-Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church in England. The Irish influence on the latter is pronounced and, in many areas, the importance of other cultural influences such as that of the Poles is increasing. The majority of senior clergy in the English Catholic Church are of Irish descent and of a generation that trained in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II. The distinctive ‘Englishness’ of Anglo-Catholicism and its liturgical conservatism are alien to them. Perhaps the reason for this is that Ultramontanism finally defeated Cisalpinism in the English Catholic Church at the end of the 19th century; the reformed Ultramontanism of Vatican II is the ecclesiopolitical creed of the vast majority of English Catholics, who have largely lost their distinctive English identity. The Ecclesia Anglicana that the 17th century Benedictines dreamed of and which was still a possibility when the Sarum rite was proposed for the Diocese of Westminster, was definitively crushed by the decrees of Vatican I.

Pope Benedict’s decree is couched in the language of the reformed Ultramontanism of Vatican II but it is certainly at odds – dramatically at odds, in fact – with the spirit of the Council. The restoration of the discipline of the primitive church through the elevation of the bishop’s role (as opposed to the priest’s) was a key element of the Council’s reforms, yet the sidelining of diocesan bishops by the creation of personal ordinariates is likely to be as popular with the Bishops’ Conference as the appearance in dioceses of Opus Dei houses that owe no allegiance whatsoever to the local bishop. Insofar as many Catholic bishops in England consider their role in the diocese important and in this way want to implement the reforms of Vatican II, they are ‘liberal’; they are hostile to the centralising tendency of the Church just as their predecessors were hostile to the Jesuits since their only allegiance was to Rome. Ironically, like the Jesuits and Opus Dei, the new ordinariates of ex-Anglicans may become the next group of Ultramontane wildcards whose authority is the Pope’s mandate alone who trample on the territory of the local bishops.

Indirectly, the Pope’s move may be seen to demean and undermine the distinctive cultural inheritance of England’s Catholics, to the extent that it still exists. The Anglo-Catholics have long proclaimed themselves to be the guardians of England’s pre-Reformation heritage and, now that they will be within the Catholic Church, the claim of English Catholics to be the inheritors of that tradition will be weakened. If the episcopal hierarchy in England, the descendents of the Apostolic Vicars and the Archpriests, can no longer claim to represent the whole body of English Catholicism, Catholics in England will be divided. In a certain sense, ‘old’ English Catholics might even come to be seen as a second-class, ‘foreign’ kind of Catholic compared to the new Catholic Anglo-Catholics.

It seems to me very doubtful that the Church of England will permit church buildings to fall into Catholic hands – it is very reluctant to do so at present, and I see no reason why that should change after the Pope’s pronouncement. The fear of losing their church buildings has long been a factor that has kept Forward in Faith priests in the Church of England and I suspect that it still may.

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