Of King James, and Sid James

January 19, 2011 at 11:45 pm (Anglicanism, Catholicism)
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Now then, Radio 4 listeners among you will be aware that some few days ago the thinking person’s wireless station devoted a day’s programming to the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible, with dramatic readings taking place throughout the day. This led to the usual bitching and whining from the pub bore wing of the atheist community, but I don’t want to talk about Terry and Keith today. What I want to talk about, briefly, is language.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that the KJV is one of the great masterpieces of the English language. We use phrases from it every day, often without realising we’re doing so. Much the same can be said of the Book of Common Prayer – one may take issue with the late Archbishop Cranmer’s Zwingliite deviationism, but his command of language is magnificent. In both cases, it’s the fact that the text was designed to be read aloud, and in the solemn setting of worship, that gives the language its extraordinary power.

It’s tremendously sad that, despite the KJV and the BCP being enshrined in English law as the standard texts of the Established Church, they’re scarcely to be heard in that setting any more, outside of the great cathedrals and some old-fashioned rural parishes. The good old C of E, one records with immense regret, seems much fonder these days of what some wag – it may have been Craig Brown – dubbed the Sid James Version.

Why should those of us of a resolutely unreformed bent be concerned about such matters? I will tell you why. As you’ll no doubt be aware, the new translation of the Roman Missal…

What’s that, Sooty?

Oh. All right. Well, some of you may be unaware that a new translation of the Roman Missal is due to be rolled out this year. You may be unaware of this because the Bishops’ Conference has done bog all to prepare the faithful for its introduction, notwithstanding Uncle Arthur Roche having just bowed to the inevitable and mumbled something about doing so at some future point. And that is an interesting story in and of itself.

You see, the spread of “yo dudes!” liturgies in the good old C of E is by no means an isolated phenomenon. It has its counterpart in the dogged attachment of the Catholic hierarchies of these islands to the 1970 edition of the Roman Missal in its English translation. In some cases, notably in the liberal Protestant dioceses along the south coast of England, this is for ideological reasons, with the 1970 text being identified as “modern” and “progressive”. If you’re wondering how a forty-year-old translation gets to be the epitome of modernity, look no further than the psychedelic vestments favoured by certain bishops.

More often it’s political, as is often the case in the Catholic world where you have nine parts politics to one part dogma. Their Lordships are great believers in uniformity, and have a nasty tendency to come out in hives when faced with things that aren’t uniform, whether it be the Ordinariate or Summorum Pontificum or those nice young priests in the Polish missions who are now supposed to be acculturated into the much more successful English way of doing things. Which is why the 1970 text has got to be such a shibboleth.

Which brings me neatly to this week’s issue of That Magazine We Don’t Mention. In its capacity as the Magic Circle’s house organ, the Suppository has been a-moaning and a-groaning about the new translation for some considerable time now. It’s even at certain points got in some proper translators to argue aesthetics, but more often than not we’ve just had Bobbie Mickens overfulfilling his fulminating quota.

In this week’s editorial column, we have – conveniently enough – a reflection on the KJV anniversary, which then morphs into a whinge about the new Missal, getting in a sly dig at the Douay-Rheims translation on the way:

But the Catholic version… stayed as close to the Latin Vulgate as possible. It introduced English versions of Latin words, and translated obscure passages equally obscurely lest any theological nuances were lost. The Anglican translators, on the other hand, sought – not always successfully – to resolve uncertainties of meaning rather than reproduce them, and they preferred words of Anglo-Saxon origin to Latin or Greek.

Ahem. Anyone who’s ever done translation work, should it even be translating a passage of Cicero at school, will know there’s a constant tension between being faithful to your source and rendering your translation in idiomatic English. That can never be avoided. That said, I think this account of the Douay-Rheims is a little tendentious – as Bible translations go, it isn’t really all that difficult compared to the KJV, and what you lose in immediacy you gain in accuracy.

But let us return to the Peppermint Spinster:

Differences of approach such as those between the King James and the Douay-Rheims versions are still alive today. Like the latter, the anxiously awaited new Catholic Missal in English has put literal accuracy above sensitivity to language, which is why many are warning that the rendering will be clumsy. [Though the old Missal isn’t exactly Henry James, is it?] At least the translation at present in use, whatever its shortcomings as literature [Told ya!], tried to stay closer to contemporary speech patterns, as did the translators commissioned by King James.

You what? “Contemporary speech patterns”, forsooth. One may argue that the KJV is somewhat less stilted than Douay-Rheims, but any fule kno that the language of the KJV was archaic even for its time, and deliberately so. Such was felt to be necessary for a translation of sacred texts.

I realise this may seem a bizarre idea to metropolitan sophisticates. Yet, even in today’s London, one can go to a Byzantine Rite Mass in the company of Ukrainian Catholics. Is their liturgy in the street slang of modern Kiev? No, it’s not even in Ukrainian but in Church Slavonic. One may also think of the other Eastern Rite Churches who use Byzantine Greek or Classical Armenian or Coptic or Syriac; not to mention non-Christian religious communities using Sanskrit or Pali or Avestan or whatever you’re having yourself. The notion of a sacred language is well enough established in human culture that the use of an elevated register of the vernacular shouldn’t be too baffling.

We conclude:

The Church of England has moved away from an Authorised Version style of language in its own liturgy. It would be an ironic twist if the Catholic Church in Great Britain – perhaps in reaction to unprepossessing translations emanating from Rome – longed to go the other way.

I know what the first sentence means, but the second has me scratching my head a little. Ma Pepsi’s organ has been running endless defences of the 1970 Missal – has she suddenly gone off message so completely that she’s now advocating something along KJV lines? Even leaving aside the implicit English Catholic chauvinism of the “emanating from Rome” reference… Well, I could see adaptations of the KJV and BCP having some purchase in the Ordinariate, as is the case in Anglican Use parishes in North America, but I can hardly see it going down well with the Val Doonican nostalgics in the Bishops’ Conference, for whom it’s always 1970.

But no matter. You know I like to be constructive, so I’ll just leave you with a modest proposal. Those priests who have a genuine, principled objection to the new translation have a simple alternative to hand. If they don’t like the new English Missal, they can just use Latin. After all, under the terms of Summorum Pontificum a priest of the Latin Rite doesn’t need anyone’s permission to celebrate Mass in Latin. And I’m certain those bishops who are uncomfortable with the new English Missal could hardly object. Could they?

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So would you too be feeling the strain

July 11, 2010 at 10:55 pm (Anglicanism)

You know, I like Rowan Williams a lot. Partly it’s because he’s a really interesting thinker – even if you’re not theologically inclined, his writings on Dostoyevsky are well worth your attention – who, often at some cost to his own reputation, doesn’t bother much with tailoring his thoughts for media soundbited purposes. Partly it’s because his theological conservatism has never stopped him taking the expansive and humane view. But most of all, I feel sorry for him. And this has everything to do with the unleadable shower he’s supposed to lead, which would tax Moses himself, never mind a fallible human being like +Rowan.

But allow me to digress for a moment. Some years ago I was talking to a clerical contact who’d done some work at the Christian Unity dicastery, and who was most interesting on the differences in dealing with the various denominations. First you have to consider that the four major Christian traditions – Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian and Coptic – may have their differences, but do share a basic conceptual universe that allows them to more or less understand each other, a conceptual universe not shared by Seventh Day Adventists or Louisiana snake-handlers or such. What this boiled down to was that if Catholic negotiators were talking to the Russian Orthodox, both sides would have their settled dogmas that they could compare, identify points of agreement and disagreement, and talk about in a structured way.

This is not, of course, to say that you couldn’t make progress with the Protestants, at least those with settled positions. My interlocutor was very impressed at the way the German tag-team of Kasper and Ratzinger had engaged with the Lutherans, drawing on a shared cultural background and some understanding of what the Lutherans were about. But what used to drive him absolutely spare was trying to deal with the Anglicans, because they were a constantly moving target. You could have Rowan Williams across the table from you and have very little idea whether what he was saying was an official Anglican position or just Rowan’s opinion. The latter would, of course, be rendered more likely if Akinola popped up the next week and flatly contradicted what you’d heard from Rowan. Or was it Akinola who was off message? One could never tell…

The point being that dear old Rowan is defined not just by his personality but by his environment. His style – he writes in dense paragraphs full of qualifying subclauses, and speaks in a slightly toned down version of the same – is not always of Orwellian transparency. But if he can come across as muddled, that isn’t entirely his own fault, as Fr Dwight points out:

How could anyone hope to be clear headed and clearly spoken when he has to head up such a denomination? Here’s the real situation. Anglicans have liberals who deny the existence of God, the supernatural, any vestige of a traditional understanding of the Christian faith and they also have conservative Evangelicals who are virtually Biblical fundamentalists. They have Anglo Catholics who believe in the real presence, have monks and nuns, go on pilgrimages to Marian shrines, call their priests ‘Father’ and whose liturgy is more Catholic than the Catholics. On the other hand they have priests who have the same orders who deny all Catholic doctrines, put leftover communion bread out for the birds and proudly bear the name of Protestant. They have proponents of homosexual marriage and those who think homosexuals should be put in jail. Some would die to have lady bishops some would die if they didn’t have lady bishops.

All of this is held together under the banner of ‘unity’, but how can anyone hope to hold any of it together at all without being totally muddle headed? It’s impossible. That’s why there is a typical sort of Anglican clergy speak which goes like this: “I think I would like to say that in some way there ought to be a way forward which does not alienate anyone and yet attempts to propose a truth statement which may, if I am not pushing it too far, expresses what might be called ‘truth’ in a way that is a propositional statement which is descriptive while it is not prescriptive. This is to say that if we cannot find a way forward then it is best, perhaps to return to a discussion stage when we might sit down and without being dogmatic or judgmental listen again to one another to see if there is not in fact a way in which we can walk together while we are still fundamentally walking apart. Of course this will be a demanding and challenging journey which will in many ways for some of us (indeed all of us in one way or another) be at its heart paradoxical if not seemingly contradictory. However the seeming contradiction need not be a real contradiction even though it feels painful for some us to continue to live and what might be called a creative tension……. blah blah blah.

Well, quite. As Fr Dwight puts it in his inimitable style, we come back to what Newman said about the sectarian error and the latitudinarian error, and the good old C of E is the living exemplar of the latitudinarian error, having raised “inclusivity” to be a virtue in itself. This is what happens, I suppose, when you have a state church which is governed by the Crown in Parliament, which was precisely designed to be an all-inclusive national church and which, as a result, has never taken magisterial teaching very seriously. Indeed, Anglican culture has elevated fence-sitting to an art form, but you still can’t be impaled on the fence indefinitely.

The upshot of all this is that, as the C of E General Synod has been meeting this weekend, the old tensions are very much in evidence. And as usual, the tensions are over gays and girls.

Prior to Synod, we had something of a kerfuffle over whether Dr Jeffrey John, the openly gay (though celibate) Dean of St Albans, would get the plum job of Bishop of Southwark. We don’t know for certain what transpired – the Anglican process for episcopal appointments, whereby a shortlist goes to the Crown Nominations Commission which then sends a name to the prime minister for approval, is no more transparent than the Catholic process – but what we do know is that it was being heavily spun that the popular Dr John would get the job, then it turned out that he didn’t. Set that against the background of Rowan having treated his old friend very shabbily when forcing him to stand down from being appointed Bishop of Reading in 2003 – well, it doesn’t look good. In fact, translated into C of E factional politics, it’s hard to disagree with Jonathan Wynne-Jones that it makes the whole church look buck mad.

What looks even crazier is when you try to unpick what the C of E’s actual position on gay clergy is. To recap, the Catholic position on homosexuality (as enounced in the current CDF documents) is that, while same-sex attraction is morally neutral (and indeed it is explicitly stated that persons of homosexual orientation have the same intrisic dignity as anyone else, and should be free of hate and persecution), nonetheless homosexual acts remain sinful in all circumstances. It’s not a position that would satisfy Peter Tatchell, but it’s a good bit better and more nuanced than the condemnation of sodomy at the Third Lateran Council in 1179. And if you think that’s convoluted, it’s as nothing compared to the mess in the C of E.

The current position, as I read it, is that C of E clergy can be openly gay – even civil partnered, as in Jeffrey John’s case – as long as they’re celibate, though how you’d tell I don’t know. This sort of but doesn’t quite satisfy the C of E conservatives for whom the main problem is sex outside marriage, and for whom the gay issue is secondary. It certainly doesn’t satisfy the more headbanging elements in Uganda or Nigeria, for whom the homosexual condition itself is an abomination. Nor, of course, does it satisfy the liberals – whatever one may say of the American Episcopalians, they aren’t hypocrites, and Bishop Gene Robinson doesn’t even pretend to be celibate. Not to mention that, when it comes to homosexuality amongst the laity, the C of E’s position depends very much on which vicar you talk to.

Before leaving this, I’ll just note that Ken Livingstone was saying on the BBC this morning that David Cameron should appoint Jeffrey John to be Bishop of Southwark whether the C of E likes it or not. I slap my forehead.

But that wasn’t what caused the big row at Synod. The big row, of course, was about women bishops, and the narrow defeat of a proposal from Rowan and Sentamu to create a reservation for traditionalists.

This is actually very simple, but it deconstructs the whole fudge whereby the C of E can claim to be Protestant and Catholic at the same time. And it’s a time bomb that’s been ticking ever since they ordained women in the first place. If you hold to the concept of a sacerdotal priesthood based on the Apostolic Succession, then the ordination of women is a non-question, which is why the womynpriests movement is extremely marginal (if noisy) in Catholicism and non-existent in Orthodoxy. If, on the other hand, you stand by the Protestant concept of ministry, there’s no real reason why women shouldn’t be admitted to all levels. Perhaps not all of the C of E liberals realise this, but they have resolved the split identity of the C of E definitively in favour of it being a Protestant church.

And this puts it up to the Anglo-Catholics in no uncertain manner. Their bluff has been called, and they’ll have to consider whether they are really Protestants who just like to spice up their worship with Catholic trappings, because that’s what the future holds for them in the C of E. Alternatively, if they’re serious about being Catholics of Anglican heritage… well, there’s Rome, with Benedict’s offer of the Anglican Ordinariate; there’s Constantinople; there are the small Continuity Anglican formations. What they can’t say is that there is no option.

It does make it more likely that the Ordinariate will get a bit of critical mass behind it, even if the numbers are relatively small at first. The other imponderable has been the English Catholic bishops, not all of whom are terribly keen about the Ordinariate. Still, they did send Bishop Malcolm McMahon to meet C of E traditionalists yesterday, which shows how serious they are, as there can be few things more likely to entice defectors than the prospect of spending more time with +Malcy. There’s evidently nothing to worry about on that score.

43 Comments

The Hitch talks about his book

March 26, 2010 at 11:42 pm (Anglicanism, Atheism, Books, Journalism, Proper Conservatives)

It’s the good Hitchens brother, as my old mucker Peter talks about his spanking new book, The Rage Against God. I’m halfway through it at the moment, very enjoyable it is too, and there will be a review to follow. Anyway, give this a watch. Peter’s engaging as ever here, and gives a few fascinating insights into his background and thinking. Very nice pictures of the author as a young boy, alongside the future drink-soaked popinjay.

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Anglicans to ingest Meths*

February 14, 2010 at 8:39 pm (Anglicanism, Methodism)

No, Rowan Williams is not advocating that Anglicans should consume mind-bending drugs. Not this week, anyway. What this relates to is the Church of England holding its General Synod over the past week. And that can only mean it’s time to turn to the irrepressibly perky Ruthie Gledhill, who doesn’t even let General Synod get her down, and somehow manages to stay alert enough to notice the odd zinger:

A wonderful and most inspiring act of Christian self-abnegation has just awoken a sleepy Synod. No-one ever expects much from presentations with titles such as ‘An Address by the President and Vice-President of the Methodist Conference’.

Ruthie is being a little tactful here. It’s actually one of those bits in the programme that signals to the assembled vicars that it’s time to nip out for a crafty smoke. But in that case, the vicars would have missed something:

So it rather surprised us all when we suddenly realised that David Gamble, President of the Methodist Conference, told us that the Methodist Church was prepared to sacrifice its very existence and return to the Anglican fold, for the sake of the greater good of the Gospel.

Say what? Actually, there’s little reason why not, theologically speaking. Notwithstanding some cultural differences – the Meths are stereotypically a bit more working-class – they could fit quite easily into the church of the Wesley brothers, their own views mapping reasonably closely onto the Liberal-Evangelical spread in the C of E. Generally quite liberal in theological terms, generally Low Church in style, plus adding the Wesleyan patrimony to the liturgical mix. Fascinating.

Of course there are a few problems.

You don’t say, Ruthie. I sense the dread question of ecclesial governance coming on:

Some Methodists are not sure about whether they want bishops or not, and some Anglicans, from the ranks of those who oppose women bishops, are not sure about whether they want Methodists. The reasons for both oppositions are the same: questions around orders and the Apostolic succession. But the Methodists might be prepared to accept bishops if women are allowed to join their ranks in the Church of England, as Methodism is fully inclusive of women in all leadership positions.

It is possible to envisage a scenario where those Anglo-Catholics who would oppose unity with Methodists leave for the new Roman Anglican Ordinariate as the Church of England proceeds towards women bishops, paving the way for full Methodist Anglican unity.

Well, that would be a neat outcome for all concerned. And yes, the validity of orders – an issue stemming from Apostolic succession – is the key thing here. To be honest, either you accept the validity of women’s ordination or you do not. If you’re prepared to accept women as priests, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have women as bishops, except the realpolitik reason, which is that opponents of women’s ordination (on precisely the grounds of Apostolic succession) were offered a ghetto to head off the likelihood of wholesale defection to Rome. Consecrating women as bishops ups the ante, especially for dissenting priests, and the stakes are raised further by both General Synod deciding not to offer a special dispensation for dissidents, and simultaneously Pope Benny calling the Anglo-Catholics’ bluff by offering them more than they were asking from the C of E. Let’s see how that pans out.

The joint church then gets the squillion pound Westminster Central Hall (just £94 million in fact), one of the top pieces of real estate in the entire country, if not the world.

Oh yes, that would sweeten the deal. One of the big question marks over the Ordinariate has been the real estate issue – whether Anglo-Catholic congregations could bring their beautiful old churches with them, rather than being forced into the 1960s concrete monstrosities favoured by English Catholicism. If the Meths can add a bit of capacity, that may create a little bit of wiggle room.

But that wasn’t the only thing worth remarking on at General Synod. There was also the ABC’s Presidential address. This being +Rowan, there are the usual bits of infuriating waffle, as well as a rather surreal invitation to us all to put on 3D glasses, but there were also points of interest, not least because he was concentrating on these equality issues that have got everyone so het up recently:

The heated debates around the Equality Bill brought this out in one way, some of the renewed flurries of pressure and anxiety about euthanasia and assisted dying in other ways. And as we look forward to our own debates later in the year on women bishops and on the Anglican Covenant, we may see the parallels.

What Rowan is talking about is a theme regular readers of this blog will be familiar with, which is the difference between a concept of civil liberties and a concept of positive rights, specifically the problem that liberal rights theory has never figured out what to do when two sets of rights conflict.

I’d say that the main thing is something to do with the nature of freedom in society – and thus also with how we talk about our ‘rights’. Of course, this was most in evidence in the Equality Bill debates, though it was obscured by fantastic overstatements from zealots on both sides. The basic conflict was not between a systematic assault on Christian values by a godless government on the one side and a demand for licensed bigotry on the other. It was over the question of how society identifies the point at which one set of freedoms and claims so undermines another that injustice results. As in fact the bishops’ speeches in the Lords made quite clear, (despite the highly-coloured versions of the debate that were manufactured by some) very few Christians were contesting the civil liberties of gay and lesbian people in general; nor should they have been. What they were contesting was a relatively small but extremely significant point of detail, which was whether government had the right to tell religious bodies which of the tasks for which they might employ people required and which did not require some level of compliance with the public teaching of the Church about behaviour.

And further:

The rights and dignities of gay and lesbian people are a matter of proper concern for all of us, and we assume with good reason, even, I should say, with good Christian reason, that the securing of these rights is obviously a mark of civilised and humane society. When those rights are threatened – as in the infamous legislation that was being discussed in Uganda – we quite rightly express repugnance. But not all governments are benign and rational. And it is a short-sighted government that creates powers for itself which could be used by a later government for exactly opposite purposes. Not the least irony in the recent controversy is in the echoes of debate twenty years ago about another government’s attempts to regulate teaching about sexuality in schools – but in a quite opposite direction to what we now see prevailing. The freedom of government to settle debated moral questions for the diverse communities of civil society is not something we should endorse too rapidly: governments and political cultures change, and it is a mistake to grant to governments authority that could impact on us in other and even weightier areas, whatever authority we grant government to define fundamental and universal legal entitlements in society at large.

This is a very important point from a civil libertarian point of view, although I suspect it may be lost on some of those who were on the rather silly “no platform for non-atheists” rally at Westminster Cathedral today. When people like Terry Sanderson and Peter Tatchell were campaigning against Section 28, a crucial part of their argument was that the state had no business telling people that their sexual preferences were wrong. I don’t believe they had in mind – at least I hope they didn’t – that a future government would set up a whole series of liberal Section 28s aimed at enforcing uniformity on people whose views aren’t as advanced as theirs. Putting your trust in legislation or court rulings aimed at securing the supremacy of liberal mores is fine, until the mood changes. When the mood swings back again, then you’ll be in trouble. That’s why a civil libertarian position will do you more good in the long term than a statist interventionism that might seem tempting in the short term.

The debate over the status and vocational possibilities of LGBT people in the Church is not helped by ignoring the existing facts, which include many regular worshippers of gay or lesbian orientation and many sacrificial and exemplary priests who share this orientation. There are ways of speaking about the question that seem to ignore these human realities or to undervalue them; I have been criticised for doing just this, and I am profoundly sorry for the carelessness that could give such an impression. Equally, there are ways of speaking about the assisted suicide debate that treat its proponents as universally enthusiasts for eugenics and forced euthanasia, and its opponents as heartless sadists, sacrificing ordinary human pity to ideological purity. All the way through this, we need to recover that sense of a balance of liberties and thus a conflict of what may be seen as real goods – something of the tragic recognition that not all goods are compatible in a fallen world. And if this is true, our job is not to secure purity but to find ways of deciding such contested issues that do not simply write off the others in the debate as negligible, morally or spiritually unserious or without moral claims.

Quite so. I think it was Hegel who said that the essence of tragedy was when both sides were right. Worth remembering, too, that while single-issue activism puts a premium on uncompromising stridency, if you’re trying to take a holistic view of things that means taking the heat out of certain arguments, and very often messy compromises.

It’s worth your while reading the whole address, if you’ve got the time. It’s thoughtful and nuanced – Rowan’s problem is that he’s often too thoughtful and nuanced – and gives a rounded perspective that’s been lacking in a lot of the self-righteous polemic we’re used to witnessing. Well said that man.

*Title nicked from Fr Dwight, to whom a tip of the hat.

16 Comments

That would be an ecumenical matter

November 23, 2009 at 12:24 am (Anglicanism, Catholicism, Europe, Judaica, Orthodoxy)

I often say that leftists should pay more attention to church politics. This isn’t just because religion is important to a lot of people (note, for instance, that the Mormons currently have over 13 million members worldwide, which is doing a bit better than any Trotskyist tendency) and it isn’t at all dependent on whether or not you buy into the theology involved. Rather, in the spirit of Machiavelli, who knew a lot about this sort of thing, it’s worth your while following these matters because the politics in itself is fascinating.

Yesterday, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was over in Rome meeting Pope Benny. There were some predictions in advance of a big showdown, though that isn’t in either man’s style. There was also a bit of crowing from predictable quarters about the length of the interview, in much the same way as Gordon Brown was recently criticised for his failure to get sufficient face time with Barack O’Bama. In fact, not only are Benny and Rowan rather similar characters – both bookish and reserved in demeanour, both personally humane while being theologically conservative (actually, Rowan might be slightly more conservative) – but their high regard for each other is well known, and the pledge to carry on with the ecumenical process via ARCIC looked to me like a diplomatic smoothing of feathers.

Because, make no mistake, the Apostolic Constitution providing facilities for defecting Anglo-Catholics has ruffled lots of feathers. Rowan himself was put out by Rome’s failure to consult him. This, one assumes, was not primarily aimed at snubbing Rowan but at bypassing the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, for a number of political reasons internal to English Catholicism. Within that sphere, there are some overlapping elements. The Cormac camp, who are old-fashioned ecumenists who were very much committed to the ARCIC process, are not thrilled at their long-range project being derailed. There is also an element at Eccleston Square that was very much happy to have an Anglo-Catholic faction within the C of E, a bit like the way the old LCR used to have a faction that was very much in agreement with Lutte Ouvrière but didn’t actually want to join LO. And then of course there’s some institutional pique at the way the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith organised this behind the back of the Bishops’ Conference. But we’re talking horses for courses here, and the CDF, while it’s primarily a doctrinal police force, in certain circumstances functions as the Vatican’s equivalent of the A-Team. If you want to spend the next forty years in inconclusive discussions about corporate union, ARCIC is perfect. If you want a job done, you call in the CDF.

It’s also notable that the Suppository, voice of the liberal left in English Catholicism, is in a bit of a snit, and fired off a furious editorial the other week denouncing the Apostolic Constitution, although it was politic enough to aim its fire at the CDF, rather than the guy whose brainchild this is and who actually wrote Anglicanorum Coetibus – which would be, er, the Pope. Uncharitable traditionalists might feel that the Tabletistas, having struggled mightily to excise the Catholicism from English Catholicism, might not be thrilled at an influx of conservative Anglo-Catholics reintroducing Catholicism by the back door.

From a related quarter, Hans Küng has also swung into action. Tying this together with the fraught rehabilitation of the SSPX – and, in Benny’s position, I’d want to make those bastards jump through a few more hoops – he characterises Benedict’s mission of becoming the Pope of Christian Unity in terms of “Traditionalists of all denominations, unite under the dome of St Peter’s!” You’ll notice that Küng says this like it’s a bad thing.

I do feel a bit sorry for poor old Hans, who must be feeling a bit bereft by this point. Most of the liberal Catholic theologians are, like him, pretty elderly these days and less influential than they’ve been for a very long time. Nor have there been any modernist successes to raise the spirits. The Catholic movement for women’s ordination, to take one example, was slapped down so definitively by the late JP2 that those who haven’t given up altogether have made their way to the subculture of episcopi vagantes, or, ironically, Anglicanism.

And what of the Anglo-Catholics, then? It’s unsurprising that the Continuity Anglicans have already welcomed Anglicanorum Coetibus, what with them having requested it in the first place. But there are bigger fish to fry within the C of E itself, encompassing Forward In Faith and going beyond them. The interesting thing is that, what with the Constitution and its complementary norms actually giving AngCats more than they might have wanted, this calls their bluff. Are they too attached to doing Victor Meldrew impersonations at General Synod to make the jump? Or will they put their money where their mouth is?

What might hasten matters along is that, while the legislation going through General Synod to allow women’s consecration as bishops had been going to include special provisions for opponents of the move, these provisions have now been withdrawn. While Benedict is holding the door open and the AngCats are wavering on the threshold, the Anglican bigwigs have chosen this moment to give them a big kick up the arse, thus propelling them forwards.

And dear old Rowan, who’s forced to preside over an anarchic body that’s probably incapable of being led, could be forgiven for taking a darkly philosophical view. Even if the Anglo-Catholics depart and that simplifies the factional situation, the extreme liberal modernists aren’t going anywhere and neither are the conservative evangelicals. I can’t see him ever going over to Rome, as much because of Rome’s innovations as its conservatism, but perhaps Constantinople might give him a call?

Speaking of which, there have been more pronouncements of interest from the Russian Orthodox Church, or more specifically the ROC’s extremely energetic external affairs honcho, Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk. Firstly, Hilarion has been saying that the German Lutherans’ election of a woman, Bishop Margot Kässmann, as their new president might affect ecumenical dialogue – the Lutherans claim to find this incomprehensible, which suggests they don’t understand the Orthodox very well. Moreover, Hilarion has been speaking on the subject of relations with Catholicism. While he’s very cautious about reunion, putting that decades in the future, he is rather keen on the idea of the tradition-based churches – the Orthodox, the Catholics and the pre-Chalcedonians – forming a strategic alliance to uphold traditional values. That sound you just heard? That’s Hans Küng’s head exploding.

Addendum on the Rompuy Kid

I must admit to knowing very little about Belgian prime minister and newly appointed European Council president Herman van Rompuy. He isn’t Mr Tony Blair, which is a plus. He is expected to be a chairman and facilitator rather than an emperor, which is fine. And I now know that he writes haiku and his sister is a Maoist activist, both of which factoids are oddly endearing.

But our friends in the National Secular Society (Titus Oates prop.) are perturbed. These fearless truth-hounds have discovered that van Rompuy is a Catholic. What with around 90% of Belgians being Catholics and van Rompuy being a leading member of the Flemish Christian Democratic Party, this is truly a shock. The NSS ask, “Does the Pope have another little toiler at the top of Euro politics?” This quaint seventeenth-century idea of theirs that the Pope spends his time phoning up Catholic politicians and giving them detailed instructions is oddly charming when it isn’t annoying. And the great thing is that this is an all-purpose NSS denunciation. Had the president been Jean-Claude Juncker or Wolfgang Schüssel or even Mr Tony, they could have run exactly the same headline.

They are rather pleased, though, that new Euro foreign minister Cathy Ashton is rumoured to be an atheist. You’ll notice that none of this has anything to do with either politician’s actual positions or competence for the job. Isn’t single-issue tubthumping brilliant?

Finally on faith-based themes, here’s an interesting article on Belfast’s Jewish community.

35 Comments

Thought for the gay

July 16, 2008 at 2:24 pm (Anglicanism, Homophobia)

Hullo Brian, hullo Sue. You know, in a very real sense, sometimes I think the Anglican Communion is a bit like the Fourth International. I don’t mean in the theological sense, though I once heard Chris Bailey call Cliff Slaughter a mediaeval scholastic, which I thought was a bit hard on mediaeval scholastics. If St Thomas Aquinas could have travelled through time to a WRP dialectics class, one suspects his first instinct would have been to point and laugh.

No, I was thinking in terms of a disparate group of people who on the face of things don’t have a great deal in common, and are held together mostly by tradition and sentiment. A more exact parallel would be with the USec of the 1970s, a church divided into two hostile factions, barely on speaking terms with each other. In that case, things were complicated by the fact that the European sections had the majority but the Americans had the money. In the Anglicans’ case, the Africans have the numbers while, again, the Americans have the money.

Things have come to a head with the opening of the once-a-decade World Congress, sorry, the Lambeth Conference, a giant knees-up for the Communion’s bishops. And at the eye of the storm is Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who comes across in his TV appearances as a very nice, intelligent and witty man. Just the sort of bishop you’d like to have. Unfortunately, Bishop Robinson is openly gay, as opposed to the legions of closeted gays in the Anglican ministry, and the macho men of the Nigerian and Ugandan churches, who are locked in fierce competition with Muslim proselytisers, have taken exception.

In a vain effort to smooth things over, the Archbishop of Canterbury, affable John Peel lookalike Dr Rowan Williams, rather ostentatiously left Bishop Robinson off the invitation list for Lambeth, which puts Gene in the good company of Bishop Kunonga of Harare, a staunch supporter of Uncle Bob’s firm-but-fair regime in Zimbabwe. Alas, Rowan’s efforts were to no avail, as the Africans aren’t bothering to turn up anyway.

The other big issue, at least for the Brits, is the consecration of women bishops. This is really a rerun of the hoo-hah a lot of years ago about women priests, which actually managed to cause a minor schism in Ireland. That said, I haven’t heard tell of the Church of Ireland (Traditional Rite) for years, and fear they may have gone the way of the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist).

On the face of it, there really shouldn’t be an issue. If you’re willing to accept women as priests, there’s no obvious reason why they shouldn’t be bishops. But that would be to underestimate religious people’s ability to get upset over the strangest things. And also the Anglican knack for turning a relatively simple question into an enormously complicated fudge.

Last time around, I was tickled by the proposal for the brilliantly titled “flying bishops”, who would, it was foreseen, cater for those parishes unwilling to accept Dawn French as their vicar. Sad to say, the flying bishops never really got off the ground, as most people who cared strongly on this point upped sticks and defected to Rome. This time around, and sticking with the superhero motif, the C of E tops are mooting “superbishops” to attend to the recalcitrants. I suspect that the superbishops too will be, in the good old Yiddish phrase, nisht geshtoygn un nisht gefloygn.

This is the background to last month’s GAFCON conference in Jerusalem, which has effectively seen the creation of an international opposition tendency, consisting of those traditionalists who object to swishy poofs, uppity women and the modern age in general. Prominent in their platform is an ambitious plan to set up a parallel section in North America, shadowing the liberal leadership there. So far, the Africans have been careful not to push things to an outright schism, perhaps being mindful that the Americans and Canadians bankroll many of their missionary and humanitarian enterprises. But one senses that Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria and his chums might just be painting themselves into a rhetorical corner.

Would that Joe Hansen were alive at this hour. He would have loved this.

24 Comments

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