Ðe Engleweg

By Robin G. Jordan

An Anglican who turns his back on his Anglican heritage and becomes a Roman Catholic no longer has a rightful claim to describe himself as an Anglican. In embracing Roman Catholicism he abandons even the pretense of an Anglican identity. A number of those who are planning to become Roman Catholics under the provisions of Anglicanorum Coetibus are so far removed from the Protestant Reformed religion of the Church of England in faith and practice that they are more accurately described as Roman Catholics in the Church of England than Anglicans. They are taking the last step and becoming Roman Catholics in church membership.

What does the Vatican gain from its maintenance of the fiction that the personal ordinariates that it is creating in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States are the ecclesia Anglicana, the Anglican Church? It is certainly not ‘ecumenism’ as it has been portrayed. Ecumenism does not encourage the members of one denomination to migrate from that denomination to another denomination, and adopts policies intended to facilitate their migration. The description of the personal ordinariates as ‘Anglican’ seems a blatant attempt to appropriate for the Roman Catholic Church the Anglican brand or label. The Roman Catholic Church has historically maintained that it was the only true church. With the creation of the ordinariates it appears to be seeking to add to this claim that it is the only true Anglican Church. The creation of the so-called ‘Anglican’ ordinariates is by no means a friendly act.

Anglicanorum Coetibus and the creation of the ordinariates raise questions in my mind regarding the wisdom of pandering to those who, while they are in the Anglican Church, promote Roman Catholic doctrines and usages. They are in effect serving as proselytizers for the Roman Catholic Church. They are indoctrinating in another faith those who should be learning to be Anglicans. This is what they are doing however they may rationalize it. Pandering to them will not keep them in the Anglican Church. It only enables them to take more people with them when they themselves leave the Anglican Church. Even if they themselves have no intention of becoming Roman Catholics, they are making the task of poaching members from the Anglican Church easier for the Roman Catholic Church. Their churches are serving as incubators for prospective converts to Roman Catholicism.

While Anglicanism has a High Church tradition, it is questionable whether Anglo-Catholicism particularly in its more extreme forms truly represents that tradition. Its sympathy for Roman Catholicism and the Roman Catholic Church set it apart from historic High Church Anglicanism, which has a decidedly anti-Roman Catholic bent. This bent is seen in the Canons of 1640.

The anti-Roman Catholic provisions of the 1640 Canons, however, did not reassure the English populace. What caught their attention were the provisions that emphasized the power of the king, prohibited the printing of books and tracts criticizing episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer, enjoined attendance of the prayer book services as well as sermons on Sundays, required the placement of communion tables against the east wall of the chancel and the installation of rails around communion tables, permitted the use of the term ‘altar’ for communion tables, enjoined communicants to ‘draw near’ the communion table to receive communion, commended the practice of the reverencing of the holy table upon entering and leaving of a church, chancel, or chapel, required the preaching of sermons supporting the lawfulness and commendableness of these practices, and prescribed the compilation of articles for use in ensuring the provisions of the canons were enforced.

Modern day Anglicans and Episcopalians who are accustomed to the practices that the 1640 Canons promote do not appreciate the alarm with which many Englishmen viewed these developments. To their way of thinking they were rank papalism. The English yeomanry and urban middle class were parliamentarian, presbyterian, and Puritan in their sentiments. They saw the provisions of the 1640 Canons as directed against them. They were not wrong in their estimation of the canons: they were indeed intended to put the upstart middle-class in their place. Politics and religion are intertwined in England even today.

What Anglicans and Episcopalians need to be doing is discovering and recovering their true Anglican heritage. This is the legacy that the English Reformers bequeathed to posterity. It includes the inheritance that both the Puritans and the Caroline High Churchmen left them. It includes even elements of the nineteenth century Catholic Revival as well as the eighteenth century Evangelical Revival.

The nineteenth century Catholic Revival, however, must be approached with great caution, as must the seventeenth century Catholic Reaction. Those elements that are consonant with the Scriptures and compatible with the ‘Protestant Reformed Religion’ of the Coronation Oath Act of 1688 must be carefully sifted from those elements that are not. We should also take a critical approach to the Puritans.

The exposing of the Host in a monstrance, processions with the Host or a statue of the Virgin Mary or a saint; the saying of the rosary, novenas, and other devotions to the Virgin Mary; the invocation of the saints; the veneration of icons, relics, and statues; the dipping one’s fingers in holy water and crossing one’s self; the lighting of votive candles; genuflecting to the holy table; kissing the holy table; and the like have no place in Anglicanism. Neither does labyrinth walking, the reading of extra-Biblical texts, the offering of tobacco to the four quarters of the earth, the invocation of the four elements, or similar practices.

Anglicanism has its own rich heritage. Anglican churches have no need to borrow the customs and practices of other traditions. Rather they need to explore their own tradition. They need to return to the old paths, to retrace once more ðe engleweg, the Anglican Way.