Proof Of Pudding

Thanks to a visitor, I've been given a pretty detailed insight into Diarmaid MacCulloch's thinking on the nature of "Anglicanism". I think if we back off and see it in survey-course stereotypes, there's no problem in looking at it as based on compromise. This also means that there's no simple way to characterize it, except by saying that during some historical periods, it permitted a limited and politically expedient spectrum of beliefs. As a result, logically speaking, there really can't be a single "Anglican patrimony", except to say that any "patrimony" consisted of a tendency to make political deals as needed.

In a 2004 lecture, MacCulloch summed up his views:

[T]he Church of England has over the last two centuries become increasingly adept at covering its tracks and concealing the fact that it springs from a Reformation which was Protestant in tooth and claw. This labour of obfuscation began with the aim of showing that Anglicans were as good if not better Catholics than followers of the pope. It then continued with the perhaps more worthy aim of finding a road back to unity with Rome, in the series of ecumenical discussions which began in 1970, known by the acronym ARCIC. . . The participants in these discussions have not been anxious to emphasise difference, and very often they have fallen back on the Anglo-Catholic rewriting of church history pioneered by John Keble and John Henry Newman in the 1830s, as the Oxford Movement took shape.

This opinion was delivered before (but not much) both the Portsmouth Letter and Anglicanorum coetibus, but I think subsequent developments have borne it out. John Hepworth presumably represented a "continuing Anglican" wing of what is correctly called Anglo-Papalism , while Jeffrey Steenson was its latter-day exponent within The Episcopal Church.

It seems to me that both promoted a misleading idea, that dissatisfaction with policies in the mainstream Anglican Communion by a fairly wide spectrum of nominal Anglicans could be translated into a wish by many of those same disaffected Anglicans to become Catholic. That outcome simply hasn't taken place. In part this is because Hepworth and Steenson both seem not to have understood the true nature of Anglicanism, which I think MacCulloch understands much better.

The desire to become Catholic simply hasn't been a practical ingredient of the real-world decisions by the great majority of nominal Anglicans, no matter how dissatisfied they may have been with the formal actions of their denominational bodies. There are very good reasons to become Catholic, but a sentimental appeal to an "Anglican patrimony" isn't really one of them.

Those who may now see themselves tasked with salvaging the disappointing outcome of Anglicanorum coetibus need to take this into account.