At best, like maple syrup flavored bacon, we must allow that this is not to everyone's taste, but the idea that this sort of highly sentimental, artsy-schmartsy introduction to the topic should be seen as appropriate by both Mr Coulombe and his editors serves as I think a confirmation that Roger Scruton's remarks about fantasy and sentimentality have some application to the ordinariates. What's going on here, as Scruton might recognize, is salesmanship.
I think the story the piece tells is incoherent, a kind of counterpoint within the Whig Interpretation.
The persecution of the English Church by Henry, Elizabeth, and company resulted in a small, secretive minority in England (and daughter colonies, such as Maryland and Kentucky). They were forced to forego a demonstrative liturgical life, instead focusing on personal piety and holiness. Living a sort of dry (and occasionally wet) martyrdom and—especially after the defeat of the last Jacobite attempt in 1746—having to forego any hope of influencing the external political order, English Catholicism became ever more secretive and inward-looking.And nothing happened until John Henry Newman and Tract 90.
This dreary picture began to be illumined by the work of such Romantics as Sir Walter Scott in rediscovering the Middle Ages. Their work bore fruit at the birth of the Oxford Movement.Famous amongst Catholics for the part played by converts like St. John Henry Newman in reviving the Church in England, the Oxford Movement also gave rise to Anglo-Catholicism. In time this movement would transform the externals of Anglicanism, if not its doctrines or ethos.
Note the apparently unwitting, but certainly accurate, attribution of Romanticism to Anglo-Catholicism. This completely skips over John Dryden (although Coulombe's essay owes an unacknowledged debt to Aidan Nichols's The Panther and the Hind), while Alexander Pope was a public Catholic, among other notable figures. The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 allowed Catholics to own property, inherit land and join the army. Catholic priests functioned openly and established parishes after this period. Respectable scholarly opinion traces the Oxford Movement to the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 and the Reform Act of 1832, which caused confusion in the Church of England about the unique status of the established faith.
And the Oxford Movement should not be confused with John Henry Newman, since Newman became Catholic, while the Oxford Movement took place within Anglicanism and, while it mimicked Catholic vestments and architecture, went its own way theologically and fully tolerated homosexuality from the start, as well as other practices not endorsed by Rome, including occultism. I think sales efforts like Mr Coulombe's take insufficient trouble to draw these distinctions, because what's being done here, as Mr Coulombe makes clear, is to bring a good deal of Anglicanism into the Church without much reflection:
But Anglo-Catholicism produced not only many of those same converts but a large number of clerical theologians and lay thinkers of the caliber of T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Arthur Machen, Dorothy Sayers, George Grant, and a host of others—all of whom can be re-examined for what insights they may offer.Literary criticism tends to separate literary texts from the lives of authors, but Catholics revere saints for heroic virtue, and there's no requirement that we keep things separate in evaluating writers for moral or theological example. In the gospels, figs do not come from thistles, notwithstanding the English Department acts as if they do. T S Eliot was a highly manipulative, sexually ambiguous character throughout his life. He endorsed clothing (Langrock's in Princeton) as frequently as he endorsed religion. His practical views on marriage should be viewed skeptically by Catholics.
The same applies to Dorothy Sayers. If writers like these behave publicly in opposition to their stated support (however imprecise this may be) of Christian doctrine -- and indeed, unlike St Augustine or C S Lewis, don't own up to it or repent of it -- I think there's a great deal of reason to hesitate recommending them as Catholic examples, which Mr Coulombe, however naively, is doing here.
Given the criteria Roger Scruton has outlined, where fantasy and sentimentality act in the service of salesmanship, I think Mr Coulombe, perhaps naively, is doing a sales job and doing his readers no service. But I assume his editors are happy enough.
