Fr Bartus says,
In the Church of England (and elsewhere too), the revival of the Baroque was indeed to demonstrate liturgically the ecclesiology: that Roman Catholicism was the true form of the faith. This produced the fine heritage of Anglo-Papalists who followed the Oxford Movement in those early days in seeking corporate reunion with the Church, today fulfilled in the Ordinariates. . . . Notice that the majority of the bishops and hierarchy who composed and led the "groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately" were in fact men who wore lace, fiddlebacks, and who were Anglo-Papalists.I would simply refer Fr Bartus, Ms Gyapong, and anyone else who might be interested to Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Notes on Camp. The essay is lengthy but inchoate, and since it's trying to catch an ephemeral idea, difficult to summarize. But here's one of her points:
This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Many people who listen with delight to the style of Rudy Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Temperance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallee in his heyday.I've referred before to the appeal of Anglo-Catholicism to gays, and of course Camp is largely a gay phenomenon. I don't mean to denounce either Camp or Anglo-Catholicism on that basis: I came to St Mary of the Angels, which must have been among the highest of high-church parishes, from an only slightly lower-church, urban Anglo-Catholic, largely gay Episcopal parish. I appreciate the Anglo-Catholic style, though Anglo-Catholics need to recognize there is such a thing as Camp, and as I become more familiar with the garden-variety Catholicism down the street, I've got to say that I appreciate Campiness in worship only up to a point. Here's another piece of the Sontag essay:
The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness - irony, satire - seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.Anglo-Catholicism is as much Camp as it is Baroque. One hates to say this, but if the clergy were to turn up at Our Lady of ______ vested in lace, birettas, and fiddleback copes, accompanied by an altar party, with a subdeacon brandishing a paten at the distribution of the host, it would clear the room -- the hundreds who normally attend any of several Sunday masses there would probably never come back; they would most certainly be voting with their feet on Bartus's proposition that Campy Baroque somehow meant that Roman Catholicism was the true form of the faith. Bartus, who'd probably have been subdeacon, would be shaking his head about how they just didn't understand.
But I'm not completely sure at this point that they'd be wrong.
