Anglo-Catholicism

GRAHAM GREENE’S CATHOLICISM: FIRST, AN INTELLECTUAL BELIEF IN GOD
THE POWER AND THE GLORY II

In this second bulletin, I outline the first two of three forms of Greene’s religion: 1) the Erastian public school Anglicanism undergirding state morality in which Greene was raised, 2) the intellectual Catholicism he adopted on the basis of argument. In the third bulletin, I shall deal with 3) in distinction from that, “conversion.”.
The Power and the Glory explains Greene’s conversion to the Catholicism he saw in Mexican peasants and described in The Lawless Roads (1939), the travelogue which gave the background, places, and many of the characters and situations for The Power and the Glory (1940). In Mexico he lived briefly, but determinatively, with a religion which embraces pain and martyrdom as ways into God, and intuits the indestructibility both of  the human need for the priestly sacrifice, and God’s provision for it. So The Power and the Glory concludes: “‘My name is Father –’ But the boy had already swung the door open and put his lips to the hand before the other could give himself a name.” 
In contrast, after descriptions of the ugliness and violence of Mexico suggesting that he is putting what he found there behind him, The Lawless Roads describes Mass back in Chelsea (London):

Mass in Chelsea seemed curiously fictitious: no peon knelt with his arms out in the attitude of the cross, no woman dragged herself up the aisle on her knees. It would have seemed shocking, like the Agony itself. We do not mortify ourselves. Perhaps we need violence. 

Greene then lists the institutionalized and unnoticed violence of daily life at the time in London, from the ugliness to the airplanes and motor vehicles. When seeing this ordinary violence in our way of life, Greene anticipated our recent change of consciousness. What we now recognize as world destructive violence, we previously took as the benign advances of rationality.
This kind of reversal of our normal evaluations is typical of Greene. So for example, The Ministry of Fear (1943) centers on the deep evil of pity “Pity is the worst passion of all.”  Just so The Quiet American exposed the murderous destructiveness of innocence. Greene’s transvaluation of values is of Nietzschean dimensions. His novels are a substitute for the metaphysical theology the English mostly lack (Charles Williams, a poetic theologian, is an exception) and his metaphysics, the novels, and his mind operate by the union of extremes. The coincidence of opposites is fundamental to Hellenic and Catholic theology. Thus,  in The Power and the Glory, and many other works (e.g. , The Quiet American,  The Comedians, The Human Factor, The Honorary Consul, Getting to Know the General, Monsignor Quixote), there is an equal concern with Marxist Communism and Catholicism. Like Williams, he regarded dogmatic Catholicism and Communism as the two defining contemporary phenomena.

The Ordinariate in England is examined as an instance of and contribution to the ecumenical movement, in terms of the process of receptive ecumenical learning - from initiating, through local to formal reception - as understood through the history and development of ARCIC, as well as a Catholic Anglican proposal for a corporate reunion in the 1980s, the Congregation of the English Mission. Also reviewed is what constitutes Anglican Patrimony, from ecclesiological and constitutional forms, to liturgical texts and traditions of moral theology, homiletics and theological dialogue. Finally, the potential of the Ordinariate as a point of engagement with Anglicanism, having been formed within and partly determined its internal ecumenism and dialogue, is considered as a means to assist Catholic understanding of Anglican tradition and thus Anglican-Roman Catholic mutual dialogue; as a sign of the Catholic Church's desire to recognise the dimension of Anglican life and religion within its account of itself as manifesting the Universal Church, and to give space to form of it; and as adding a distinctive 'dialect' of its own in the task of the new evangelisation of English society, culture and people.

The Philadelphia Times included a detailed account of a commemoration of King Charles the Martyr in its January 30, 1897 issue. The article narrates the unveiling of a painting of the Royal Martyr (originally painted with an elderly Queen Victoria's permission for the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York) at the Church of the Evangelists, Philadelphia, a major early American center of Anglo-Catholic activity.

An overview of the history and general principle of distinctive clerical dress for leading divine worship, followed by a discussion concerning the most common robes and vestments currently worn in the Church of England. The paper concludes with some evaluative thoughts and questions.

From 2000 to 2010, every domestic diocese in the Episcopal Church declined in average Sunday attendance.  This decline is attributed in part to a lack of theological and liturgical identity rooted in the Holy Eucharist.  Using the mystagogical homilies of Church Fathers as inspiration, this project uses social media to teach the Eucharistic doctrines of Real Presence and Sacrifice through video and social media.  This project utilized the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to produce, share, and collect data on two videos on Real Presence and Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Focus Groups based in St Swithun’s Episcopal Church  in the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina were used to gather responses on the effectiveness of the videos and the reception of Eucharistic doctrine.  Data was also collected from the social media websites.  The focus group responses showed high receptivity to the use of YouTube videos in liturgical and Eucharistic catechesis.  Responses also showed a general lack of understanding of Real Presence and Eucharistic Sacrifice before viewing the videos and a greater understanding after viewing, suggesting success in the mystagogical method.  Online data gatherings show that viewers have a short attention span and that the videos must be short in length and make the catechetical case in the first thirty seconds.  The value of this project is to show that members of the Episcopal Church are not averse to catholic teaching regarding the Holy Eucharist and that social media is a valuable tool in catechesis and hopefully in discipleship and church growth.

The Oxford Movement is considered to be one of the most influential movements in the history of the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion. This paper sets out to examine this movement's far-reaching effects, particularly in the realms of liturgy and spirituality.

The last General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, of July 2018, has approved the measure A068 Plan for the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer.

The General Convention has given green light to a project that had been simmering over all on the basis level of the Church. Unlike other propositions of BCP revision, my prospect is thoroughly ecumenical. I know from experience that for many people inside or outside the Episcopal Church, ecumenism is irrelevant ; for some, the Episcopal Church has crossed too many lines : women’s ordination, same-gender marriage, a few controversial clergy-persons etc. ; some others do not understand why the Episcopalians would still compromise with misogynist, homophobic, and other lesser enlightened Christians. For these groups, as opposite as they seem to be,  ecumenism and liturgy are first-world problems.

In spite of this, I believe that the love of God goes hand in hand with the love for the neighbour, and our Lord Jesus Christ seems to have accepted one-year salary’s worth of perfume on his body from a friend, although others argued that it could have been put to better use. As for the ecumenism, Christian unity has been under inner attack almost since the Pentecost, but notwithstanding the “ecumenical winter” which we see now, there is reason to believe that opportunities such as the BCP revision may be open doors to an ecumenical spring.

Therefore, my objective is to offer to the public an informed opinion about additional guidelines to follow for the BCP revision, bearing in mind the unity of the Christians.

My strategy is to take the 1979 BCP, analyse thematically its parts, describe its ecumenical flaws and strengths – how did this change distance the Episcopal Church from other Churches ? how did that change help the Christian unity ? how does that element manifest the one faith of the Church catholic ? – and prospect a better way of correcting the errors in the future, and of preserving what is good.
The proposed changes are not merely theoretical. Most of them have been tried in practice. The General Convention calls for experimentation at the basis level, under the supervision of the bishops. However, long before the call, many congregations have already had experiments of their own. Other people may share different kinds of experimental liturgies ; the ones which are shown here have followed, as I have said, an ecumenical approach.

John Henry Newman’s 1841 publication of Tract XC (hereafter Tract 90), likely the most read of all installments of The Tracts for the Times, produced a strong backlash against the Oxford Movement. This final tract precipitated Newman’s move to Roman Catholicism and spelled the end for the Movement’s first generation.

In this paper I offer a novel interpretation of Euripides' Iphigeneia among the Taurians.  I argue that by inventing the dissenting Furies, who refused to accept Orestes' acquittal at his trial on the Areopagus, Euripides is telling us that Orestes' pollution and blood-guilt from the murder of his mother are ultimately inexpiable.  In this play Orestes is trying to escape from the Furies and their renewed pursuit by stealing an image of Artemis and bringing it to Athens.  In doing this he is committing sacrilege; and he, and his sister Iphigeneia, carry out this theft by stressing how badly polluted he is in consequence of the matricide.  As Orestes leaves the stage, he cuts an utterly isolated and repellent figure.  At the end of the play, Orestes and Iphigeneia do escape from the Taurians, but there is no true 'happy ending' for them:  as many critics have noted, the future which Athena predicts for them is a very somber one.

This thesis examines Neoplatonic and Anglo-Catholic influences in the writings of the influential Melbourne organist, music critic and teacher, Arth E.H. Nickson (1876-1964). Nickson won the Clarke (Southern Provinces) Scholarship, founded to enable young Victorians to study at the Royal College of Music, where he studied organ under Sir Walter Parratt (1895-99), and came under the very strong influence of the Catholic revival in the Church of England at its height.

In 1901 Nickson returned to Melbourne where the aesthetic views he had begun to develop during his studies in England formed the basis for his activities as a church musician, which was centred on the parish of St Peter's Eastern Hill, a prominent Anglo-Catholic parish in Melbourne, recitalist and lecturer. These views were further developed as he began to write and publish essays expressing his aesthetic views that span a forty year period beginning in 1905.

Over the course of a 56-year career as a lecturer at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Music, Nickson had a strong influence due to the fact that every student passed through his lectures at some point in their course. In his lectures on the history, literature and aesthetics of music, Nickson presented a distinctive view that saw fine art as a sacrament. Nickson's presentation of thes ideas will be explored through the notes of Bruce Steele, a student who attended his lectures in 1950, other student recollections, and Nickson's own lecture notes.

This thesis falls into two broad sections, seeking first to provide an adequate biography tracing Nickson's development, and secondly, to examine Nickson's presentation of his aesthetic views in his essays and lectures. The final chapter falls into two parts. In the first, Nickson's central claim, that art is a sacrament, will be examined. From this it will be seen that Nickson viewed artistic creation as a sort of sign making which could be understood in three ways, as symbol, metaphor and sacrament. It will be shown that Nickson's centreal claim, that art is a sacrament, and his view that the world emanates from God, expose tensions in his thought that appear to be inconsistent with these central claims. Nickson focussed his thinking on the artist in the creative process, rather than on the art object itself. The central requirement he placed on the artist was that they should cultivate a particular religious disposition of mind, based on the assertion that "the powers of the Artist reach their fullest extension only in the Christian Faith"; this requirement will be seen to have been based very firmly on Nickson's own mysticism.

In the second part, Nickson's application of his ideas will be examined through his teaching, making use of student recollections, and his own rereading of Karg-Elert's Seven Pastels from the Lake of Constance (Op. 96), presented in his program notes for a concert where this work was played. Challenges to Nickson's ideas included his own rejection of twentieth-century developments in music, such as jazz and dodecaphony, and the work of non-Christian composers and performers, particularly given that some of these people held views very similar to his own. It is clear that Nickson did not respond to these challenges.

Although it is little remembered today, Christian Socialism was a vibrant and recognized branch of British socialism in the late-nineteenth century. Despite the fact that British Christian Socialists came from all backgrounds, from Nonconformist to Roman Catholic, Christian Socialism became especially associated with Anglo-Catholicism by the turn of the twentieth century. Catholic socialists often linked their political convictions to an incarnational and sacramental theology. Moreover, for many adherents, Anglo-Catholic Christian Socialism was also a vital part of the Catholic polemic against supposed Protestant individualism and puritanism. As a result, socialism became a factor in late-Victorian disputes between Anglo-Catholics and Protestants. Not surprisingly, the existence of an especially vocal and visible Anglo-Catholic socialist tradition led many anti-Catholic Protestants to associate Catholicism and socialism. In the minds of Protestant organizations, Anglo-Catholicism and socialism had grown into a twin-headed hydra. The marriage between Anglo-Catholicism and socialism in late-Victorian England is especially visible in the career of Stewart Duckworth Headlam and the first socialist organization in Great Britain, the Guild of St. Matthew (GSM). Unfortunately, the contributions of Anglo-Catholic socialists like Headlam are little recognized today among the British Left, and even professional historians, because most Anglo-Catholic socialist groups failed to engage with trade unions. As a result, the Christian Socialist contribution to British socialism faded dramatically as the century progressed.

John Macquarrie (1919-2007). Church of Scotland ordained 1945 while in the British Army, Chaplain to 1948; parish minister, PhD University of Glasgow 1954, under Ian Henderson, on Heidegger’s influence on Bultmann: An Existentialist Theology: a comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (London, 1955).  In 1962, translated with E. Robinson, Heidegger’s Being and Time,  appointed Professor of Systematic Theology at the Union Theological Seminary, New York, moved to Anglo-Catholicism, ordained Episcopal priest 1965. 1970 to 1986, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. Gifford Lecturer for 1983: In Search of Deity( New York: 1984). Attracted to Bultmann corrected by Heidegger versus Calvin and Barth (‘insufferable’), his work helped establish the early Anglophone interpretation of Heidegger, and became the basis of the  ‘existential’ phase of his theology: Principles of Christian Theology ( New York,1966).  Karl Rahner was the synthesis of catholic faith and philosophy he  sought: In Search of Humanity (London, 1982). ‘Panentheism’ close to his position, but resisted death of God theology and religionless Christianity. Religion good,  presence of holy in sacrament and symbol, human has inborn drive to transcendence. Moved to greater ecumenical openness and saw no basis for the absolutist claims for Christian mediation: Mediators between human and divine: From Moses to Muhammad (New York, 1996).  Prolific, theologically wide ranging, author, greatly loved and outstandingly effective supervisor of research students.  Being and Truth, Essays in Honour of John Macquarrie, ed. A. Kee, E. Long (London, 1986) with Macquarrie, ‘Pilgrimage in Theology’ and bibliography.

This article reconstructs the major role played by William Chauncey Langdon (1831-1895) in the activities towards Italy developed by the Episcopal Protestant Church in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Italy, between the autumn of 1859 and the spring of 1861, Langdon gave life to the Episcopal congregations of Rome and Florence. Back in America, on his impulse, in 1865 the Episcopal Church gave life to a Joint Committee on the Italian Reform Movement that sent him to Italy in early 1867. He remained there until the summer of 1873, providing information on the Italian religious world in America and supporting Italian reform groups. Langdon presented Episcopalism to his Italian interlocutors as a model for a possible reformation of the Catholic church. In contact with Ricasoli, Langdon was the de facto director of the Esaminatore, after the death of Stanislao Bianciardi in 1868.

In this lecture, I begin with a sketch of the relationship between the Tractarians and their Ritualists offspring in the second half of the nineteenth century. I then turn back to Lancelot Andrewes and John Cosin as key examples of how some of the Anglican Divines approached the tension they identified between the text of the prayer book and their eucharistic theology. Part three pivots forward to the nineteenth century Ritualists and the much more diverse and complex approaches they had to expressing in ritual and ceremony their theological concerns. The final section explores the challenges that the Second Vatican Council brought to the Anglo-Catholic movement. One of the reasons for this, I argue, is that Cranmer and Vatican II share some critical principles of reform. I conclude first by identifying some of the difficult features of Anglo-Catholic movement that make it peculiarly Anglican and then by suggesting what ascetical posture might be most fruitful as we look to the future.

In this essay, I will seek to explicate that the Oxford Movement was not based upon a monolithic message that was responding to a given set of problems or needs. To make this point I will show how the three primary personalities involved were very different in their interpretations, especially in how to communicate their convictions in writing. I will also show there was no primary strategy but rather an organic outworking of ideas in the form of the 90 Tracts that were published between 1833 and 1841. I will also show how the outcome of the movement was as much a redefining of the theologies of the writers themselves and how various evolving ideologies developed as they studied, wrote, were criticized and interacted with each other. A New Movement is Born The following passage from August B. Donaldson, one of the seminal writers on the Oxford Movement, best characterizes how this paper has outlined the context and the actual outworking of the Oxford Movement: […] it was something more than a reaction, it was a new growth, and a revival of long-dormant principles. There here had been rising in England, from various quarters, a fresh life of culture and art. Men had grown dissatisfied with the old commonplaces in poetry, painting, and architecture. Poetry had with Wordsworth taken nature and religion into an alliance and had planted the seeds of a mystic spirituality. Walter Scott had recovered juster [sic] views of the Church of the past; and, with others, had shown that the Middle Ages were not altogether times of unmitigated darkness and corruption. Added to this, opportunities for foreign travel, which had increased enormously since the end of the great wars with France, had removed not a little of the narrow and insular prejudice that declined to see anything good in the religion and worship of Continental Churches. 1

This paper traces the development of "eucharistic social theology" in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the nineteenth-century Church of England, in which eucharistic social theology is defined as the advancement of social parity on the basis of one's sacramental theology and praxis. The paper attempts to sweep away some of the naive (or more strident) historiographical assumptions about the origins and development of Anglo-Catholic doctrine, while advancing a tentative thesis that there is a genuine thread of eucharistic social theology stretching over a century, from the Oxford Movement and F.D. Maurice to the Anglo-Catholic Congresses.

T.S. Eliot was deemed a leading Anglican layman in his day, and espoused a high church tradition, almost Roman Catholic. With deeply troubling personal, marital problems in his life he adopted in faith a discipline of penitence. After many years he issued into sunny uplands, albeit not those of the earlier vision.

The nine boxes of materials, on deposit at Nashotah House since 2010, include financial ledgers, journals, meeting notes, devotional publications, estate documents, newspaper clippings, correspondence, promotional brochures, tracts, annual reports, and service leaflets. Of particular interest is the 1868-1905 manuscript Journal of Meetings and Services—an important primary source for the earliest decades of an organization based in the Church of England and its integration into the life of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.

Between the mid-19th century and the outbreak of World War I, a few London buildings wholly or partly copied works of Byzantine architecture. They represent a minority within the stylistic polyphony of Victorian architecture, dominated by neoclassicism and ‘Gothic Revival.› Neo-Byzantine style was reflected either on the decorative details of façades or in the plans and roofing systems. During the 1850s and 1860s, its use was reserved for secular buildings and reference was made primarily to San Marco in Venice. It was first used for church buildings by Dissenters and Primitive Methodists. The Greek Orthodox church of Saint Sophia (1877–1879) as well as the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral (1895–1903) moved closer to Constantinopolitan Byzantine style, taking Hagia Sophia as a standard. The neo-Byzantine style was only adopted for a church building by the Anglican majority in 1902, fifty years after it first appeared in the streets of London.

Beyond the influences that the Oxford Movement and later Anglo-Catholicism had on liturgy and spirituality in the Church of England and wider Anglican Communion, the Movement's early leaders - the Tractarians - were primarily focused on ecclesiology. This paper sets out to examine the ecclesiological thought of the Tractarians and how they sought to reshape Anglican ecclesiastical identity.

In the decades following the Second Vatican Council, Catholic liturgy became an area of considerable interest and debate, if not controversy, in the West. Mid-late 20th century liturgical scholarship, upon which the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council were predicated and implemented, no longer stands unquestioned. The liturgical and ecclesial springtime the reforms of Paul VI were expected to facilitate has failed to emerge, leaving many questions as to their wisdom and value.

Quo vadis Catholic liturgy? This Companion brings together a variety of scholars who consider this question at the beginning of the 21st century in the light of advances in liturgical scholarship, decades of post-Vatican II experience and the critical re-examination in the West of the question of the liturgy promoted by Benedict XVI. The contributors, each eminent in their field, have distinct takes on how to answer this question, but each makes a significant contribution to contemporary debate, making this Companion an essential reference for the study of Western Catholic liturgy in history and in the light of contemporary scholarship and debate. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/tt-clark-companion-to-liturgy-9780567034427/#sthash.kWcA4cg9.dpuf

Offering a decisive challenge to the older reception of Pusey as a paragon of backwards scholarship, Tobias A. Karlowicz argues that Pusey is properly understood as a penetrating and original theologian whose work anticipated contemporary conversations about the nature of theology, and a pivotal figure in the history of Anglican theology. Karlowicz locates the heart of Pusey's project in a theological perception which looks through the physicality and concreteness of language, to discern Christ at the centre of both Scripture and the physical creation. This 'sacramental vision,' which grew from Pusey's critique of Christianity's decay and his formative engagement with patristic hermeneutics and ontology, forms his teaching on the sacraments as vehicles for a Christian life of eucharistic self-oblation in union with Christ, and demonstrates the relevance of his thought to contemporary theology.

Guy Thorne (1876-1923) was a journalist, sportsman, avid drinker, man-about-town, and a committed Anglo-Catholic.  Like many of his contemporaries, Thorne was caught up in the so-called “Great Church Crisis,” a conflict between the Protestant and Catholic parties within the Church of England occurring between 1898 and 1906.  A close reading of When it was Dark, combined with Thorne’s own statements and those of his contemporary readers, reveals that its polemics were not primarily directed against Jews or Judaism, but against radical anti-Catholic Protestantism.  Revisiting When it was Dark reveals a forgotten early twentieth-century moral panic and a significant preoccupation of late-Victorian and Edwardian popular literature.

Conferenza "Pionieri o profeti? Figure e luoghi del mondo cattolico per l'ecumenismo prima del Vaticano II".

Alcuni fra i profeti dell'ecumenismo cattolico sono annoverati fra i partecipanti alle Conversazioni di Malines e fra questi spiccano l'abbé Portal, il cardinale Mercier, e dom Beauduin, con il suo famoso memorandum L'Eglise anglicane unie non absorbée. Non vi è dubbio che le Conversazioni abbiano potuto ispirare, col loro metodo e coi loro contenuti, altri pionieri dell'ecumenismo che hanno poi preso parte al concilio Vaticano II. La storia di questi cinque incontri anglo-cattolici dei primi anni venti (1921-1926) è certamente ben studiata e documentata, in particolare in seguito all'apertura degli archivi della diocesi di Malines nel 1966, che hanno aggiunto la disponibilità delle fonti cattoliche a quelle anglicane. Gli archivi Pio XI, aperti alla consultazione nel 2006, possono aiutare però a chiarire l'attitudine vaticana rispetto a questo evento. Quale fu il grado reale di approvazione da parte della Santa Sede? Quale ruolo hanno avuto esponenti romani appartenenti ad altri orientamenti unionisti come d'Herbigny? Quale peso hanno avuto quanti, come Merry del Val, erano fermi in una radicale opposizione a qualsiasi forma di avvicinamento diverso dalla conversione? E infine, come spiegare il passaggio dall'apertura iniziale degli anni 1920-1922 alla chiusura quasi di condanna del 1927? Per capirlo occorre ricollocare la storia delle Conversazioni nel più ampio rapporto del papato rattiano con le diverse iniziative di dialogo fra i cristiani che fioriscono in quegli anni.