Fr Barker's History -- I

As I'd requested, a visitor pointed me (many thanks!) to Fr Jack Barker's Early History of the Anglican Use. This turns out to be a very useful complement to Douglas Bess's Divided We Stand, since it gives a different perspective on the events surrounding the 1977 Congress of St Louis and in fact fills in several gaps. On the other hand, I think the history also provides an insight into what I think is the miscalculation that has led to the disappointing underperformance of both the Pastoral Provision and the Anglican Ordinariates.

Fr Barker introduces the issue by saying,

[I]t should be noted that Anglicanism has varieties of theological persuasions from liberal to conservative generally tolerated so long as unity of worship is maintained. The Elizabethan settlement had resulted in a Church that very much lived lex orandi lex credendi. Without the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church the commonality of worship through the use of various Books of Common Prayer became the earmark of unity in the various Anglican Churches throughout the world, in the face of what would otherwise have been certain disunity.

However, Catholic commentators from Frederick Kinsman to Richard John Neuhaus have pointed out that the prayer books provide only an appearance of unity, not just from calculated ambiguity in wording, but their effect is vitiated by a deliberate policy of looking the other way at heterodox practices. In fact, the heterodoxy that had been tolerated for about a century before 1977 included Tridentine vestments and Latin liturgy in Anglican services. As Kinsman has pointed out, Anglicanism has calculatedly allowed a faction to fancy itself Catholic.

Fr Barker continues,

It had always been the hope of catholic minded Anglicans that a full scale corporate reunion or intercommunion could ultimately take place between the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

But many of those "catholic minded Anglicans" were the same ones that Kinsman recognized were allowed to fancy themselves "Catholic" as they were. This leads to the first major problem that Fr Barker describes. There was never unity of purpose among the High Church Episcopal dissidents.

Many other groups who had varying degrees of dissatisfaction with the Episcopal Church were active at the same time. The umbrella organization for them was the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen (FCC). The Diocese of the Holy Trinity joined the FCC and attended its September 1977 meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. This meeting in St. Louis produced a loose amalgamation of several groups into the Anglican Catholic Church in North America (ACNA), and this was destined to become a new "Anglican" church in the United States and Canada Some of the members of the Diocese of the Holy Trinity identified with the aims of the FCC as it moved toward founding the ACNA. Canon DuBois and the Anglicans United (successor to Episcopalians United) did not. Those in the Diocese of the Holy Trinity who agreed with the aims of ACNA kept the name Diocese of the Holy Trinity and remained with them Those who desired reunion with Rome then formed the Pro-Diocese of St. Augustine of Canterbury (PDSAC) to act as the "corpus" for transitional jurisdiction to full unity with the Roman Catholic Church.

Note history repeating itself in the Patrimony of the Primate, with about the same result. In 1977, two delegates from the PDSAC, one of whom was Fr Barker, traveled to Rome to present

a proposal for consideration of what later became the Pastoral Provision, i.e. the possibility of Episcopalians returning to the Catholic Church while retaining something of their Anglican heritage.

The proposal was very favorably received by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. However,

Before leaving Rome, confidential letters from the delegation were mailed to Bishop Albert Chambers, the retired Episcopal bishop of Springfield, Illinois, and Fr. James Mote, bishop-elect for the Diocese of the Holy Trinity. Bishop Chambers was scheduled to be the chief consecrator at the ordination to the episcopate of four Episcopalian priests, including Father Mote, which would inaugurate the new Anglican Catholic Church in America as planned by the FCC. In those letters both were advised of the results of the Rome meetings and that Rome would see those planned ordinations as a serious obstacle to reunion.

Two weeks after returning from Rome, the delegates spoke at a joint synod of the priests of the Anglican Dioceses of the Holy Trinity and Christ the King, on December 15, 1977. Bishop Chambers presided at this meeting and allowed less than ten minutes for the report on the meetings held in England and Rome. It seemed apparent to all present that the bishop was not interested. For example he said: "Your people don’t want to be Roman Catholics." This sentiment was echoed by bishops-elect Mote (of Denver) and Morse (of Oakland). Bishop Chambers continued to plan for the consecrations to take place in January 1978.

The problems that have dogged St Mary of the Angels and the "continuing Anglican" movement were present from the start. My understanding, by the way, is that Louis Falk did not attend the 1977 Congress of St Louis, was not involved in the consecrations of Mote and the other bishops, and did not make any move to join the ACC until the following year. Yet the pattern of willful duplicity that we saw in later events like the 1991 Deerfield Beach consecrations and the formation of the Traditional Anglican Communion had already been established at the start. But all things considered, Bishop Chambers was right: there never has been a significant movement, even among disaffected Anglicans, to become Catholic in a body.