What Do We Mean When We Say "Anglican Patrimony?" -- II

We might try to limit the Spong problem in several ways. One might be to cut and splice Msgr Lopes's words creatively and say, well, our definition of "Anglican patrimony" is that part of it that nourishes the Catholic faith, so we can't include the thought of an obvious heretic like Spong. But no heretic is an accepted Catholic thinker anyhow, so we're getting close to tautology: 'Anglican patrimony' is the Catholic part of Anglicanism, the part that nourished Catholic faith. So we've said the Catholic faith is the Catholic faith, which doesn't tell us anything about Anglicanism, which means we've said nothing.

But in my quote from Mr Murphy yesterday, he said the Ordinariate movement means to "bring the treasures of the Anglican patrimony into the Catholic Church". So we're somehow bringing something in that isn't heretical and wasn't there before. Exactly what is that? Spong is an easy call. What Anglican thinkers are more Catholic and not heretical?

But now my interlocutor rises up, red-faced and shaking: "Mr. Bruce. You. Are. Missing. The. Whole. Point. The Episcopal Church ceased to be Catholic in 1974, when it ordained women priests. The instances like Pike and Spong are from this very recent period and don't represent real Anglicanism and the precious Catholic treasures of its whole Patrimony."

The only answer I would give is that the Church of England ceased to be Catholic in 1534. The Catholic Church recognized this systematically in 1896. But my interlocutor is coming from a direction that I think needs greater examination. Earlier I discussed Frederick Kinsman's Salve Mater, his disillusionment with Anglicanism, and his remarkably clear-eyed prescience about its future, based on what he knew of its past.

In later life, Kinsman returned to teaching Church history, this time to Catholic seminarians. At Catholic behest, he published many of his lectures in Reveries of a Hermit (1936). This book has the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur. His lecture explicating Anglicanism for seminarians is contained on pp 132-150. A key element of his description is the division of Anglicanism into three tendencies, High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church. He feels the Broad Church faction has been the most dominant since Hanoverian times and traces some of its vagaries to its tendency toward general tolerance, which it had to promote as a political arm of the State. This has carried over to The Episcopal Church in its perceived need not to be controversial, a quality Kinsman certainly felt was not new in the 1910s, when he left.

But his remarks on High Church are also perceptive and, again, prescient (pp 136-7):

This type of [Laudian] churchman largely went out of fashion and power under the Hanoverians, but never out of existence. [In] 1832, a band of clergymen in Oxford made a fresh plea for. . . . reversion to the ways of Laud and his compeers. . . . although they strove to keep well within the limits of the Prayer Book. Later some of the party ignored these, used translations or adaptations of the Missal, and set themselves to copy altogether the ways of Roman Catholics. Their watchword was always "Catholic", and their aim the support of Catholic doctrines and practices. Yet, in the party, there was much exercise of private judgment, both in a chronic fastidiousness which spent its energy in pointing out how everyone else was more or less wrong -- the superciliousness of schism -- and in a willfulness to follow individual whims. The spirit of Catholicism is obedience.

I've simply got to refer readers to Fr Hunwicke's disturbingly silly remarks I cited yesterday. He's "heard it argued" (viz, by Msgr Lopes of the Vatican, Msgr Steenson, and no doubt others) that "the Extraordinary Form is not part of the Anglican Patrimony." Well, in his private judgment, it doggone well is. You can take the vicar out of the country, but not the country out of the vicar, it would seem.

I recall that, during the runup of the UK Ordinariate, there was some consternation over a delay in Fr Hunwicke's ordination, due to views he may have expressed on the web. In my estimation, any such caution was well justified.

More to come.