Young Fogey is writing on a favourite theme, trying to prove that only Roman Catholicism is viable enough to foster and continue the Catholic way into the future. One by one, he proceeds to trash the alternatives.

The disillusionment of Anglicans is held up as an example – ‘I really do think the dream of a non-papal Catholicism is just that: a dream’, quoted from Anglican Bishop John Hind. The Eastern Orthodox are no good because they don’t have a firm line on contraception. One by one, the branches are lopped off with a summary wave of the hand at Old Catholicism, including the PNCC. I can’t say I exactly disagree when viewing the Continuum as “a little gaggle of squabbling sects”. The simplistic conclusion: the Pope’s the only one who makes sense, and he has a world presence, teaching all nations.

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus – great, and nothing will survive. Perhaps it shouldn’t.

Triumphalism indeed. The apologists project their notion of the “true church” onto what seems to be a Platonic idea. The Church they try to convert us to is not my local parish, or even the local RC diocese, but a romanticised idea of the Church from the 1870′s which no longer exists, or perhaps never did exist. How can one “convert” to an idea? Certainly, it is an idea to which we all aspire, but it is the Communion of Saints, not some institution here on earth whose image of the Eternal Church is tarnished. The reality here in Europe is sobering. The Roman Catholic Church looks like being another candidate for Young Fogey’s trash list! It’s a bit bigger than all the other non-viable entities, but the logic is the same.

In my student days, a friend of mine in London came across a couple of very original ladies who produced a little printed magazine called The Romantic. Google has found me their website. They also produced cassette tapes of amusing “news” from the Great Invisible Empire of Romantia. The cassette was to be put into a tape recorder hidden inside the shell of an old 1930′s wireless set. Imagine listening to the hissing cassette and hearing a precious female voice imitating something like the Queen but pronouncing the “r” as a “w” like children in the 1920′s in aristocratic families (as in Be vewwy quiet: I’m hunting wabbits), saying: “This is the News of the Imperial Home Service, coming to you from somewhere in the Great Invisible Empire“!

The implication is that you imagine that you are back in the days of the British Empire, namely the Victorian and Edwardian eras. I found it all very funny and amusing – until. It turned out, according to something I heard, that these two ladies set up a “school” variously in Ireland or north London, where teenage girls could go and get an “old-fashioned” education with corporal punishment – which seemed to have sado-masochistic overtones. They have a site at Aristasia and it all still seems to be in the wrist! Obviously, those two ladies are outrageous eccentrics, and my friends and I took it all as one big joke.

It is tempting to apply the same kind of psychology to the Church, living as if Pius IX was the Pope and adopting the kind of rhetoric characteristic of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers or Manning of Westminster. It is simple stupidity, yet people get taken in. I too like 1950′s cars, hats and cut-throat razors – but times have changed, and their modern equivalents are so much more practical. I’m not so sure that people were more virtuous in the 1950′s. I remember most of the 1960′s and that was in the 40-50 years ago, long enough ago to be the good old days. But, were those days so good? The fantasy of living in a Platonic idea is little more than the delirium of the Klu Klux Klan!

Reality in 1962 – fifty years ago – was bleak, and we faced the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. We are now in 2012 and the threats to our life are different. We were as bad then as we are now. There have been prophets of doom and nostalgics throughout history.

The churches in Europe are closing down, now at a rate that rival Anglican and non-conformist church redundancies in England. The buildings are sold for business premises or conversion into prestige homes. The buildings of greater artistic merit are reused as banks, museums, concert rooms and libraries. What all those churches have in common is – Ite missa est. So the problem is secularisation and the inexorable ebb of faith and belief. The closing down of churches in Europe is nothing new. In the days of the French Revolution and anti-clericalism in the nineteenth century, churches were turned into farm buildings and military barracks. Nothing new.

Church buildings are expensive to maintain, and there are too many of them. One thing that is painful for the few Christians left is that very few people care about those buildings. Their disappearance would make no difference to them.

I was discussing the question of relevance of the Church in our society. That relevance is the existence of parishes and the dioceses doing what is necessary to ordain priests and provide a full sacramental life for all the faithful. The clergy blame the laity on secularisation because of materialism, the “good life”, material security, well-being, health and so forth. Perhaps a good war would bring everyone scuttling back to church! But, to what? The problem is one of the clergy, clerical culture and increasing elitism. They alienated the working class in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie in the 1950′s and now the rest of us. Why go to church? What will we find if we go there? A locked door?

Until the question of priests is solved, Papal Catholicism – just like any other kind of Catholicism – is going the same way, nowhere. Just one more bit of trash… I could go further: Europe’s present is America’s future.

We are faced with bleakness, uncertainty, our own agony in trying to reconcile our fixed beliefs with a reality outside ourselves. Does the world fall into chaos without Christianity? Of course not. Every prophecy of the end of the world has failed, as will that of the 21st of next month. The world existed before Christianity or the present Papacy on which the conservatives are pinning all their dying hopes. The world will continue without it. It looks as though Christianity was a worthless illusion from the first.

In human terms, there is no sense in any of this. Thinking men have agonised about all this for decades. What is said now is little different from what was said a hundred years ago. Evola recommended that Christianity should be abandoned, but for what? Guénon converted to Sufism, but does that spiritual way do any better to reverse the trend of western civilisation’s terminal decline? We continue to seek a philosopher’s stone.

I could end this reflection in complete nihilism, but there are signs. In one of the most secular countries in the world, monasticism is thriving and young people seek further than materialism. Some resort to various forms of conservative politics and project their ideology onto their belief. Others seek a way that no longer contains the seeds of its own destruction. One thing is for sure – that we are at the end of history or the beginning of a new era. And this will continue to be our Advent…

* * *

Update: One of my readers has been sending out e-mails to several persons including myself and Bishop Roald Flemestad concerning alleged weaknesses in the Polish National Catholic Church and reflecting the latest postings of Young Fogey. Convert to Roman Catholicism or die!, as seems to be implied.

From a friend: I asked a prelate of the Polish National Catholic Church how they continued to resist women’s ordination and the other assaults of the modern world, and he said that this is how their people voted.   I asked then, if their people had voted like Episcopalians, or if they did so next year,  would the truth be changed?   He didn’t like my question.

The good Bishop replies:

As you have included me among the recipients of this email and refer to the PNCC in the text, I suppose you are soliciting a reaction.

Firstly, your anonymous friend’s comment appears condescending to me. Is he of of those blinded RC triumphalists one meets every now and then?

In that case, tell him you need a looking glass to find Roman Catholics who do not accept the ordination of women. The hierarch himself stated in his first interview after his appointment that he was in favour of women priests. As it caused a stir, he later came out saying that he was misquoted. Fortunately, there are more traditionalist currents among the clergy.

As to the PNCC, the ordination of women is explicitly rejected in the Declaration of Scranton of 2008. It was prepared by the doctrinal commission, accepted by the clergy conference and promulgated with the signature of all the bishops as expression of their teaching authority.

Somehow it seems doubtful that the Roman Catholic Church nowadays could muster that kind of broad consensus. Time will show but it is perhaps not so convincing to present the RC as societas perfecta et communio hierachica – as least not at the expense of other churches.

This is the title of the opening section of Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a description of the life of an undergraduate at Oxford University in the 1920′s and his friendship with an aristocratic family with no financial worries. I see the parallel with the title Paradise Regained, and perhaps this might have been in Waugh’s mind as a man of literature. I follow on from my articles The Invisible Empire of Romantia and The Dream of Non-Papal Catholicism. Naturally, I pass off Romantia as a big overgrown schoolboy’s joke, but underneath, there is a strong element of nostalgia. It is no less than the Paradise Lost of John Milton or Thomas More’s Utopia. The longing for Utopia is part of our human soul.

The Romantic Ladies are not the only ones to have come up with a perfect romanticised world of the past, which in their case in situated in one of my own favourite periods between something like 1890 up to World War I. If you had money and came from a good home, those were the days of imagination and the heyday of Arts & Crafts. All around me here in Normandy, especially at the coastal resorts, the houses of the wealthy (or at least reasonably well-to-do) from that period are all in a fantasist Anglo-Normand style. They are head-turners as you drive past.

It is interesting to find various articles on this theme. One of the most impressive archetypes is Arcadia (Ἀρκαδία), a vision of man living in harmony with nature. It is a theme found in Romanticism, in its art and poetry in the early nineteenth century. Unlike the utopianism of the murderous twentieth-century ideologies, Arcadia remained for most a dream, a lost paradise. Inherent is the notion of the lost golden age corrupted by modernity.

One of my readers rightly drew my attention to a novel called Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. This is a fantasy that can strike at the hearts of all of us. Unlike Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, Islandia is not magical, but simply a traditional civilisation. We could think of Tibet of before the moment the Chinese Communists got their hands on it. Our childhood is filled with the notion of good magic, fairy tales and impossible wonders. Jules Verne was the one who did it for me. Today’s kids go for Harry Potter, condemned as dangerous by conservative Christians, but a character able to fire imaginations. We need it – and this is why we have cinema and fictional novels. Imagine a part of the world yet undisturbed by modernity where the people live entirely according to traditional principles. When I first came to France, I imagined finding a diocese that would have been untouched by the Vatican II reforms, yet without the ideology of the traditionalist groups. See Fr Bryan Houghton’s Mitre and Crook, the story about a diocesan bishop who resisted and kept everything traditional. Fr Houghton was an Englishman who expatriated to France, as was Fr Quintin Montgomery-Wright. To an extent, I found it, but in a few parishes with an old priest who had stuck up for himself against a reforming bishop. Those brave priests have now all passed away, and some of the parishes are now in the hands of traditionalist priestly societies, and other churches have shining new padlocks on their doors, left to fall into ruin.

And so, Romantia – or the “Platonic Church” – is a deep instinct in many of us, certainly in me. My whole life has been dedicated to finding the best compromise possible between the inescapable “reality” of modernity and the inner quest for innocence and blessedness. I opted for country living and discovered the joy of being at sea in a sailing boat. I don’t think utopianism is unhealthy if we have a fair grasp of our relationship and willingness to compromise with the “real” world. It is modernity that gives us our technology, feeds us, cures us of our sicknesses, educates us and gives us skills to get by and socialise with other human beings in society. We can’t live entirely in isolation, seeing the experience of shipwrecked people on remote islands and how well or badly they do. Our relationship with the utopian archetype will determine our spiritual and emotional balance.

Jung‘s books explain the psychological dimension far better than I ever could, and those writings are abiding. We all need to be vigilant in keeping the balance between our inner γνῶσις and our place in human society. Even if we live in the country and have many things on our own terms, there is still money to earn to keep it all going, bills to pay, boring work to do, conflicts to resolve and the general condition of us all. The garden has to be done, and the house needs constant maintenance. A motor vehicle is a complex piece of machinery and represents our fragile and fickle link with the outside world. That too takes our attention and makes us need money. Perhaps living in the country helps with this sense of realism, knowing that the utopia cannot be an absolute – as in the nostalgia of city-dwellers.

This is something I notice in those who dedicate themselves to hard-selling an idea or proselytising. They invariably live in cities and their projected nostalgia is that much harder to reconcile with their actual condition. Our desire for another life beyond bodily death is also a very strong instinct, marred by the thoughts coming from our contemporaries. What if life were merely material and all over with death? It is the antipode, the negativity that leads to dystopia as in the visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, brought to grim reality by Hitler and Stalin and to some extent and degree in the countries where we live, from North Korea to Sweden! Our life contains elements of both utopia and dystopia, happiness whilst sailing on the sea or taking the dog for a walk in a forest – and the next day queuing at the till of a supermarket surrounded by blaring loudspeakers and screaming toddlers wanting this or that.

I leave these thoughts to those who project their deep desires on the Church and are “more Catholic than the Pope”. The idea of building the Empire of Romantia in our homes may seem absurd and be the butt of endless jokes, but there is a foundation that is necessary for our spiritual health. We can go so far in making ourselves citizens of God’s Kingdom, and even adapting our lives around us to some extent, but only to some extent. We can’t change the world, but we can do something about a tiny bit of it. That was the idea behind setting up little “rump churches” like the Continuing Anglicans or some of the more grandiose-minded independent sacramental movement bishops. Have you ever heard of micro-states (tiny countries recognised by the international community like Liechtenstein, Monaco, Andorra or the Vatican) and micro-nations (attempts at making a dream like Romantia into a reality)?. The micro-nation may seem absurd like a comic opera, but the foundation is always the same when the intention is pure (for example not a way of tax dodging, etc.). The Chinese had a proverb about there being peace in the heart, and that peace spreading to the family, the village, the county, the nation and finally to the whole world. It has to begin with ourselves, otherwise we can do nothing about other people.

I think that just about sums it up. We have to compromise and negotiate all the time – that’s life.

I can sometimes understand why atheists like Richard Dawkins would have things in such a way as Christians would be no more acceptable in society than Holocaust deniers and flat-earth fanatics. Perhaps he would like to be a new Robespierre and have the guillotine permanently set up on a public square ready for use at any time! Perhaps his good lady wife is good at knitting… Unfortunately, he is not the only one. In the same way as some of the most virulent French revolutionaries were former rigorist Catholics, so it is in our own day.

The serpent eats its own tail as we find more souls who would correct Christ’s errors in the words of John Gielgud as the Grand Inquisitor.

I have to admit about being vague about “free Catholicism” as there is no institution upholding that notion, and all the free Catholic attempts I have known of came unstuck or did not survive their founders. In the mind of the “totalitarian” Catholic, religious freedom is cognitively dissonant and/or deeply dishonest. Catholicism is therefore all about submission to authority and being under the control of a single institution.

If the fundamentalists of that Church spoke Arabic, the word would be none other than Islam (س ل م). The association of ideas is chilling. In history, the Church has hardly distinguished itself for respecting human freedom in any way – the Inquisition, the Crusades and everything that discredits it with us and our contemporaries. Islam (or at least the strict tendencies thereof) is no different from Christianity in the fourteenth century.

Is rejection of such a vision the equivalent of Satan’s non serviam in the Genesis narrative, the root of all sin and the Fall? That is question conservative Catholics ask. The cognitive dissonance is, however, not in the minds of those seeking the freedom Christ gave his disciples, but rather in the minds of those upholding an ecclesial system that has had its Vatican II, preached ecumenism and religious freedom, and uphold the pre-conciliar ideology.

These questions are constantly raised in the blogs, and nothing we can say will change the minds of the conservative Catholics, since the empathy they have for other people is probably less than a dim flicker. One might just as well try converting the Ayatollah of Iran or the Taliban in Afghanistan. One of my objectives in this blog is to uphold an alternative vision, different from and above the warring factions of the conservatives and liberals – two forms of the same intolerance. That alternative vision is freedom, however much it lacks viability in human terms.

The same questions are asked, whether sacramental Christianity or “generic” Catholicism is based on a notion of voluntary love and service of God or fear of punishment for falling back into one’s “natural” evil state. Here, one can easily see the root of Hitler’s ideology according to which people are nothing more than cattle to be disposed of by the “master race”.

The conservatives then emphasise the futility of anything “pretending” to be Catholicism without being under the proper authority. Anything not part of the system is held to be a false imitation of Catholicism with the purpose of deceiving the credulous. The extreme Eastern Orthodox do the same thing, and some will even re-baptise people moving from one Orthodox Church to another Orthodox Church. This conception of the Church is the greatest obstacle to evangelism.

They continue by saying that any reason for describing oneself as “Catholic” other than being parts of God’s “Waffen SS” is shallow and unsustainable. They mention the example of fragmentation between national Orthodox Churches and between traditionalist groups. We bewail the same kind of fragmentation between independent Anglican and independent Catholic groupings.

In Catholicism, there may be wildly different opinions, but the Pope is the central authority that keeps us together. We can either be obedient and be in communion, or be disobedient and be excommunicated.

The simplism might seem to be appealing for the war-weary continuing Anglican or someone who has been involved in a “vagante” Church. Give up freedom for totalitarianism, and one finds the pill for happiness. Do we not read all about it in Huxley’s Brave New World?

Those conservatives have relinquished their freedom, and I wonder how happy they are in a system that theoretically upholds (but doesn’t practice) religious freedom and ecumenism (but reduces it to diplomatic chit-chat). They repeat the same mantras and cannot learn from any other point of view. I leave them to stew in their juice, but rather appeal to those who are not convinced they hold the final truth.

Attempts at free Catholicism have never been long-lasting. Conciliarism, which was the solution agreed upon by the Council of Constance (14 14-1418) to resolve the situation of up to three rival popes was finally snuffed out by Vatican I. Pius IX cut off the final branch of Rome’s credibility. Henceforth, any pile of bunkum coming out of Rome under the cover of (implied) papal infallibility was made acceptable. Hitler and Mussolini invented nothing! The old archdiocese of Utrecht was seduced by Kulturkampf liberalism in the 1880′s, and Old Catholicism became what it became – aligned with the sterile and de-sanitised mush of much of contemporary Christianity, the nemesis and mirror image of the infallible Pontiff.

I have come to the stage where I cease to believe in any “true church”, at least that notion being tied to any visible established institution. The setup I belong to was reduced to a pile of rubble by the ordinariate movement, and the survival is not as transparent as I would have hoped. They surely have their reasons “above my pay grade” or “clearance level”. Its looks like we have to accept a certain degree of obscurantism, at least until it turns out to be something manifestly unacceptable.

Saint Augustine maintained that a sacramental life was possible outside the official Church – valid but illicit – whilst Saint Cyprian upheld the total invalidity of any sacramental life from the instant of separation from the institutional Church. Rome now tends to hover between the two. Bishops and priests in independent contexts cannot refer to Rome for the ontological reality of the ministrations or legitimacy. They must appeal to a principle other than authority. They can’t have their cake and eat it!

The fact that Rome recognised Eastern Orthodox orders and those of the Old Catholics before they started ordaining women is an indicator of the fact that Rome is not actually Cyprianic in its theology. Conservative Roman Catholic lay people are often both Cyprianic and Donatist.

What is the characteristic of Catholicism? Is it the sacramental and liturgical character of its worship. If they exist in the Orthodox Churches, then can they not be an aspect of other forms of independent sacramental Christianity (based on a priesthood that would be valid in Augustinian terms)? Perhaps the Orthodox are more acceptable to westerners because they are practically unknown to us and “exotic”.

Putting it another way, what makes a Christian, a carrot or a big stick? Did not the British Navy just after the time of Captain Blighe admit that flogging with the cat o’ nine tails breaks a good man’s heart and makes a bad man even worse? Would we not be better Christians through love than through fear of punishment? Aesthetics often draw souls to the truth through sacred symbols and a sacramental experience. One of my loyal readers says that aesthetics is the wordless language of the soul. That is the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, not Vatican totalitarianism and the canonical equivalent of Fascism.

Belonging to the Church, any Church, is a question of connection. The beauty of the liturgy, a thing of the past in most RC churches, is one thing that connects us to the essential Christ-Mystery. Aesthetics is a means by which we fall in love with the Mystery, and Christ draws us to himself.

I am not repelled by the fragile church such as the one I belong to as a priest, because the entire Gospel of Christ is all about fragility and weakness. The Grand Inquisitor’s religion is about power and strength. The strong send the weak to be burned at the stake, shot or gassed. The weak and fragile have compassion and empathy for the little ones of this earth, those to whom the Beatitudes apply.

Catholicism in its universality is a pilgrimage of the human spirit in the way of freedom and holiness, a journey towards the light…

Shut it all up in a box, and I, with nearly the totality of our contemporaries, would not be interested.

The message I try to convey here is one of hope, for those who are not locked up in one prison or the other. Freedom is lived in our weakness and precariousness, but such is our condition that we can transcend.

This comment on Fr Smuts’ blog about Bishop Fellay, superior of the Society of St Pius X, calling the Jews the “enemies of the Church” is worth reading. Friends used to joke with me in private, calling them the “Waffen SS – PX”! Those priests are not all neo-Nazis by any means, some are good devout men who got into it because of the liturgically and doctrinally traditionalist stance, but others of those men have some very nasty ideological opinions.

During the occupation of France by the Nazis from 1940 until 1944, some Catholic minds thought Nazism would be useful to get their own back against the Socialists and Freemasons who were responsible for the separation of Church and State in 1905 and for anti-clericalism.

Of course, anti-semitism goes back further and is one of the most profound sources of embarrassment for the Church since the days of the Spanish Inquisition and all the way back in history. It was an important part of the late nineteenth-century anti-liberal conspiracy theories that blamed everything on the Jews, the Socialists and the Freemasons.

I am quite taken back by the motto adopted by Maréchal Petain – Travail, Famillle, Patrie. This is also the motto of a right-wing organisation (supported by the superior of my old seminary) based in – - – Brazil. Brazil, Paraguay and other South American countries were refuges for some of the worst Nazi rats when Hitler was defeated – if they had enough gold (which was stolen from the victims of the Nazis in the concentration camps). I don’t know if there is any connection, but the connection seems pretty obvious! I have to give it to my old superior that he did rebuke a seminarian who declared himself to support the neo-Nazi ideology! I remember… And I was in a clerical institute recognised by Rome.

French bourgeois Catholicism has a lot to answer for. Practically the whole working class in this country is alienated from the Church, that in spite of the generations of Marxist priests and bishops from 1945 up to about the John Paul II era. It is a sign of shame that there were many Catholic justes who did what they could to resist the enemy and save as many Jewish people as possible, but this was not the official policy of the French Church! They sacrificed their lives and were often atrociously tortured by the Gestapo before the relief of death.

Mourad’s account seems to be accurate according to my information and reading of writings of historians like Dr Luc Perrin of Strasbourg University. However, he overlooks something that he might be intending to describe in a future comment, the phenomenon of Intégrisme as a Papally-supported (Pius X 1903-1914) movement reaction against theological Modernism. This accounts for the name of the Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Pii Decimi or Fraternité Sacredotale Saint-Pie X.

Here is a link to my article on anti-Modernism in the pontificate of Pius X and up to the suppression of the Sodalitium Pianum headed by Monsignor Umberto Benigni in 1921 by Benedict XV – see Sodalitium Pianum.

I was “received” by the SSPX in June 1981 and attended their masses in London until leaving for France the following year. There were some good and devout people, but the cranks left me with a lasting impression. I spent some time at one of the Society’s schools in France from October 1982 until the Easter of the following year, learning French and helping with teaching English. It was an eye-opener to say the least, a lens through which I would have a critical view of Roman Catholicism for many years.

One again, I am spiritually exhausted and ask for your prayers and will need to address these questions much less frequently. It’s greasy, very dirty and like something I once trod on in the gutter – very unpleasant! It is nothing other than pure evil!

This kind of thing can be dealt only by prayer and fasting…

All these links are in French. If you can read this language, then you will see that the polemics go back a very long way.

• Intégrisme (Wikipedia article).
• Les Amis du Christ-Roi en France – containing several documents on historical intégrisme.
• Alain de Benoist, Psychologie du Conspirationnisme (pdf).
• Sodalitium n°60 (décembre 2007) with very well researched articles.
• Page of issues of Sodalitium in pdf. No English downloads available.

As I mentioned in my earlier article, Sodalitium is the review of the Istituto Mater Boni Consilii, a group of priests in Italy who aspire to restoring the status quo of the Church under Pius X. They are much more “extreme” than the Society of St Pius X from which they are dissidents, and hold a position about the Pope (since 1958) close to sedevacantism. Les Amis du Christ-Roi, based at Nantes, are even more extreme.

And a couple of books by one of the greatest scholars in the subject, which give more balance in historical and intellectual terms:

• Emile Poulat, Intégrisme et Catholicisme Intégral, Paris 1969.
• Émile Poulat, Catholicisme, démocratie et socialisme. Le mouvement catholique et Mgr Benigni de la naissance du socialisme à la victoire du fascisme, Paris 1977.

This question is asked by Bishop Chandler Holder Jones in SSPX.

Here is his article:

The Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, the most well-known Latin Rite traditionalist movement, now appears to be, by the description of its Superior General Bishop Fellay, Old Catholic. That is, its position is precisely analogous to the status of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands, the Dutch Roman Catholic Church of the Old Episcopal Order, in the years 1723, 1870 and 1889, as it has refused definitively to accept the ordinary magisterial authority of the modern papacy. The SSPX places the Tradition of the old Latin Fathers of the ancient Church and the consensus of the Fathers above the teaching office of the contemporary Roman Communion. This has been exactly the historical position of Old Catholicism, and yes, Anglicanism, from the Reformation forward…

Fascinating.

Orthodox Anglicans and orthodox Old Catholics are, of course, sister Churches and have historically enjoyed full sacramental communion on the basis of the shared Faith of the ancient and undivided Church of the first millennium, the Faith of the One Church East and West, as expressed in the Western Rite. What could the future hold for the SSPX?

Yes and no… The story is incredibly complex. The SSPX upholds post-Tridentine and nineteenth-century Ultramontanist ecclesiology, so the historical and doctrinal questions are just not the same. They have (officially) avoided the sedevacantist solution – see my recent articles A Few Links to the “Intégrisme” Theme and An Excellent Explanation of French “Intégrisme”.

There is a certain analogy to Old Catholicism – schism from Rome in the name of Tradition and resistance to innovations, whether they be the papal bull Unigentus against Jansenism, papal infallibility, religious liberty or the Novus Ordo. Comparisons are possible, but they are only very rough and about as different as apples from oranges.

Will they go the way of ecumenism and liberalism like the Union of Utrecht, or like the Raskol (Old Believers) of seventeenth-century Russia? Speculation is possible.

Any religious community needs a foundational myth, a reason for its existence. With the SSPX, it is not the liturgy but intransigent Roman Catholicism claiming spiritual, moral and political ownership of the entire world. How they will do that without being in communion with the Pope or becoming sedevacantists, I cannot imagine. The mind boggles, and I don’t envy them.

I occasionally look at the blog of Fr Ray Blake, who is a Roman Catholic priest in Brighton. He bewails the increasing secularism in England through his entry of yesterday, Like the Monks of Egypt. I have very simple questions to ask.

Essentially, what is it that Christians do that annoys the powers-that-be? I think it is two-sided. I have personally been “out of it” for too long, unused as I am to urban life, to say much of value, but I can offer a guess. On one side, I can only guess that there are hot-headed Evangelicals constantly “witnessing” and bothering people, and a very small minority of right-wing Catholics who think everything is due to the Church – all one-way. On another side, a nurse who holds the hand of a dying person and says a discreet prayer can lose her job. For the sake of the zealots, all Christians can be put into one basket and assumed to be “enemies of the people” – (Now where have I heard that one?).

It seems to be simple. If you are brash and bother people, the system will fight back. What place is left? Fr Blake suggests a return to the monastic life or something like the catacombs. Frankly, I think it would do us all a lot of good! The atheist and secular backlash must be reacting to something. On one hand, it may be inventing its own enemy like the Nazis when they burned the Reichstag and blamed the Communists! On the other hand, there has to be something to react against – bigotry and intolerance. Society then becomes increasingly polarised when everything is related to homosexuality and people wanting to “change sex” becoming something normal.

I had a long talk with my wife about the demonstration of last Sunday in Paris against the Socialists’ project of introducing same-sex marriage. Of course, we are talking about civil marriage, what happens before Monsieur le Maire before the couple goes to church for a sacramental wedding if they are believers and want a church wedding. The real issue here is not so much the couple of men or women, but that heterosexual married couples and single people can adopt children and the children have the right of paternity from their mother and father, or single parent. There is a problem when a child of two same-sex parents (the child being adopted or the result of artificial insemination in countries that allow it like Belgium) suffer from the separation of the couple or the death of the legal parent. The person who is not the legal parent cannot adopt the child and has no rights. Civil marriage of two persons of the same sex would resolve this legal difficulty so that all children would have the same rights as those of heterosexual married couples.

Of course, we could go back to imprisoning homosexuals like in the nineteenth century – but the genie is out of the bottle. Hitler stuck pink triangles to them and sent them to concentration camps and most were murdered. Nowadays, we have no choice other than to accept the trajectory of history, knowing there will be other changes and reactions in the future if the provocation is too great. For those who are Christians, the priest is called to minister to them pastorally like anyone else. Then it is a question of persons and conscience.

We are of course talking about civil law and people who for the most part are not Christians or believers. Intégriste Catholics go from the standpoint of the “social kingdom of Christ”, the rights of the Church over all humanity and the moral duty of all to convert to the true Church. Vatican II introduced ecumenism, the inter-religious dialogue, religious freedom. The 1983 code of canon law states that the Church claims jurisdiction only over baptised and practising Catholics. No claim is made over others. The Inquisition dies hard!

We Christians may disapprove of homosexuality on moral grounds and wish that society were more influenced by Christian tenets, but that is no longer the case. There is also abortion that involves the taking of human life. Abortion is wrong, but doctors and their clients will still do it. As a lesser of two evils, it seems better to allow abortions in proper surgical conditions than forcing the women concerned to resort to the use of knitting needles and coat hangers! And that after having shown the woman what abortion really involves, the bloody and gory killing of a human being. The Church can teach its own faithful about sin and wrong, but not those outside and beyond. The secularists now have strength and have the advantage over religious organisations and believers. Do we still go on rattling the sabre and provoking trouble?

It certainly doesn’t seem wrong to believe that secularism is showing an ugly side of intolerance and hatred of belief and Christianity in particular. English society is side-lining Christianity, and here in France, Christianity is closing down. French secularism has always been vigilant about les dérives sectaires, sectarian tendencies with a number of characteristics that present real dangers to the weak and vulnerable. To be fair, there are some very unpleasant organisations coming over from America, very aggressive, totalitarian and very interested in large amounts of money! There are always two sides to everything.

In recent history, France had anti-cléricalisme from about 1880 up to World War I. There were similar movements in Italy, and corresponding in time with the infallibilist movement of the 1860′s and Vatican I, amidst a number of skirmishes in Europe. Germany had the Kuturkampf, and the Church had to suffer. The clash was essentially an Enlightenment world view against the visceral anti-liberal combat of Pius IX.

How far can the Church go without ceasing to be the Church? In those days, it was a question of separation of Church and State and the believer’s attitude to science. Now, the extremes are pushed ever further apart.

Some unmarried young people might feel inclined to enter a monastery, and others are drawn to “alternative” lifestyles by buying abandoned villages in Spain and elsewhere and living the “good life”. Most of us have to stay where we are, dictated to by our jobs and need for money and the material necessities. We depend on the politicians and the businessmen, and they are holding the aces.

I have no simple answer to everything or even anything. However, I think we can make certain distinctions that will make it less difficult for Christians to live in a secular or even a hostile society. Perhaps in America, you can still knock on doors and “witness”. If I had some kind of “witness” at the door, even if he wasn’t from some weird cult, I would not accept Christianity coming from there. No one I know here in France would either, especially if the religion on offer is something irrational and inhuman.

We have to think as individual persons, think outside the box, and be sober about everything. People will do what they want, and we might feel offended. People have always done their own thing, including wrongdoing, and they haven’t always been punished by the law. We live in an unjust world. We are also “doing our own thing” by being Christians and doing what Christians do. Our rights find their limit at the beginning of other people’s rights, whether they identify with another religion or none.

We will probably be called to worship in houses and small churches, rediscover prayer and the value of spiritual experience. We will certainly need to rediscover the underground church like in China today, in the Soviet Union yesterday or the Roman catacombs centuries ago. The French réfractaires also survived when they didn’t get killed by the revolutionaries, and many of those people really gave their lives for the faith and not for politics and bigoted opinions. We can resist and fight like some people did against the Nazis in France during the war, but not be surprised when we suffer the consequences.

Above all, Christians are no longer the owners or policemen of the world. Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, as he responded to Pilate that awful Friday morning. History is no longer in our favour, and it probably never has been. So, it is not a surprise that if we put our head on the block, we are likely to get it chopped off. We cannot provoke without expecting a reaction. So, it seems to be ad fontes!

In my posting of 5th March, Towards the Unknown, I mentioned an individual described by the secular press as a fake bishop who tried to infiltrate himself into a pre-conclave meeting of Cardinals. I made fun of the individual mainly on grounds of his mistakes in terms of dress. Actually, the man’s name is Ralph Napierski, a German who appears to have received vagante ordinations.

I decided to do a little research, and found this fellow had been consecrated, by a German bishop called Athanasius Seiwart, himself consecrated by one Jean-Gérard Roux. Roux claims, on the basis of lies and false documents, that he was consecrated by Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục personally in a place called Loano in Italy. A witness affirms that the Archbishop was in Munich on the day in question! What more needs to be said? Roux is a fraud known to the French authorities and has a rich criminal record to his credit. Such a record would not invalidate the transmission of Holy Orders, if Roux received them validly from someone, but this is not someone we would want to invite to dinner.

To substantiate my position on Roux’s consecration, I quote the words of Dr Eberhard Heller in Einsicht – Röm.-Kath. Zeitschrift, December 1993, page 95.

Da sich der Erzbischof, den ich am 29. Januar 1982 in Nizza mit dem Flugzeug abgeholt hatte, zu diesem Zeitpunkt in München befand- er flog erst am 1. Mai 1982 wieder von München nach Nizza (Abflug: 15 Uhr 35, Ankunft: 17 Uhr 05), wo er von Herrn Norrant mit dem Auto abgeholt wurde -, kann eine Weihe zu diesem Zeitpunkt nicht erfolgt sein.

I have also seen a dated video of his priestly ordination in November 1985 by Bishop Jean Laborie – and this also refutes his claim to have been consecrated by Archbishop Ngô Đình Thục. I read reams of material about 14 years ago provided by an acquaintance who lives in Nice, and I still have much of it in my archives mouldering away in a cardboard box in my loft! There’s nothing personal: I just hate to see this kind of person besmirching the credibility of Christianity.

The above photo is Napierski in Roux’s chapel in France, at La Ferté Gaucher, some way to the north-east of Paris in the Seine-et-Marne near Meaux. A site still exists – Abbaye de Marie Reine – but is “closed for administrative reasons”. Perhaps Roux can still be found on Facebook if you’re interested. I’m not.

Roux has had himself photographed with Pope Benedict XVI, unless the photo was a Photoshop job, which is not difficult. I guess the photo was taken in the Paul VI Audience Hall, but how the heck did this creep do it? What is even more ironic is that Roux is an on-and-off sedevacantist!

Napierski’s consecrator, Seiwart, claims to have been reconciled with Rome and accepted as a valid bishop. I don’t believe that. Rome never takes back “apostate” clergy. Seiwart got himself “in” with Pope John Paul II. He is wearing Mass vestments and it is clearly a Papal Mass in St Peter’s Square, so I suppose concelebrating clergy are not required to show credentials called a celebret, what we Anglicans call a canonical licence. Of course, Rouxs’ forgery department and department of dirty tricks might at last have found a way to do a good job on their papers!

Now, Naperski describes himself as a bishop in communion with the Roman Catholic Church – katholischer Bischof in Union mit der römisch-katholischen Kirche. How do these guys have the cheek to do this kind of thing? They might have got valid ordinations from somewhere, as I did to my shame, but with claims to be genuine Roman Catholics, they are indeed fakes and frauds. They discredit many independent Old Catholic and other Sacramental Christian clergy with genuine vocations.

These bandits are not the only ones. There is also a bishop by the name of David Bell who also somehow gets into Papal Audiences and Masses.

If there are any accusations of libel, they should be addressed to my source of information – The strange case of “His Eminence” Bell.

But who is David Bell and what is the Roman Catholic Society of Pope Leo XIII really? Bell is a forty two year old Englishman who was ordained priest and then bishop within the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church (ICAB). ICAB is a group that was created in Brazil during the 30’s and was made up of priests and a bishop who did not want to follow the teachings of Pius XI against communism. Over the years, ICAB has adopted certain old Catholic positions, refusing to recognise the dogma of papal infallibility imposed by the Second Vatican Council and opening up to the idea of priests being able to marry. Today in Brazil, the ICAB has a number of bishops and communities which celebrate new marriage ceremonies for divorcees who wish to remarry.

It was ICAB’s superior, the elderly “patriarch” Luis Fernando Castillo Mendez, inappropriately referred to as “cardinal”, who consecrated Bishop Bell in 2006, proclaiming him “cardinal” in 2009, shortly before he passed away. Mendez had been in contact with the Holy See at the end of the 80’s but had not yet accepted John Paul II’s outstretched hand.

A video of Bell’s consecration ceremony is available on YouTube. Both the international and Italian Society of Pope Leo XIII websites regularly publish photographs of Bell kissing the Pope’s hand during one of the Wednesday Audiences in June 2011. There is even one image of the bell and another bishop from the congregation apparently co-celebrating mass in St. Peter’s Square.

Bell is undoubtedly a valid bishop, but he is a false Roman Catholic, hardly a way to endear himself to the instances of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for his reconciliation. The quote article points this out clearly. The problem is not being an independent bishop, but pretending to be what one is not!

The latest rascal is Ralph Napiersk gate crashing a meeting of Cardinals, at least for the purpose of getting himself photographed with them for the purpose of getting false credentials.  Get Religion links to various versions of the story. Napierski’s site is Corpus Dei, and he shows us what he’s got or claims to have. It’s strange the site is in English and not in his native German. The reason is not given.

I will end this unsavoury subject by a few reflections. Men like these cause all independent priests and bishops to be tarred with the same brush and called fakes and phony. That has been going on for a long time with the famous books by Brandreth (Episcopi Vagantes and the Anglican Church) and Peter Anson (Bishops at Large). I remember reading Anson’s evaluation of Freidrich Heiler, a man he respected on account of his intellectual achievements. Most of the others were aping something they were not or were at the limits of honesty to understate it.

I have written articles under the category Independent and Old Catholicism, and I am still sympathetic to the idea of independent sacramental communities in which the Church can subside through the Priesthood and the holding of the full Apostolic Faith. A community might be one priest or bishop and a handful of laity, or he might belong to an organised Church like one of the Continuing Anglican bodies. There are communities that identify with orthodox Catholicism whilst being honest about not belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. There is no problem there.

The problem is being a “wannabe” Roman Catholic and setting out to imitate what one is unable to become. This just plays into the hands of apologists and polemicists of all kinds. The “blood-crazed ferret” Damian Thompson wrote Wandering bishops, grief-crazed Lib Dems… and Hillary Clinton’s Croydon facelift some time ago. It isn’t flattering. Who can blame him when you get the more honest bishops doing a Post the Host service and other shenanigans? It is heartbreaking.

I tip my hat to the blog Bože!, which inspired me to look into the case of Napierski and write this article from my own perspective. Bishop Alexis, who runs this blog tells of his painful awareness of the proportion of men in the independent sacramental world who are either mentally ill or suffer from some personality problem like narcissism. He points out that the mainstream churches also have bad clergy. Alexis’ approach is praiseworthy, which consists of blogging, researching and writing and putting a positive side to a spiritual world that is not well known, and against which the bad eggs bring adverse publicity. This is also one of the purposes of this blog – dispelling ignorance and prejudice through education and reasoning.

But, some characters are indefensible and show nothing to condone!

This is just a little sideshow whilst thinking of Spanish-speaking Popes, perhaps to go with some of those bishops who misrepresent themselves as Roman Catholics. So, don’t take this article too seriously. I have never had anything to do with this sect (they brainwash people, divide families, get lots of money out of people, break the law, etc.) and I would not recommend anyone to join them.

The story of this singular cult in the Andalusia region of southern Spain is known in some quarters and obscure in others. Here is an introduction to the so-called Palmarian Catholic Church founded at the end of 1975 with alleged apparitions of Our Lady to a group of children and the whole thing being taken over by a pair of fraudsters. Iglesia católica palmariana is in Spanish but better documented. A satirical film has been made in Spanish called Manuel y Clemente portraying Clemente Dominuez y Gomez and Manuel Alonso Corral as a pair of homosexuals and cynical fraudsters. Whatever happened, this group got hold of a lot of money and support at the beginning, enough to build this cathedral!

Palmar Cathedral interior

Palmar Cathedral exterior

Clemente Dominguez y Gomez (pope Gregory XVII) leading a procession of cardinals (actually a cortège, since in a procession, the highest ranking prelate is at the rear)

Peter II who died in 2011

Gregory XVIII – since 2011

Argentina also has a funny set-up – Iglesia Católica Apostólica Remanente with a blog on Iglesia Católica en el Exilio, also mostly in Spanish. Their pope never shows real photos of himself, but uses Photoshop to graft the head of a young Anglican curate of St Clement’s Philadelphia onto the body of Benedict XVI. If he exists, the real name of this man is Alejandro Tomás Greico and he is only 29 years old!

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I’m someone who likes to use words well, and being a translator, I have developed a sense for using language accurately and rationally. Words sometimes conventionally have emotional meanings that can seriously mislead – but are a part of our human condition.

One such word is the Anglicised version of the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον meaning good news as is news brought by a messenger ἄγγελος, an angel. The Greek word is rendered into St Jerome’s Latin as evangelium or bona annuntiatio. Old English gave us gōdspel and Middle English gave us gospel as we still use in our modern English. The good news of the mysteries of Jesus Christ were named gospels, but that word is only analogically applied to information of proven truth rather than simply good news. The word is already corrupted from meaning goodness to meaning absolute truth.

Evangelisation has come to signify the means of propagating the Gospel and the Christian religion among those who have no prior knowledge of it or who have become lapsed Christians or have for some other reason rejected their traditional faith. This is the mission of the Church, the great commission to announce the Gospel and administer the Sacrament of Baptism in the name of the Holy Trinity. We read a considerable amount about the importance of the mission in the Acts of the Apostles, the Gospels themselves and the writings of St Paul. Missiology is a discipline within the genus of theological studies. There is a theory of evangelisation as well as the actual “marketing” techniques used in the different eras of church history.

St Paul succeeded through his use of Hellenistic philosophy even though he hailed from the Jewish tradition. This combination was highly successful in the Mediterranean basin. This discipline therefore involves knowledge of cultures, anthropology, history and methods of communication. During other periods, men took the easy way – invading and colonising a country, giving a few notions of Christianity, baptising by force and persecuting relapsi as heretics! The latter method was favoured by those who lusted for political power, but it has nothing to do with the Gospel.

Nowadays, the primary requisite is to respect freedom, whilst offering a Gospel that is attractive and convincing by the merit of its intrinsic truth. To do this, like any marketing technique, the “market” has to be targeted and researched. It is the same in business – you either research a need for a product or service and you fill that need by being in the right time and place. The difference with Christian mission is you are not (or should not be) doing it for money, but altruistically for the good of those you are sent to evangelise.

Last week, I received at least three telephone calls from an insurance company peddling its wares. We get this all the time in France and doubtlessly in other countries too. I deeply object to marketing by telephone. They force a person to take notice of them by stopping us in our tracks and react favourably or unfavourably to their offer. The first time, I simply told them I was satisfied with my present insurance policies for my healthcare, home and car and that I was not interested in their offer. I thanked the person and then put the phone down. They called a second and third time. The second time, I suggested that the person could give me their personal phone number so that I could give it to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The third time, I threatened (bluffed) doing a trace on their call and resorting to legal action (which would need more proof of harassing that I would be able to provide). With some telephone salesmen, I react like a bureaucracy and put them on hold, and play them nice music until they get bored and give up. Truly, telephone marketing is a dirty business. Now, if Christian evangelism is conducted in anything like this way, it is too horrible to contemplate.

I am opposed to aggressive marketing, just as with with the crude attempts of internet trolls. It is in its essence little different from the methods of the King or Queen of Spain in the fourteenth century and the dreaded Inquisition! It violates freedom and privacy, or even our own intimate relationship with God in all the ways He manifests his existence and love.

Evangelicalism is a “buzz” word with an emotional meaning, usually denoting the characteristic of Christian denominations competing for customers, and therefore bases of power and wealth – who puts the most cash into the collection plate! The word is often opposed to other characteristics such as contemplative or liturgical – dare I say it – Americanism on steroids! I get the impression the Roman Catholics in South America are aping the Protestants because they fear bankruptcy for not keeping pace with the market of people who like mass hysteria and “feel good” services.

I think the real point has been missed. Christianity is trying to appeal to the wrong cultural instincts rather than searching from aspirations to “spirituality” and the transcendent, through the sense of beauty and contemplation some people seek by climbing mountains or getting into a boat and going to sea. These aspects seem to be seriously neglected in the usual evangelical paradigm.

We need to understand our words accurately and rationally, and once and for all decide what Christianity is all about. What it is not about are politics and business!

Religious fanaticism throughout history has caused many evils, including murder and genocide. Secular society is right in fighting against it. Much of the prejudice against religion held by atheists and agnostics is unfortunately justified.

So I’ll leave you with a few tips.

We should accept that every religion has some good and truth to it. We should see other religions and versions of Christianity for their good rather than their bad qualities. We should refrain from making personal accusations or threats. Don’t denigrate such and such a church or religion as false or bogus in relation to your own which is the “true church”. Learn to be kind and patient.

We should learn about other versions of Christianity (denominations, different theological “systems”, etc.) and about other religions. How many of us have read the Koran, even in an English translation? I haven’t, but I have taken the trouble to read some basic introductions to Islam. I know very little about Hinduism or Buddhism, but I know I am missing something unless I take the trouble to learn something.

How open are we to our ordinary life at work and at home? Are we forcing our beliefs on everyone else and judging? Or are we kind and teaching by meekness and example? Are we making friends outside our churches and discussing courteously with people who believe differently or not at all?

Are we prepared to learn tolerance, which does not mean that we do not believe in truth or the validity of what we might consider as wrong? Kindness is much more convincing than brutality either in deed, speech or writing.

We know that fanatics and zealots form a tiny minority in their communities, but like in society at large, they are the bullies, the sociopaths and narcissists that dominate and make life miserable to those who they would like to be lower in the pecking order. They ruin everything for everyone else. The evil is potentially within any of us.

Please comment wisely.

I have already written on this subject, especially when commenting on the Grand Inquisitor theme.

My task here is simply to offer a few summary ideas to help us all to understand how the “mechanism” works.

Fanaticism is not the result of faith but a lack of faith. It comes from fear that one’s commitment does not go far enough. Believing in God, praying and living a moral life are, for that person, not enough. There is the element of proving something to himself and others, showing his faith through extreme commitment.

All religious people feel they have to do something. Most go to church and try to avoid doing evil, being good decent folk. A next stage is serving the poor, getting involved with humanitarian works, giving money, becoming a priest, a monk or a nun. These are fully committed Christians. Then we have people who commit atrocities “in God’s name” like seventeenth-century Christians – both Protestant and Catholic – or today’s Muslims in the Taliban or Al Qaeda. This is fanaticism.

Fanaticism need not always involve murder. It can take many forms, superimposed on the predatory instincts of ruthless people seeking to establish their fields of power and dominion. The Grand Inquisitor (see above) is a perfect example of this kind of person and his motivations. Trolling on the Internet is also an aspect of this kind of personality when motivated by extreme religious “commitment”.

The borderline seems to be between the person who practices his faith and religion, but respects other people in their beliefs – tolerance and recognition of good and grace in the other. Proselytism is the beginning of predatory fanaticism when it involves trying to trash and destroy the other person’s basis, to create a need for the fanatic’s way. This is the usual approach implicit in commercial advertising, and is a common characteristic of unredeemed humanity.

If God has any interest in what human beings do, it is preferable that God should be seen as love (as said by St John and others in the Old and New Testaments) than as some kind of Lord High Führer who feeds on suffering, blood and death – the Demiurge or “bad creator god” of the Gnostics. Most of us are sure that a loving God would prefer us to be good decent folk than going to church and being evil in our lives!

Does that make us have to be liberals? That depends what liberalism means. If it means tolerating other people and recognising good and truth in them, then we should be liberal. If it is some kind of intolerant ideology to be imposed on others, then we should not be. It is as simple as that.

We should be aware that fanatics, as sociopaths / psychopaths in the world around us, are only a tiny minority. Most of our churches, mainstream and marginal, are made up of good, positive, decent and tolerant people. That goes for the Roman Catholic Church to the little group of Evangelicals in their improvised place of worship. Most of us want to serve God and be good to other people, helping those less fortunate than ourselves and being just. This is one thing we should remember. When there are problems, it isn’t the fault of the Church or most of us faithful and clergy – but of the tiny minority who have no empathy or care for other people, or any recognition of truth and goodness outside themselves.

That is fanaticism. When we recognise it for what it is, then we have nothing to fear.

I have been getting some new responses to an earlier article, Vagante Bishops and Aping Rome, about a small number of individuals who get themselves ordained and consecrated bishops by prelates on whom they count for getting themselves recognised as valid by Rome in the hypothesis of their taking steps to find a back door into the official Roman Catholic clergy.

The men in Rome who occupy positions of responsibility in the Curia know about this trick. Many have tried it, and there is no reliably proven example of it “working”. Two examples in recent history are cited.

The first is that of Bishop Barbosa Ferraz, who was one of those who were consecrated by Bishop Carlos Duarte Costa in the 1940′s. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1963 in his Orders as a bishop. Some allege that he had been a Roman Catholic, and that Rome made an exception from the normal rule, namely that anyone who has been a Roman Catholic and has committed heresy, apostasy or schism, or has received orders from schismatic bishops is definitely grilled, as we termed it in seminary. The evidence points to Ferraz having come from a Protestant background and never having been a Roman Catholic. He was treated in the same way as any Old Catholic or an Orthodox bishop swimming the Tiber. Once the orders are ascertained to be valid, the man goes over like any other convert.

The second case is that of bishops and priests ordained and consecrated by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and who are all Roman Catholics. In the early 1980′s, deacons and priests leaving the Society of St Pius X were treated as if they were in the usual inextricable canonical situation. As Cardinal Ratzinger took over at the CDF from Cardinal Seper in 1983, the padlocks began to fall away. Clerics were regularised and traditionalist priests doing their doctorates in Rome began to mount “ratlines” to get the former SSPX clerics incardinated into Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, etc. dioceses. Eventually, after the SSPX consecrations in 1988, Rome allowed communities like the Fraternity of Saint Peter and the Institute of Christ the King to be set up.

There have been other maverick Roman Catholic bishops ordaining and consecrating outside canonical norms, three to my knowledge:  Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục, Bishop Alfredo Méndez-Gonzalez and Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo. In the cases of the first and third of these prelates, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith pronounced: “does not recognize and does not intend to recognize in the future such ordinations or any ordinations derived from them, and therefore the canonical state of the alleged bishops remains the one they were in before the ordination conferred by the aforementioned N.“. This standard formula means that whether or not the orders in question are valid, they are canonically irregular and will never be regularised, except by the person in question returning to his Church as a layman. Bishop Mendez-Gonzalez seems to have slipped under the net, as he avoided provoking the media, and there were no blogs in those days (1983). The bishop he consecrated, Clarence Kelly, is a sedevacantist and would be unlikely to be looking to Rome to be regularised!

I have followed all this kind of thing for many years, and hoped an exception was going to be made for Archbishop Hepworth on the basis of his leading a significant ecclesial body. It was not to be so, and the way he has been dealt with by the CDF is nothing exceptional. Go wrong in this way and there is no way back except as a layman! The question remains as to whether one believes that the Roman Catholic Church is the “true Church”. If that is so, rather than “trying it” for pragmatic reasons, belonging to it without any condition outweighs any kind of sense of vocation or attachment to one’s priestly orders. This is really what it comes down to.

I find this world of men looking for orders and trying to justify themselves more than a little sickening, and I relate to it less and less well. Some independent Catholic clerics take a humble attitude and don’t try to justify themselves, and are realistic about not being able to be a cleric of a “mainstream” Church. Some of them have a few souls to minister to and others lead more contemplative lives of differing degrees of authenticity. Those are people I can relate to.

But, when it comes to men like Bishop Bell in England, mentioned in the older article, and a certain prelate, consecrated by ex-Archbishop (Rome laicised him) Milingo, looking for regularisation with Rome, then my reaction is that they can bloody well go through the front door on their knees and go to the crappiest Novus Ordo they can find! These poor men tie themselves up in knots with something with which they will never get anywhere. I do not mock them or take any pleasure in their lot. Mine would be just the same if I pursued the wait-wait-never-never game with Rome – or the local Bishop or parish priest – all the same thing as such cases are always referred to Rome – it’s the law. We just have to know what we want in life.

I have nothing against Rome or Roman Catholicism. It’s a fact and that institution has its rules, which it always applies. Just try committing a traffic offence and try negotiating with the policeman who catches you! The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The realist trims his sails!

The more realistic of us know that we can settle into a Church who will accept us and find use for our gifts, or we can do as most do – retire into secular life and seek to live another form of spiritual life. We all have our choices to make, and no one is beyond the pale of God’s mercy even if he is beyond that of the institutional Church. Most of us mature and grow up over the years, and see through the charade of clericalism. We cannot go back in life, but forwards. None of us can afford to be triumphalistic, and I have nothing to be triumphalist about.

For me, it comes to the notion of Christian anarchy, separating priesthood from clericalism. The distinction may seem fine, but it is vital – otherwise the priesthood is thrown out with clericalism and tacky nineteenth-century churches which finally get their appointment with the demolition company and their bulldozer.

The message is simple, all the wannabe Romans have to do is become rank-and-file lay Joe Catholics and go and find out what’s going on at the local parish. Alternatively, they can take a deep breath and think things over, and then make a realistic decision.

* * *

I will end this reflection with a few theological notions. The first is the absurdity of considering the ordinations of men like David Bell as valid whilst denying that of the bishops of Anglican communities, who, they, have souls to minister to and accountability. Usually, men like Bell are of interest only to themselves and what I might be tempted to term as “episcopi vagantes spotters” searching on Google. He has managed to attract a lot of attention to himself by claiming to be a regular Roman Catholic and sneaks in to get himself photographed with the Pope.

The notion of being valid but irregular / illicit leads to an absurd notion of the Sacrament of Order and the Catholic priesthood. The Orthodox deny that such a state of things could be possible – if you’re illicit, you’re also invalid. That is the Cyprianic notion – Sacraments being possible only within the Church. What has to defined is the notion of regularity and licitness. For whom? Is the Roman Catholic Church or the canonical Orthodox Churches the only judges, therefore the only true Churches outside of which the taps of grace are turned off and sealed?

I have often attempted to write on notions of ecclesiology, to demonstrate the possibility of the unique Church subsisting in several ecclesial bodies that are divided from each other in human terms. Call this the “branch theory”! I don’t care. What I do care about is that ecclesial bodies that are much smaller than the Roman Catholic Church or the Patriarchate of Moscow can also participate in the mystery of the Church. If this is so, licitness and regularity are simply the ecclesial context of an ordination. It’s not an easy one to judge, and the big Churches have every right to deny the ordinations of anyone coming to them or to ignore the marginal church bodies that keep away and to themselves.

I find it absurd that someone like Bell should be seeking to get Rome to say he is valid, yet not go to the CDF, lay aside his orders, do a penance and go back to London or wherever and find a job. He is not the only one. Other guys have been to get “kosher” orders in the hope the CDF will accept them as an episcopal package. The situation of individuals outside any ecclesial context other than imaginary or fictitious, is quite clear. They are simply charlatans. All such men applying to Rome will be turned down unless they agree to be reconciled as laymen with a perpetual irregularity against exercising orders.

In recent times, the Roman Catholic authorities, like the Orthodox, are very careful about commenting on the orders of those who are outside their communion and canonical chain of command. They just say “whatever might be the question of validity – quidquid ad validitatem” and say that those men have nothing to do with them.

A part of being an independent Catholic, or being in a Church where Catholicism subsists in sacramental and theological terms, is not to misrepresent oneself as what one is not. We in the Anglican Catholic Church are clear about not being in communion with Canterbury or being part of the “official” Anglican Communion. We are tiny and marginal, but we have the characteristics of a Church, at least for our own. We don’t need Rome or Constantinople to “recognise” us. We should be prepared to enter into dialogues and common efforts to unite churches in accordance with the explicit will of Christ. But, if we are shrugged off, it won’t be our fault.

We are much more likely to have an ecclesial life and valid Sacraments by belonging to Churches that “are what it says on the jar” than chasing around with fantastic pretensions and seeking to get recognition from Rome (unless we have never been one of theirs).

In any case, we’re fiddling as Rome burns… What’s the use?

* * *

As a post scriptum, I received an e-mail from “Edson” who complains that I said that the CDF Thuc and Milingo in the same boat.He said it was not true that the CDF only made a statment about Thuc, and the statement was unsigned and merely issued by the Vatican Press Office not legal authority. He tells me the first bishops Milingo ordained were already valid though the Old Catholic line but that the offical spokesman for the Vatican declared the Milingo ordinations as valid, unlike Thuc. See: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34466444/ns/us_news-faith/t/vatican-defrocks-african-archbishop/.

And later in the message:

And later they were compared to the illicit Chinese ordinations. Perhaps you can correct the statement on your site about comparing Thuc to Milingo in this regard.

OK, the man has a right to a response, but it is not very coherent. In his comments to the other posting, he advances theories that are off the mark, like a laicised bishop ordaining invalidly or that validity is compromised by there being several “links of a chain” between the original Roman Catholic ordaining prelate and the ordinand in question. Almost as if ordinations were like photocopies of photocopies, each generation being less perfect than the previous one. That’s a new one on me! Fortunately, when digital files are copied, the copy is just as good as the original.

We’ll see when “Edson” gets his own situation sorted out and finds his name in the Annuario Pontificio. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I waited long enough to find out the truth with Archbishop Hepworth! Again, we’ll see…

Another one has just come in giving a link about the Chinese Patriotic bishops. The article cites Archbishops Milingo and Thuc, but in a very imprecise way, and this article is what it is, a news article. Whether Thuc is called a schismatic and Milingo not – by a journalist – is of no consequence. I see no substantial difference between the way Milingo and his bishops and Thuc and his bishops in Palmar de Troya and Toulon as far as Rome is concerned.

I can see what “Edson” is getting at, a loophole by which he can get through the net and become an official Roman Catholic bishop. It is not for me to decide. We’ll see what Rome decides.

I remember as a child reading a comic in which a cartoon cat used fishing tackle to catch a mouse. The cat threatens the mouse with great delight – “I’m going to hook you. When I get you, I’ll reel you in and fillet you“! Sometimes we’re slaves or victims of other people, often of ourselves.

My subject today is that of addiction. This seems to be a pluridisciplinary subject somewhere between medicine and psychology. I am not qualified in either subject, but I may have noticed patterns of behaviour in some fields of life which have not yet drawn the attention of the medical profession.

Addiction or dependence is a form of behaviour that is based on a repeated and irresistible craving for something in spite of efforts of the subject to control his own life and find independence from the thing that enslaves his life. Generally, it is a chemical substance like tobacco, alcohol or soft / hard drugs. In the case of some chemical substances, dependency becomes physical and severance is made possible with medical help.

I smoked cigarettes for many years and became addicted. Whilst it was a simple moral matter of willpower and courage, I found it impossible to break the addiction. Many people do. I stopped once for about a month, and the second time I held out for six months, and I was quite depressed. Depression is not merely the result of an all-or-nothing worldview. It is also a physical problem of the brain and central nervous system. The human organism is extremely complex, and the more doctors discover it, the more remains hidden from their scientific knowledge. I finally broke it when I married and my wife got me thinking about addiction not merely as a “moral” problem but a medical problem. There are now medicines that take away the physical craving and nervous depression. The nicotine patch also does wonders and is reduced progressively. Acupuncture, whether the traditional way or using special laser beams (done by a medical professional), is also helpful. It has now been seven years, and I haven’t touched one since – not one puff!

To get off cigarettes, the medical help is great, but there needs to be a very personal motivation in the first place. The usual anti-smoking propaganda is actually quite harmful, and anti-authoritarian people hate being threatened by the law. I found the best motivation, apart from the usual health and financial reasons, was that I was being taken over by an “authority” and was enslaved. Emancipation and freedom were within my reach if I went about it the right way for me. When I was a lad, smoking was a part of the “independence” and anti-authority movement – and that was a way of thinking I had to reason away. I am being more of a “rebel” not smoking than when I smoked. It is also better for other people, and there are only advantages to having kicked it.

There are many other forms of addiction, and I won’t go into alcoholism and drug addiction here. I will reflect on forms of addiction not involving chemical substances and modifications to the organism’s chemical-physical functions. The professionals often talk of being “hooked” of chemicals as a dependence rather than an addiction.

The most known non-chemical addictions are gambling, internet and computer games and television. We are now purely in the field of psychology, and several pathologies are known like obsessive-compulsive disorders. I am not an expert on psychology, and can only refer the reader to books and internet articles written by professionals. Sexual addiction is devastating, as a person often needs more and more of it, and with ever more “kinky” methods of stimulation. This is a developing science as contemporary society grapples to understand what drives paedophiles and rapists. One other thing I see as a possible source of obsessive-compulsive dependency is religion. This is something often picked up by atheists, and there need to be ministries in Churches to help people caught in these behaviours. Such persons are quite easy to spot in churches with stereotyped gestures and habits, and in the way they relate to other people. People hooked on cults and sects – or cult-like communities in the mainstream Churches – display the same pathology.

As a person lives with an addiction, it becomes a downward slope as that person’s relationships progressively deteriorate. Return to normal behaviour and relationships becomes increasingly difficult.

Doctors have discovered that some people are more prone to addictions, including chemical ones like alcoholism, than others. Not all heavy drinkers become alcoholics. It is something in the human psychological mechanism. Certain sports can also become addictive, bringing on a dependency independent from the will.

The word addiction comes from the Latin ad-dicere, say to… In the old Roman world, slaves didn’t have their own names and were “said to” their paterfamilias. Addiction is thus the condition of a slave, someone without independence or freedom. Debt is also a form of slavery and addiction. Sigmund Freud used the term to show a primitive need of all human beings. Children are addicted to our mothers for our very survival, and this is a kind of archetype of all addictions. A most credible definition of non-chemical or behavioural addiction is given by the psychoanalyst Aviel Goodman:

a disorder in which a behaviour that can function both to produce pleasure and to provide escape from internal discomfort is employed in a pattern characterized by:

1. recurrent failure to control the behaviour;
2. continuation of the behaviour despite significant harmful consequences.

There is also the notion of increasing the “dose” to obtain the same degree of satisfaction of the craving. Whether we are talking of chemical dependency, perverted sex or other behaviours, we find common characteristics like an increasing tolerance and greater difficulty in breaking the habit. The subject can no longer control the degree of consumption by the use of reason and willpower. As the addiction becomes more intense, other social, cultural and leisure activities are neglected.

There is also the term workaholism, the person who devotes himself inordinately and unreasonably to his job. We can become addicted to anything, to things that are usually good for us, like physical and intellectual activity, sport and reading / study.

Addiction is something that has become something much better understood than in the days when it was considered as a lack of character or willpower. There are many theories, and here again, I can only refer the reader to the experts. It seems to be closely related to the mechanism of reward and sensation of pleasure. We remember how we train dogs and small children using rewards and punishments: good = a sweet or a toy, bad = a slap, a smacked bottom or half an hour in “time out”. Where is the dividing line between normal and addictive behaviours?

Can addictions be “cured”? Chemical dependencies are cured medically, like my old cigarette smoking. The doctor gives his patient something to take away the craving and withdrawal symptoms. Then comes the psychological aspect, which will differ from person to person. I still get occasional cravings for a cigarette, but I stopped smoking so long ago and have very little contact with “second-hand” smoke, and can only conclude each time that it is a psychological illusion. Deep breathing and a good stretch usually do the trick – and life goes on.

How does a doctor treat someone who is addicted to the internet or gambling? There is no chemical dependency, so it is more simple and complicated at the same time. Different professionals have their methods and theories. One example is internet addiction, and games in particular. Blogging can also be addictive, as can be going on forums and commenting. I often wonder whether the behaviour of “trolls” is not also a form of addiction or compulsive behaviour.

From some of the articles I read, one goes “cold turkey” – shutting down the computer – and going to residential behaviour-modification programmes. Like establishments for alcoholics, restrictions are placed so that the addiction becomes impossible. So, no alcoholic drinks for alcoholics and no computers or internet for internet addicts. That seems to make sense. These centres also forbid electronic gadgets. They find life as it was thirty years ago – opportunities for reading books, listening to or playing music and good old-fashioned board games. One re-learns practical things in life: making and repairing things, cooking, looking after animals and physical exercise. Walking outside does wonders.

Those involved in this kind of work have noticed the effects of Facebook and Twitter, which seem to be designed to hook you like a fish. There is the old drawing of the Facebook player who had several thousand “friends”, and when he died, there were only two or three people at his funeral. That alone is sobering. Addictive use of the internet can become something like “electronic cocaine” and “mind-rot” like excessive amounts of time spent watching television.

Internet can make us information-saturated, and this is very unsettling. We need to spend more of our leisure time with sports, outdoor exercise, music (playing an instrument) and reading old-fashioned books. Some may need to stop using the computer entirely. For others, it suffices to ask ourselves whether we have a good reason to use it: for work or getting information. A good exercise is to keep our daily “survey of the blogs” to a minimum time. I would say that ten minutes a day is enough, plus not more than half an hour for reading articles and writing well-reflected comments. Personally, I don’t think my use of the internet is compulsive, and I recognise the signs of “overdoing it”.

We all need to examine ourselves and see if we tend to be addicted to things. We need to begin to understand the mechanism of addiction so that we see the warning signs in ourselves. It is simply a question of our own health, our freedom and independence in relation to slavery imposed by other people and our own compulsive behaviour.

Yes, I look at the “progressive” point of view as well as everyone else’s. The so-called Enlightened Catholicism blog has done a trashing job on the traditionalists by contrasting the way Benedict XVI hoped to deal with the Society of St Pius X and the “Sorry you feel that way,  see ya’ bye” of Pope Francis. See Pope Francis Talks About The Church Of Living Stones; SSPX Throws Stones.

Before going any further, I am not casting any innuendos against the Roman Catholic church or its Pope, or even giving credit for a blogger who would see her Church go the way of the Anglican Communion and secular society. I have no interest in the Society of St Pius X one way or the other.

What is of significance to me is the reason why the traditionalists are being trashed in this way. Is it because of their anti-democratic politics and nostalgia for twentieth-century totalitarianism? No. It is about the liturgy -

I wish them well and hope if they ever figure out how to be living stones by espousing a 14th century Catholicism in a dead language they come back and let us know how they accomplished it.  In the meantime, Francis has one less problem to deal with.

If you take the trouble to read the article, this blogger tars Pope Benedict XVI with the same brush as the SSPX. That the SSPX espouses nationalist and authoritarian politics is of no consequence to this blogger, since she would certainly advocate the imposition of absolute authority and “re-education” for dissidents if she ever found herself with the levers of power in her hands. I would only expect this kind of talk from this blogger, just as I would expect to see leaves on the trees in spring.

So the problem is the liturgy! Evidently not for the vast majority of western humanity to which the Church is no longer a known or trusted entity. In a way, this person is right – the old Latin liturgy will not bring the crowds back. Rather, it is the contrary: large numbers of people are drawn to “mega-church” liturgies. I have nothing against that for those who are drawn to God that way, but some of us are aliens to this type of religion. The common-sense answer would be diversity of “churchmanship” as in twentieth-century Anglicanism. But would it work? Perhaps the other common-sense answer is to get away from institutions and see the Church another way.

It will just bring us to reflect on the real reasons that keep most people away from church. They only ever went because they were forced to by civil authorities under the control of ecclesiastical authorities. How long ago did the Church die? Or rather, how is the Church still surviving far away from the rubble and waste?

As an afterthought, I keep an eye on Patricius‘ blog Liturgiae Causa, in which this young man from the greater London sprawl has written most insightfully. I find myself unable to comment on this blog for reasons of not having the right kind of connection to Google. The conclusion he has come to is sad but is understandable, as we see the dialectics between two totalitarian visions of Catholicism, one “nationalist” and one “socialist” and everything being blamed on styles of worship. Patricius and I sympathise probably more than he or I would care to think. At the same time, I have been around for long enough to know that intemperate writing alienates even one’s friends. I hope Patricius will have the courage to get out of his south-east English existence in a place as dull as Sidcup, to find new surroundings in which he can mature as a person and find fulfilment.

I am determined not to apostatise, but rather to hang on and remain faithful to those little pockets and remnants of Catholicism where they still exist and where they are still Christian as opposed to political. I have written at length on anarchism. Anarchism has always failed in political terms, because it is a-political. It concerns persons and the spiritual life, not yet another way to re-model society, in exactly the way Oscar Wilde claimed to have found freedom in prison. This is the freedom of the spirit – and it is there for each of us to discover.

The title comes from the Vulgate version of Hebrews x.32:

Rememoramini autem pristinos dies in quibus inluminati magnum certamen sustinuistis passionum

But recall the former days in which, after you were illuminated, you endured a great struggle with sufferings

This text come into my mind as I celebrated the Mass of the Seven Brethren last Wednesday. The word pristine was used by both popes Pius V and Paul VI in the missals they published with the idea of rendering a “pruned-back” and more healthy liturgy. When we talk of something pristine, we generally mean in as-new condition, very clean, pure and something eminently desirable.

As human beings, we tend to idealise the past and imagine that life has gone downhill. A grumpy old English gentleman would be wont to say – Broumpf! Damned country’s gone to the dogs! Was life really so perfect then? Perhaps between then and now, things are no better or worse – just the same but different.

Similarly, we ask ourselves whether there was ever a time when Christianity was “normal” or “pristine” (pristine meaning first, not necessarily purer). Was there ever an ideal Christianity? The evidence seems against such an idea – which would either condemn Christianity out of hand or bring us to seek an ideal derived from the whole of church history. Attempts to “restore” an “ideal” from any one time seem to be condemned to failure.

The idea we get from reading the Acts of the Apostles is that after Pentecost, everything was perfect and united in the power of the Spirit. Jesus’ disciples started to convert masses of people around them, and the mission worked smoothly until it got clogged up with “accretions” in some way.

I haven’t time to do a complete historical study here, so I will have to give some notions from my general knowledge. It would seem that the Christian movement was very diverse from the very beginning, and that there is evidence of disunity in the New Testament. For example, there were those who believed that only Jewish people could become Christians and had to continue observing the old Law. I think of St Peter with his dream about the sheet full of food animals that Jews are not allowed to eat.

Other Christians were more open to admitting non-Jewish people into the community without imposing all the Laws of the Torah. There were many ambiguities about Baptism, the role of John the Baptist, and many more things.

As the second and third centuries came, Christianity still didn’t seem to be a unified movement. There were some organised congregations, which would become the first dioceses. There was also Gnosticism as evidenced by the Nag Hammadi scrolls found in the 1940′s, which give us greater knowledge of this phenomenon, together with Πίστις Σοφία, than the polemical writings of Irenaeus of Lyons.

There were many other “heretical” groups, which were contested by the early Ecumenical Councils. Who was (is) Christ? We are still attempting to answer that question today. The greatest threat to “orthodox” Christianity was Gnosticism.

How “mainstream” were the bishops who attended the Ecumenical Councils and defined the dogmas most of us take for granted? What did it take to eliminate the diversity and the “other” views?

Saint Paul’s missions were incredibly successful, and their growth was explosive. But the “style” was not uniform. They didn’t all have the same liturgies and hymn books! Paul was constantly appealing for an end to the squabbles that made believers unworthy to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.

We often have a problem with the experience of diversity. Why so many denominations instead of one Church, one liturgy, one set of beliefs and everyone doing the same thing like in the early Church? But it was not so – ever. They were fighting each other, killing each other, right from the beginning. If groups collaborated, it was for things like looking after the poor. Diversity is hated by many, because it relativises one own self-justification.

I was writing about mystery religions a few days ago. Many of them influenced various forms of Christianity other than the more purely Jewish models. We already see the divergence between strict monotheism and the influence of paganism. This fact also influences the way we think about other Christians, other religions and non-religious people. There were probably more versions of Christianity in ancient Rome and Corinth than in the present-day USA! The downfall of Saddam Hussein showed the explosive divisions of different kinds of Islam in Irak – they all hate each other over differences of interpreting the Koran and other doctrinal and moral matters similar to the Christian world. Islam began as a kind of Jewish-inspired pagan Christianity!

Diversity seems to be like having four Gospels, all with a different slant, but generally confirming each other as testimony of Christ. Christians were always calling for unity, yet constantly squabbling over the kind of unity there should be. Pristine Christianity? Was there ever such a thing? Too many are saying that the early Church was perfect, idyllic (except for the persecutions coming from outside) and pure, and only little by little did heresies and conflicts arise, and then the waters were muddied by the dreaded “accretions” – so that the golden era has to be restored. The problem is that had such a “golden age” existed, we would all be agreed on its being a standard to which we should all conform.

We often feel that there should be one institutional and visible Church (or that we should identify that true church and join it). The notion is inherited from Judaism (whilst Islam settles for its diversity – and they kill each other for it), a single people of God. From there comes the desire to find a place of truth. I have noticed that authors like Soloviev and Berdyaev had discovered that the very drive for unity causes division and schism. It is ironic that the various ecclesial bodies in schism from each other are witness to the unity they think they should have.

The original line of division was whether Christianity was something new, prepared for by Judaism and the pagan mystery religions, or a continuation and “fulfilment” of Judaism with the observances of the Torah (circumcision, no pork, etc.). This divergence continues to govern our basic religious instincts, so that the Catholic tradition has tended to pursue the mission of Christ to the Gentiles, and the Reformed tradition tends to pull Christians back to the Old Testament and pure monotheism.

Church history, as any history, is written by those who prevailed over the “others”. Thus the Gnostics were heretics and the Ecumenical Councils taught the truth as revealed by God through the Church. All too often, truth was enforced by persecution, violence and force. If we got anywhere near what really happened – which we probably won’t – we will find a story of political power and domination by the strongest.

Perhaps instead of hankering for unity, or compliance with a single standard of orthodoxy, we need first to learn tolerance and then to welcome diversity, and then engage in a dialogue of love (which may not be reciprocated). Many of us refer to past periods of church history, and some may find the fact that I use a liturgy as used in the tenth to the sixteenth centuries a sign of considering that era to be a golden era. No era is more or less golden than another. I use a liturgy that gained stability and was widely loved in the culture of those who used it. Our Anglican Missal is essentially the Use of the Roman Curia with a few Sarum variations via the Prayer Book. That too represents a rite that was not invented yesterday.

There is a world of difference between attachment to a tradition and the desire to restore a golden age that never existed. I have given thought to this problem for years. Newman came up with the idea of doctrinal development to solve this problem of a Church that is both traditional but in and of its time. Many books have outlined the difference in the view of tradition between Newman and Bossuet, for whom change and variation were a sign of heresy and heterodoxy. There are clearly problems with either view. It is the fatal flaw in “classical Anglicanism” that seeks to project itself on the Church of before about the fifth century. To me, this view holds no credibility.

I come increasingly to the view that Christianity is not something to be spread everywhere, even less being an instrument of political power and ambition. It is something – a spiritual and moral way of life – to live individually and in small communities, serving the world in an essentially Cynical and Anarchical philosophy of love and self-sacrifice. Justin the Martyr defended the Christians by exclaiming – See the love they have for each other – not See how they have organised their Church to offer a single truth to the world.

This is why I insist so much on the human side of Christian life and its appeal through beauty and love, more than through force and the enforcement of standards of orthodoxy. Maybe I sound like a liberal, but those we usually call “liberals” are intransigents on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum to the conservatives or traditionalists. We have to transcend these categories, all in leaving people where they are to make their own discoveries and experiences.

Let us love and serve, remaining loyal and faithful to our own Christian communities, and let the others too get on with what they believe to be right. Perhaps in this way, we may be closer in spiritual Communion than if we tried to get all the eggs into a single basket.

I received a very kind message from my Bishop this morning who found that it was wise to put The Anglican Catholic to bed for a little while until it gets focused on positive themes and transcends the kind of themes for which I devised the three Blow-Out departments on this blog. Even there, I expect a degree of courtesy so that matters can be discussed between adults. This blog does not engage my Church or Diocese in any disputes – see the disclaimer at the head of the right-hand sidebar.

I often say it myself, and my Bishop has put it beautifully:

The fights that regularly break out in the holy places in the holy land between groups of monks charged with custody of these shrines does more damage to the cause of the Gospel than a million authors writing books like the ‘God Delusion’.

Ah, the Holy Mountain! Some of those monks will have only themselves to blame if the whole place is turned over to developers to turn Mount Athos into a complex of luxury hotels and rest centres with saunas and jacuzzis for rich businessmen and politicians. In the 1900′s in France, the French government became virulently anti-clerical and turned the monks out of their monasteries, took possession of the cathedrals and parish churches, took away state support for the Church as under the old Napoleon / Pius VII Concordat. Priests and pious lay Catholics were mocked in the same way as Jewish people under the Nazis. In short, what was the cause of all that?

Clericalism.

The western world faces a secular future. Even the Muslim immigrants are enjoying life in our countries and put their faith on the back burner. Three things contribute to this process, religion discrediting itself through intolerance and obscurantism, the easy modern life (on condition of being able to afford it) and pressure from atheist intellectuals.

I am in two minds about discussing things on blogs. We clergy tend to say that we should keep quiet about all the “negative” stuff and present a rosy image of Christianity to the world, one that will appeal to the innocent and credulous. Another part of me says that we all have to be lucid about the reality so that our faith and Christian commitment will be that much more robust and be able to resist scandal and anti-religious rhetoric. Perhaps this is something we could discuss.

Certainly, the spectre of Christians fighting over sets of doctrinal articles, dogmas from Ecumenical Councils, liturgical rites, political ideologies and the “true church” alienates most people of good will. I am certainly affected by all this poison, and I am expected to be thick-skinned, being a priest and veteran at blogging! One great intuition of Pope Francis is the idea of being simple again and thus getting the real message of Christ over to people.

Some may read this and say to me – Speak for yourself! Indeed, we are all guilty of being the most effective persecutors of Christianity, far more than Robespierre, Jules Ferry, Jean Jaurès and Richard Dawkins to mention only a few ideological atheists. This is persecution from within, and we all have our examination of conscience to make when we consider our empty pews and increasing church upkeep bills with nobody to pay them.

The atheists may be our enemies, but we are our own worst enemies!

I would just like to get a couple of reflections in during a brief blog session. I remember as a kid in the 1960′s being brought up in a very straightforward kind of family, not very religious but highly respectful of all authorities and institutions. As a choirboy, I remember being suspicious of the Methodists until I met some some of those people and saw how straight and honest they were – at least the ones I met. My sister-in-law has often remarked how Establishment my family was (and is). If we belonged to a Church, it was the Church of England, just as we obeyed the laws of the land, considered the police to be an instrument of the authority of the law and the State. Our schools also represented institutions and authorities. That was my own experience in the 1960′s in the north of England, a bit like the 1950′s elsewhere!

Stick with the mainstream – was always the good advice of my parents. In regard to the Church, one would either be Church of England or non-religious. However, I came from a very tolerant and open family background, and never would I hear a bad word said against Roman Catholics, Methodists or Jewish people. We were Establishment, yet with feeling and tolerance towards the minorities. It was a balance we felt and expressed with the high ideal of the common good and stability of society in our eyes.

I have experienced this basis as an English Anglican, which is something different from America, where minorities and marginal faiths are the majority. There is no Establishment. In Continental Europe, there are still expressions of cujus rex ejus religio – you followed a religious expression as was that of the governing authority of your country.

The real crux of this article is the question of institutionalisation and free faith. Are we Christians because it’s the way we are brought up in our families and cultures, or is it a way of life that is freely adopted through having become convinced by its message? Reality would answer – both. The latter notion leads to the former as Christianity as a “philosophy of life” begins to influence society and its institutions, and also proves conducive to the psychological well-being of individual persons. Christianity in history built cultures and moral traditions of law.

One problem in today’s society is that the influence of Christianity is challenged by other systems of faith and morality. We live in multi-cultural societies, where Christianity is actively rejected, and this would inevitably bring us to the conclusion that there is no longer any such thing as mainstream Christianity. All Christianity is marginal as no Church has much influence on society in most countries.

After all, Christianity began as a “sect”, a counter-cultural movement. It was a persecuted minority, and historical evidence points to it being divided and fragmented from the beginning. It only survived because it was adopted by the “mainstream” – ie. the Roman Empire. The relevance of Christianity to most of us is less political, cultural and social – but what it does for me, how well it answers my existential questions. What answer does it bring to suffering and death? Then, how does it bring us to experience transcendence and lift us out of our drab existence and the mechanistic determinism of our world?

Institutionalism happens to every inspiration and insight of founders. In came the theological speculation and the urge to find the right explanation for everything. A religious society had to be organised and be given set forms of worship through liturgies and rites. Institutionalisation becomes a living symbol of the experience of the founder, and the sacred becomes embodied in profane structures. We go from experience to a balance between experience or the prophetic dimension and the institution and culture, and finally to the pure institution and a smothering of the prophetic instinct. Finally, the institution is questioned and replaced by something new and different, and a new cycle begins. Institutionalisation brings a dilemma that can never be resolved.

The institution remains alive for as long as it tolerates creativity and heroism, the cult of the saints, but the institution is there to create stability. We observe this happening when “eccentric” people begin to stretch the institutional limits between orthodoxy and heresy, and how the institution deals with it by punitive measures, a long drawn-out investigation embroiled in bureaucracy or a fundamentally open attitude. This happened in the Reformation era as in the 1960′s as “enthusiasm” came about and produced the Charismatic movement as well as the secularising currents.

Dilemma is our lot in life. Religion both needs the “mainstream” institution and suffers from it. The prophetic dimension has to find expression in “ordinary” and empirical expressions to which most of us can relate. One of these dilemmas is our motivation for adhering to our particular religious movement. We can be a disciple of a charismatic leader and be very single-minded – the words monk and monastery came from the Greek word μόνος, singleness of mind. With the arising of the stable institution, there comes another kind of motivation: power over others, prestige, aesthetic and cultural needs, security. These motivations can be quite benign in a small institution, quite iniquitous in a larger one!

What happens when self-interest prevails? The original institutions are gradually transformed and corrupted. When the corruption is complete, it is then challenged and threatened, and then forced to bring about reforming measures. We see these characteristics in the large Church bodies, particularly bureaucracy sacrificing the very goals of the institution to vested interests, official timidity and inertia. From a religion of converts, we have a Church of cultural “cradle” members.

The prayer of converts who had the “experience” becomes liturgy. We all relate to liturgy in different ways. Most of us are persons of routine. Our domestic and professional lives are generally ruled by routine and a fixed way of doing things. Rigging my boat has become almost a rite, because doing everything out of habit and routine eliminates errors and things getting out of order. Monastic life is 99% routine, and 1% quiet and unannounced experience of beauty or transcendence. Go to a high point of a city and look down, and see it functioning like a machine. That is the end result of routine, something that began by being good but which removed the heart and soul from what routine was meant to preserve.

This is liturgy. I celebrate Mass as I rig my boat, with attention and care. Naturally, ropes and sails don’t have the transcendent meaning of the Sacraments of Christ, but the approach is similar. We combine automatic habits with thinking about what we are doing. Driving a car or riding a bicycle are also conditioned habits, but we still have to keep an eye on the road to ensure our safety and that of our passengers. The sacred action of the liturgy has both to be a movement of the soul and something we do right – for the reason it is not our property but a part of the community to which we belong. The rites of Mass, the other Sacraments and the Office are autonomous and work like a machine, but they provoke a spiritual response. There is the dilemma of the Deus ex machina and spiritual anarchy. There must be an interplay between the objectiveness of the liturgy and the subjective experience of those who participate. If that link is completely broken, then the liturgy is dead. If subjectivity prevails, then there is nothing stable or objective. As rites become more routinised, the obscurity and mystery keep an element of sacredness, but also allow magical attitudes to develop.

We need to recover symbolism through knowledge and spiritual experience, so that we do not become alienated from the liturgy. To what extent has the transcendent to be symbolised? Do we not run the risk of secularising? If the balance is lost, the relationship between external and internal is lost, and then it is attacked and rejected. Much of the English Reformation was concerned about doing away with the “abomination of the popish mass“, even more so than the Papacy itself! Symbolism is rejected because it had been lost.

Spirit and letter is another dilemma, already known to Saint Paul. The letter kills and the spirit gives life. There is the old order of the law, and the new order of grace. In time, Christianity would become as legalistic as Old Testament Judaism in the Temple clergy, the Scribes and the Pharisees. This transformation happens to every religious movement that survives the death of its founder. Conversion and coercion are another difficult point. It was the whole drama of medieval Catholicism with the Inquisition and the Crusades, the forced baptism of Jews and Muslims and their persecution for relapsing into their former religious habits. One of the most difficult things a convert will find about his Church is that most of his co-religionists never experienced conversion, but are just part of the furniture. The institutional Church continues to preserve the values of spiritual conversion, enshrining belief in liturgy and canonical structures like parishes and dioceses.

Religion depends on interior dispositions of its members, but tolerates the presence of those who are nominally religious. Religious leaders are constantly tempted to use the relationship between faith and culture to enforce religion. In a totalitarian society, church leaders can find themselves in a position of using a godless dictatorship to reinforce their power. The relationship between Church and State, religious experience and political loyalties, can make religion very “mainstream” but can at the same time weaken it. Such a relationship alienates Church members opposed to that particular political ideology.

There always has been and always will be tension between the rejection of compromise with the world and evil, but yet the need to maintain a relationship with the world in order to influence it with Christian spiritual and moral values. I write from the point of view of a Continuing Anglican priest, a member of a Church that is comparatively marginal and relatively unaffected by institutionalisation. Nevertheless, any body that survives the death of its founder will go the way of institutionalisation. The first stages will be beneficial and the later stages will see its corruption and death or reform. This just seems to be a fact of our human existence.

There is an extremely interesting article from the Latin Mass Society Chairman Joseph Shaw in his blog – Mystical not ascetic: a response to Pope Francis, Part 5. This is the last part of a series of articles on Pope Francis. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am of the conviction that we don’t need the Pope to be Catholics, and that we are Catholics in various Churches that are not in communion with Rome. Of course that subject is open to debate, but I do not flinch from such a position.

What is of interest to me is that what seems to be entering the picture is a third way, one that is neither liberal nor conservative. He begins with the distinction in Pope Francis’ mind between mysticism and asceticism – “Ignatius is a mystic, not an ascetic”. Mysticism is openness to the influence of the supernatural, of the Holy Spirit, and asceticism in his mind is close to legalism and being closed in on oneself. He is very insistent on criticising the kind of Christian who wants to turn back the clock, go by rigid rules and want everything clear and safe. Being attached to Tradition transcends looking to authority and discipline for doctrinal security. Tradition is the wholeness of the Church and the Christian experience in the whole of history, and not merely the period when the Church seemed to offer the most security and certitude.

This distinction may seem to be a little tortured, but it reflects some of my own thought over the years, and also that of some so-called “modernists” from the beginning of the twentieth century, Tyrrell in particular. That is a notion of being attached to traditional forms of liturgy and spirituality without being of a legalist or authoritarian attitude. We come to the idea that such “traditionalism” is not a part of the “liberal” and “conservative” dialectic. Many traditionalists are not “extreme conservatives” but rather of another category altogether. The points on which “traditionalists” differ from the “conservatives” are exactly legal positivism and Ultramontanism. Incredible! That this should come from a Roman Catholic’s pen!

Being a traditionalist in this perspective is being critical of these conservative tenets. We find Pope Francis showing opposition to canonical positivism and the centralisation of the Church with its logical consequence in Ultramontanism. One capital principle of canon law is salus animarum seprema lex – laws are overridden by the spiritual principles of Christianity. The moral obligation to obey laws is overturned when their literal observance would go against the whole purpose of ecclesiastical law. Laws have to promote the common good, and it is not legitimate to use law as a tool for gaining personal power – for example. Looking through the layers, I see Pope Francis calling upon the principle of subsidiarity – decisions being made at the lowest levels possible: leaving to diocesan bishops what diocesan bishops find within their competence, and the same with parish vicars and vestry councils. In that way, we don’t need to hear doctrines and moral teachings repeated ad nauseum by the Pope so that they may be that much “more true” for us. Still, many things said by Pope Francis seem to be incoherent, far from “infallible” and often confusing. It is not my duty to defend him at all costs – though there is a very appealing “core”.

Traditionalists like Dr Geoffrey Hull have influenced my own thinking in that they are critical of centralism and absolute Papal authority. In this, they differ from conservatives. A highly apposite point is that traditionalists appeal to the principle of preserving and fostering local liturgical rites and uses. Conservatives see liturgical pluralism as a source of problems and a lack of unity in the Church, above all a lack of lock-step discipline. Traditionalists are more likely to disobey through the use of their conscience. Do not we Anglicans see our own faces in this particular mirror?

One thing I do notice about this Pope is that his positions are not typical of the old liberalism of the 1970′s or the Anglican Establishment. I try to see through the tacky vestments and externals that seem to have taken the post-Benedict XVI Church back to the 1970′s. His doctrine of the priesthood is completely traditional. The liberal sees secularism as the yardstick to which religious practice should be conformed for the purpose of fostering political issues or “going beyond” Christ. We should be open to the world – but not of the world. Liberals love bureaucracy, committees and meetings. The Jesuit Pope sees the priest called to the front lines of his ministry and the sacrificial dimension. One thing by which we will be able to judge the Pope in the coming years will be how he deals with bureaucracies and all the stuff that makes the Church inaccessible to ordinary folk.

These considerations will not classify the Pope as a “traditionalist” and certainly not a “traditionalist” who is really a “super conservative”. Anyone’s words can be twisted around to mean anything. This is why I am not interested in “Pope-sifting”. We have to try to understand the underlying philosophy and get beyond the “buzz” phrases and the trappings.

We need to explain that Traditional Catholics are not hyper-conservatives with all the baggage of Ultramontanism and legalism…

It’s an interesting thought, but many of the RC traditionalists I came across were “super conservatives” and “true church” fanatics. But not all by a long chalk. All we can really understand from Pope Francis is his criticism of both conservatives and liberals. Does he recognise a “third way” transcending Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Only time will tell.

In regard to the use of the old Latin liturgy, the Pope seems concerned that it should become a kind of “ideological banner”. On the other hand, he has wonderful things to say about the Orthodox Liturgy and everything we attribute to our own traditional rites and uses. As mentioned in an earlier article, much will be discovered by the Pope’s choice of someone to head the liturgical department of the Vatican.

The traditionalist world is extremely diverse, with Jansenistic (“Augustinian” puritanism) undercurrents together with other theories more or less detached from reality or common sense. We continuing Anglicans, especially Anglo-Catholics, have much in common with the eminently liturgical motivation of our dissidence from the “mainstream”. Problems arrive when there are obsessions, single-issues and hobby horses, rather than an honest attempt to see the big picture. We have analogical problems in our circles.

I suppose, as this series of articles was written by a Roman Catholic, it is an appeal for “traddies” to get their act together and get rid of the cranky “stuff”. It would be a start. One lesson can be learned from the American experience of Prohibition in the 1930′s. Ban alcohol, and human nature will bring people to want to drink it increasingly. Ban the old Mass – and it is a most unpastoral thing to do. Prohibiting the old liturgy brings people to revolt and come up with self-justifying theories. If people could just get on with life, there would be no controversy, and the Church would be one in peace. We still have alcoholism and drunkenness in countries where people can drink freely, but perhaps less so than under Prohibition. I think the comparison is valid.

Wherever we are, in the RC Church, some dissident traditionalist community, or among us continuing Anglicans on the “other side of the fence”, the priority is not our self-justification but our Christian commitment and to the living and incarnate Christ through the Sacrament, the liturgy and beauty. Once we just get on with life, the world might become that little bit more peaceful – and nearer to God.

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Update: see Alms and Liturgy. How Francis Wants Them by Sandro Magister. For all the good words we read, we cannot count on this Pope for the liturgy. Thank goodness we Anglicans don’t have to!

Two interesting links have been sent out this week by Dr William Tighe, one to the future of Christianity being conservative Evangelical – Atheism is doomed: the contraceptive Pill is secularism’s cyanide tablet.The other is Why Millennials Long for Liturgy. I have found them intriguing as I tend to take an interest in predictions and conjectures about what Christianity might look like in ten years or so, a time scale in which most of us who are not too old reasonably expect to be still alive.

When I have written on this subject, the reactions often tell me that I am too pessimistic and that we should be more upbeat about prospects in the future. Perhaps, and in any case we should be positive and affirmative, since experience has often shown that we often get what we “want”. This is one difference between Americans and Europeans, with the British being somewhat apart.

The prediction of the victory of Evangelical Christianity seems as simplist as hearing Mayor of Brescello Peppone from one of the Don Camillo films expounding on Marxism and the fight of the proletariat against capitalism and the black clerical reaction. At least this is how it strikes me.

The devil in this story is liberalised sexual ethics and the white knight in shining armour is the conservative Evangelical. It’s all about large families of children suitably indoctrinated to outnumber atheists and baby boomer liberals. The ideology sounds just about as hollow as the stuff you probably still get in North Korea, not that I have ever been there! This ideology opposes the older one consisting of saying that when people become comfortable in life, the belief and values of Christianity go out of the window. According to this article, the victors won’t be Muslims but conservative Evangelicals of the American variety.

The alternative to the conservative ideology would be liberal religious people embracing atheism. The idea seems cogent, since this is what seems to have happened. The article says it clearly

Fundamentalists are largely immune to their [those of the atheists] attacks, and become only stronger as the more committed members of the established churches head their way. Those religions that survive will become more conservative.

We hear the same about traditionalist and conservative Roman Catholicism. The Roman Catholic Church becoming “smaller but more committed” as the atheist Left attacks it is lifted straight out of the old musings of Cardinal Ratzinger. The interesting thing about this article is that it is not an apologia for the American Tea Party and the kind of politicians who would send troublesome children to the electric chair, but a view of a similar movement occurring in English Conservatism.

Naturally, Christians can only condemn abortion because it is the taking of innocent human life, however tragic the circumstances usually are. But from there to affirming that Christianity will win out by having conservative families have lots of babies lacks credibility. Most of the children of clergy and other devout Christians I have known have taken other directions in life.

Evangelicalism? I have a brief brush with it in the 1970′s as I would go, after having sung Evensong in our Parish Church choir, to where my sister attending a Fellowship service at our town’s other Anglican parish, an Evangelical one. On getting married, my sister became a Baptist, and I attended a service in their church last February a day or two before my mother’s funeral. See Sunday Evening Worship with the Baptists. They are good people, but like many religious communities, they can suffer from the fermentum pharisaeorum, the leaven of the Pharisees, self-righteousness and intolerance.

Evangelical Christianity is growing in many parts of the world, including England, but I don’t think the liberals and atheists have any more to fear from it than the Muslims.

The other article brought to my attention affirmed the idea of large numbers of “millennials” being drawn to liturgical Christianity like traditional Catholicism, Orthodoxy or high-church Anglicanism. I myself am one who was initially attracted to Catholicism (I mean generic Catholicism) by church buildings, choral and organ music and by the liturgy – once I had discovered it in the Milner-White legacy at York Minster. How many others of my age were also interested in such things. There were about 400 boys in my school, and daily and Sunday chapel were compulsory. At school, we had Prayer Book Evensong and optional Series II Communion, rather simple and middle-of-the-road. The incense and processions were down the road at the Minster for things like the Epiphany Procession and the Feast of St Peter, and they were joint services organised with our school choir and the Minster choir. In short, all 400 of us got a good exposure to these ceremonies and regular services, heard the Word, but yet few of us would remain interested in “church”.

I am very sure that most of those 400 young men, a few of which have already died, were not attracted either to the liturgical wealth of York Minster or even to the Evangelical services over the road at St Michael-le-Belfry. A few boys were interested in introducing guitars and the “modern style” for some of our services. I don’t remember many boys being attracted all of a sudden to Christianity because the music was sometimes a little more “catchy”.

This other article advances the idea that post-moderns are yearning for “meaning” through rich liturgy and ceremonial. Some young people were joining Roman Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox communities. In the 1970′s a few of us did, but most did not. The weakness of this article would seem be that of extrapolating from a tiny minority of young people who did get interested in the liturgy and its aesthetics. But so many others say the same thing. There are remarkable examples of the most unlikely and culturally marginal people being attracted to Catholicism, like the band of bikers with long hair and leather jackets in America reading St Thomas Aquinas and becoming Catholics. Things do happen, but it is far from being a general movement. Many of us are attracted by beauty, but only a few are.

The story of someone’s passage from the barest version of American Protestantism to Anglo-Catholicism is moving and impressive, but this is the case of individual people. One thing that shook me to the quick in the traditionalist Roman Catholic world was that most people were not attracted by the beauty of the liturgy even though they were attending the old liturgy – but by religious and political conservatism. There is quite a lot in common between French traditionalists or intégristes and American fundamentalists.

I dare say that if more traditional liturgies were available, a greater cross-section of society would discover what they offer. Most traditional liturgy groups advance this notion of large numbers of young people being attracted by the old rites. Certainly, many young adults are bowled over by what they discover. Are the numbers so high? There are striking events like thousands of young people on the Chartres Pilgrimage each Pentecost, closely associated with scouting and the Benedictine abbeys being filled with young men. That is undeniable. The notion that any young people are attracted to traditional liturgies is something that deeply disturbs some of the old liturgical “dinosaurs” of the church establishments.

Here in France, some of the old Charismatic communities slowly evolved into a more monastic spirituality as they “re-ritualised” the new liturgy. There are quite a few articles on the Internet showing this idea that young people are returning to the older forms of liturgical Christianity.

I think a lot of study needs to be done on making the distinction between those attracted by the liturgy and the contemplative dimension of Christianity, on one hand, and those who are more motivated by politics and the anti-liberal reaction. I am at a loss to find objectivity in this matter, and would appreciate comments.

From a certain point of view, it would look as if the future belongs to conservatism, authoritarianism, nationalism, anti-liberalism, intolerance and even fanaticism in some cases. It looks to be a dark prospect, if the far-right is the only alternative to the dying relics of socialism, capitalism and the many things we fear. I would be very sceptical about liturgical Christianity becoming a mass movement, dominated by political ideology and force rather than a discreet leaven of discovery and spiritual growth.