Church of England May Abolish Vestments

The Church of England is considering abolishing vestments for the Clergy during worship.  This picture is an example of what may replace it.  This is not a joke.  Full story from the UK Daily Mail.

Five Anglican Bishops Have "Poped"

Five, count 'em five (5) Anglican Bishops have announced their conversion to the Catholic Church. Praise be to God!

The Episcopal Church is Broke!

The Episcopal Church is broke and is taking out a $60 million dollar mortgage on its New York City Headquarters to meet the shortfall. Read the full story here.

Factions Within Anglicanism

Anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows that, because of his former Protestant affiliations, the Bad Catholic is an aficionado of all things Anglican. Here's a fascinating post about the Anglo-Catholic vs. Evangelical divide in Anglicanism.

Anglican Muddle

The BAD CATHOLIC remains nostalgic about his former religious affiliation and is fascinated by all things Anglican. Father Dwight Longenecker has an excellent post about the current muddle in the "C of E."

Episcopalians Welcome Witches

Father Dwight Longenecker has a new post about the Episcopal Cathedral in Asheville, North Carolina allowing their buildings to be used be a group of "Wiccans" for their religious rites. The Episcopal Church just needs to go ahead and admit that it is no longer a Christian Church.

C of E

As everyone who reads this blog knows, I have a soft spot in my heart for the Church of England and the Anglican communion. Here's an interesting blog post about the Church of England.

Canadian Anglicans Line Up to Become Catholic

Apparently, Canadian Anglo-Catholics have had enough of "Your OK, I'm OK, God's OK," liberal Anglican theology and have come out in force to come home to Rome. Full story here.

The Episcopal Church Throws Out Orthodox Anglicans and Sells Church To Muslims

Father Dwight Longenecker reports that the Episcopal Church in New York State threw a congregation of orthodox Anglicans out of their church building and then sold the building to Muslims for use as a mosque.

Confessions of a Convert

I recently finished reading Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT. Benson was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and his conversion to Rome caused great scandal in the Church of England in the early 20th century.

According to Joseph Pearce, "Besides Chesterton and Belloc, the writer most responsible for carrying the mantle of the Catholic literary revival in the early years of the twentieth century was Robert Hugh Benson. In some respects, Benson's life paralleled that of Newman. His conversion to Catholicism in 1903 and his subsequent ordination caused a sensation on a scale similar to that which greeted Newman's reception into the Church almost sixty years earlier. In Benson's case the sensation was linked to the fact that he was the son of E.W. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1882 until 1896. Like Newman, Benson followed a literary as well as a priestly vocation, and before his untimely death in 1914 at the age of forty three, he had published fifteen highly successful novels. The other obvious parallel with Newman was Benson's writing of a lucid and candid autobiographical apologia describing the circumstances leading up to his conversion. Benson's Confessions of a Convert warrants a position alongside Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua as one of the great expositions of the spiritual and psychological background to religious conversion."

Confessions of a Convert is not very long, but one finishes the book feeling as if you have known Benson for years. Benson's description of his upbringing is fascinating. On Sunday afternoons, it was the habit of Benson's father to take the children for a walk and read from some spiritual book while walking. Benson recounts that one Sunday, his father read the account of the martyrdom of Saint Perpetua in Latin and flawlessly translated the Latin into English while walking.

Archbishop Benson was a "broad churchman," in other words, he was one that straddled the middle between the extreme Anglo-Catholic party and the extreme Evangelical party. After becoming an Anglican priest, Benson became a devout adherent of the Anglo-Catholic or High Church party in the Church of England.

Benson recounts the usual Anglo-Catholic vs. Evangelical turmoil in the Anglican Church. Benson recounts how after making a trip to the middle east, he realized how insignificant the Church of England really was. Benson comments, "A national church seemed a poor affair abroad." Benson quips that the Anglican Church is something that the English carry with them abroad "carried about (like an India rubber bath), for the sake of personal comfort and the sense of familiarity."

After returning to England, Benson joined an Anglican religious order and for a while this satisfied his Catholic longings. Ultimately, Benson resolved that the Church of England was not truly a part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and was received into the Catholic Church.

Although it may be Victorian sentimentalism, there is much beautiful writing in Confessions of a Convert. Having come to Rome from the Episcopal Church myself, I am very sympathetic to what Benson says about his experience as an Anglican: "It was not that she (the Church of England) had become unlovable. I love her even now as one may love an unsatisfactory human friend. She had a hundred virtues, a delicate speech, a romantic mind; a pleasant aroma hung about her; she was infinitely pathetic and appealing; she had the advantage of dwelling in the shadowed twilight of her own vagueness, in glorious houses, even though not of her building; she had certain gracious ways, pretty modes of expression; her music and her language still seem to me extraordinarily beautiful; and above all, she is the nursing mother of many of my best friends, and for over thirty years educated and nursed me, too, with indulgent kindness. Indeed I was not ungrateful for all this, but it had become entirely impossible for me ever to reverence her again as the divine mistress of my soul."

Father Benson says that in searching the scriptures he found 29 passages of scripture in the New Testament which support the Petrine office. In Benson's words about Holy Mother Church written 100 years ago, I could not help but think how true his words are today, when the Church is rocked by the scandal of pedophile priests, liturgical turmoil, and the cancer of extreme liberal theology.

"She (the Church), too, was betrayed and crucified; 'dying daily,' like her great Lord; denied, mocked, and despised; a child of sorrows and acquainted with grief; misrepresented, agonizing; stripped of her garments, yet, like the King's daughter that she is, 'all glorious within'; dead even, it seemed at times, yet, like her natural Prototype, still united to the Godhead; laid in the sepulchre, fenced in by secular powers, yet ever rising again on Easter Days, spiritual and transcendent; passing through doors that men thought closed for ever, spreading her mystical banquets in upper rooms and by sea shores; and, above all, ascending for ever beyond the skies and dwelling in heavenly places with Him who is her Bridegroom and her God."

Amen.

Marginal Catholics

At the monastery I finished reading MARGINAL CATHOLICS by Ivan Clutterbuck. Published in Britain in 1993, Father Clutterbuck states in his introduction that his book was written in response to W.S.F. Pickering's book ANGLO-CATHOLICISM: A STUDY IN RELIGIOUS AMBIGUITY, which has previously been reviewed on this blog.

Even though I personally was only a member of the Episcopal Church for about five years, I have soft spot in my heart for all things Anglican and especially the High Church Party in the Church of England. Father Clutterbuck does not begin his history of the Anglo-Catholic movement with the 19th century Oxford movement, but begins it with the Reformation, which is deemed to have mostly been a big mistake. Throughout the book, Clutterbuck takes swipes at the opponents of Catholic worship in the Church of England. The Puritans, the Methodists and the Evangelicals all get hammered to varying degrees by Father Clutterbuck's pen.

When it reaches the Oxford movement, the book really takes off. We are treated to stories of the Victorian Anglo-Catholic priests who ministered in some of the worst slums in the cities of England and then were subjected to riots organized by Protestant Anglicans to disrupt masses. Since the Church of England is an established Church, the prayer book rubrics have the force of law. Protestant Anglicans organized and had criminal charges brought against High Church priests for violating the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. In some cases, priests were jailed for offenses such as putting candles on the altar, wearing Eucharistic vestments, and burning incense.

The autobiographical parts of the book are particularly fun. Father Clutterbuck was raised in a High Anglican parish in the 1920s. He calls his book "Marginal Catholics" because he says that when he went off to university and theological college he found out that the Anglo-Catholics were really on the margins of the Church of England. He then proceeds to tell anecdotes about how Protestant Anglican bishops sought to marginalize the Anglo-Catholics. Clutterbuck's bishop sent him off to the army chaplain corps at the beginning of World War II to "teach him some manners." The book explains how the chaplain corps in the British Army was run by the Evangelicals while the Navy chaplain corps was dominated by the Anglo-Catholics. After serving as an army chaplain during the war, Father Clutterbuck went to sea as a navy chaplain and has many entertaining stories about his experiences all over the world.

The final chapter involves the decision of the Church of England to ordain women to the priesthood and the effect that this decision will have on Anglo-Catholics. Although Father Clutterbuck rejects the obvious solution, to reunite with the Church of Rome, he does state that it will be impossible for Anglo-Catholics to remain within a church which has departed from orthodox belief and practice. I found it very interesting that Father Clutterbuck comments that women's ordination carries in its wake an entire program of liberal theology which challenges traditional belief.

The Bad Catholic's general response is that maybe its time to move from the margins and cross the Tiber!

Ango-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity

Our Lady of Walsingham


Yours Truly, the Anglo-Catholic, assisting Father Charles Bennett at St. Thomas Episcopal Church a number of years ago.

Lately, as my light escapist reading, I have been reading Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity by W.S.F. Pickering which was published in 1989.

As one who as a member of the Episcopal Church delighted in being a self-described "Anglo-Catholic," I find this subject to be incredibly fascinating. For some unexplained reason it is just downright fun to be a member of a Protestant Church and pretend to be Catholic by putting on fancy vestments, doing a lot of bowing and genuflecting, throwing a lot of incense into the air, and generally putting on a big liturgical show.

Now let me tell you, the Anglicans/Episcopalians know how to put on a good show. In some respects, they may be more High Church than the Vatican. The only problem is that it is all form and no substance. They have all the outward forms of the true Catholic faith, but there are very few Orthodox Christians left in its ranks that hold the substance.

I finally decided that all the things which I liked best about the Episcopal Church were all the things that were Catholic and the things I liked the least were the things that were the most Protestant. I had already decided to "swim the Tiber" before the melt down of my Episcopal parish. A large number of the membership left and formed a new "Anglican" Church. However, the new "Anglican" Church is definitely part of the Evangelical, or "Low Church" tradition within Anglicanism, if it is really "Anglican" at all. With all due respect, if I had to put myself within the jurisdiction of a foreign bishop, I would rather choose the Bishop of Rome than the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda.

When I became a real Catholic I no longer had to hide that I prayed the rosary, and prayed to Our Lady and the Saints. (Nothing makes Protestants more nervous than devotion to Our Lady and the Saints.)


Here's a good quote from Pickering that kind of sums it all up:

The problem par excellence for Anglo-Catholics is their claim to be Catholic within an institution which for several centuries has generally been reckoned to stand in the Protestant camp, certainly not in the Roman Catholic camp. Some Protestants in the past, and still some today, have gone so far as to see in the Church of Rome the Antichrist. How can one be an Anglo-Catholic in a church in which only a proportion of the members openly claim they are Catholic and the rest say they are Protestant, or at least non-Catholic? Here is the ambiguity of using the self-designation Anglo-Catholic, or more simply, Catholic.

Keep in mind the fact that Pickering is an Anglican writer. In another place he says this:

In practice the Catholic church, if it is to be found anywhere, is the Roman Catholic Church, for on grounds of geographical universality, there can be no other contender. Roman Catholic theologians assert categorically that there is no Catholicism outside their Church. When Anglo-Catholics claim to be Catholic they are hardly adopting a universalist position but one which is essentially sectarian.

Bottom line: Anglo-Catholics are Protestants who are pretending to be Catholic.

Sacred Heart of Jesus: Have Mercy on Us!

Our Lady of Walsingham: Pray for Us!

What Is the Church?

The recent defection of Father Alberto Cutie to the Episcopal Church disturbs the BAD CATHOLIC in a number of ways. (Father Cutie appears above flanked by Episcopal Bishop Leo Frade and Father Cutie's fiancee Ruhama Canellis).



First, let me say that it is not my place nor my intent to judge Father Cutie. Our priests are only human and the vow of celibacy is difficult. We should pray everyday for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on our priests.



However, I am disturbed by how fast his vows as a Catholic priest were abandoned in order be a Protestant minister where he can marry his girlfriend and continue his career as a clergyman.


Presumably, as a Catholic priest, Father Cutie was supposed to believe that the Catholic Church is the one true church established by Jesus Christ. The Baltimore Catechism says "We know that the Catholic Church is the one true church established by Christ because it alone has the marks of the true Church. . . . We know that no other church but the Catholic Church is the true Church of Christ because no other church has these four marks.



1. One Faith, One Sacrifice, One Sacramental System, One Head.

2. Holy in its Founder, Holy in its Teachings, Holy in its Means of Grace, Holy in its Members who follow the Teachings and use the Means of Grace provided.

3. Catholic. It is not the Church of one nation or one race, but of all nations and all races.

4. Apostolic. It can trace its origin back to the Apostles on whom Christ founded the Church.



Only the Catholic Church has all four of these marks. It alone is the Church Christ founded. But we must convince men of this by love. . . ."



Of course, Father Cutie can engage in the High Church Anglican fantasy that "Anglicanism" is a branch of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. They can argue that Reformation Archbishop of Canterbury THOMAS CRANMER and other English bishops who became Protestants stood in apostolic succession and that the Protestant bishops whom they subsequently ordained were, therefore, in Apostolic succession. Therefore, so the argument goes, Anglican bishops are in apostolic succession and Anglican holy orders are valid. For a number of reasons, which are too detailed to go into here, the Catholic Church has always rejected this argument. As a former Anglican/Episopalian, I cannot believe that a Catholic priest would seriously accept this argument as correct. The harsh truth is that the Episcopal Church is a Protestant church with some trappings of catholicism.



Second, I am disturbed by the manner in which Father Cutie's conversion to Protestantism has been handled. Apparently, neither Father Cutie nor the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida bothered to notify Archbishop John C. Favalora of the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami that Father Cutie was going to be received into the Episcopal Church and then ordained an Episcopal priest. An article at Episcopal Life Online reports that Father Cutie had already undergone a two year discernment process for the Episcopal ministry, presumably under the nose of his Catholic superiors. It seems to the BAD CATHOLIC that it would have been polite to at least tell the Catholic Archbishop that this was coming and not make him hear it for the first time on the news. At the point that Father Cutie was even thinking about becoming a protestant, he should have notified his superiors and resigned from active ministry in the Catholic Church. I think that Archbisop Favalora is totally justified in saying that Episcopal Bishop Frade's actions are "a serious setback for ecumenical relations and cooperation between us."



Episcopal Bishop Frade was quoted by Episcopal Life Online as saying "We welcome Father Alberto into the ministry of the Episcopal Church. Our ministry has centered on spiritual growth, love, forgiveness, and a sense of community. Guided by a spirit of fellowship and understanding, the Episcopal Church remains a beacon of hope and faith for all." This statement heavily implies that the Roman Catholic Church does not have "spiritual growth, love, forgiveness and a sense of community." Therefore, the Episcopal Church is "a beacon of hope" for Father Cutie and other victims of Roman Catholicism.



I know that many of my friends are members of the Episcopal Church. What I am about to say will probably hurt their feelings. Please forgive me. In my opinion, the Episcopal Church has theologically degenerated to the point that you can pretty much believe anything you want to and still claim to be a good Episcopalian. There is very little that one can do, other than fail to be politically correct under current cultural standards, that will be definitely condemned by the Episcopal Church as sin. So violating one's ordination vows is certainly no big deal. Father Cutie should make an excellent Episcopalian.