Fr Longenecker On Religious Neverland

I first found Fr Longenecker during a Lenten conference at our parish a year ago. I found his story engaging, not because it was somehow romantic, but because it struck me, as someone who'd been wrestling with the whole Anglicanorum coetibus puzzle, as something like the opposite of what I'd seen with the North American ordinariate.

Longenecker was raised an evangelical Protestant, became a Church of England priest, decided to become Catholic when C of E ordained women, at a time when the English Catholic hierarchy in response made it easy for married Anglican priests to do so, but was thwarted due to bureaucratic inertia.

So his story involved bureaucracy and effort reminiscent of the persistent widow in the parable, not the life he envisioned for himself in this post at his blog:

I was going to be a George Herbert kind of chap, living simply in my country parsonage, writing poems, visiting the poor and wandering off to my crumbling thousand year old church to ring the bell and kneel among the hassocks and cassocks and the musty dust of ages to mutter my prayers from a dog eared prayer book.

This is the stuff of immaturity–to run off after a romantic dream, and the religious romantic dream is the most seductive of all because, of course, one sees oneself as a courageous pilgrim–an adventurer who sets out in faith to follow the star. The religious romantic dream is the most seductive because it is so elusive and because one is being otherworldly and holy for pursuing it.

He's responding to a review of a new Thomas Merton biography, and of course, he thinks Merton is an example of someone pursuing a religious romantic dream.

This is also why I’m increasingly suspicious of any kind of romantic Neverland religion. It’s not real, and because it’s not real it makes you unhappy.

It makes you unhappy because it is never good enough. The reality never fits the dream. I’ve seen this time and again as people go church shopping. Their local parish isn’t to their liking so off they go to some other kind of religion or some other denomination, but of course that church is never good enough for them either.

. . . I had one friend who had a taste for traditionalism so off he tootled to the local parish that had good altar servers, nice music and high ceremonial. But it was the Novus Ordo shock horror! So he began reading more traddy literature online and started driving an hour and a half to attend a Fraternity of St Peter parish where everything was in Latin. Then when reality hit he grumbled, “They’re just a bunch of homos and liars too.” From there it was the Lefevbrists and then full blown sedevacantism.

As I mention here from time to time, I've never quite figured out what Bernard Law had in mind when he cooked up the Anglican outreach project. Whatever the original intent may have been, the reality is that in the US -- the key target market as Law originally saw it -- pretty much the only people who've been attracted to it are religious romantics, either ex-Anglicans (dominated by "continuers") or cradle Catholic traddies, often those disillusioned in the course of some other pursuit, already having found this, that, or the other that was never good enough.

This is probably a big reason why "Anglican" has never quite been defined in the Complementary Norms. If you went even as far as the Pastoral Provision does in including Methodists but excluding the Charismatic Episcopal Church, you'd be limiting your target market, which is a small and scraggly bunch no matter how you define it.