Anglo-Catholicism

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Template:Anglicanism The terms Anglo-Catholic and Anglo-Catholicism describe people, groups, ideas, customs and practices within Anglicanism that emphasise continuity with Catholic tradition. Since the English Reformation there have always been Anglicans who identify themselves closely with traditional Catholic thought and practice. The concept of Anglo-Catholicism as a distinct sub-group or branch of Anglicanism, however, began to come to prominence in the Church of England during the Victorian era under the influence of the Oxford Movement or "Tractarians".

1 Background
2 Practices and beliefs
3 History
4 See also
5 External links

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Background

This party stresses historical continuity of the Church of England and (and the Churches derived from it through Apostolic Succession) with Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, and hence upholds a "high" concept of the episcopate and of the nature of the sacraments (or Sacred Mysteries). According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, the existence of such a school goes back to the Elizabethan Age; it flourished under the Stuarts, and came into prominence again with the Oxford Movement.

In the early 19th century various factors caused misgivings among English Churchmen, including the decline of Church life and the spread of laxity in theology in the Church of England. The plan to suppress ten Irish bishoprics in 1833 evoked a sermon from John Keble in the university church in Oxford which is regarded as the beginning of the Oxford Movement. The chief objective of the Oxford Movement was the defence of the Church of England as a Divine institution, of the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession, and of the Book of Common Prayer as a rule of faith. The Tracts for the Times were designed for this purpose.

The Oxford Movement in the Church of England aimed at restoring High Church principles. The leaders of the movement were John Keble, John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey. It soon gained influential support, but it was also attacked by the latitudianarians within the University and by the Bishops. Within the movement there gradually arose a much smaller party which tended towards submission to Rome. After the censure by the Convocation of Oxford in 1845 of a book by W. G. Ward, and again after the Gorham Case in 1850, there were a number of conversions to the Roman Catholic Church. But the majority remained in the Church of England and, despite the hostility of the press and of the Government, the movement spread. Its influence was exercised in the sphere of worship and ceremonial, in the social sphere (the slum settlements were among its notable achievements), and in the restoration of the religious life in the Church of England and many parts of the Anglican Communion.

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Practices and beliefs

Anglo-Catholic people and churches are usually identified by their liturgical practices and ornaments. Anglo-Catholics use many traditional Catholic practices in their liturgical ceremonies such as vestments, incense and candles and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Anglo-Catholic liturgical practices (sometimes called 'Ritualism' though many Anglo-Catholics resent the term) were a particular source of controversy in the nineteenth century, especially in England where Parliament was asked to legislate against certain practices. Many Anglo-Catholic "innovations" (or, rather, revivals of dormant practices) have, however, since become accepted by most mainstream Anglicans. In fact, the Liturgical Movement, ignited by Anglican divine Dom Gregory Dix with his book, The Shape of the Liturgy shaped the sweeping simplifications and standardizations in liturgical practice of the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II, as well as of the churches in the Lutheran World Federation and the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht and the Independent Catholic Churches derived from them. What little distinction is left in the Western liturgy has to do with the Anglican recourse to the customary of the Sarum (Salisbury Cathedral) Use, the Nordic recourse to the Wittenberg Use, and the Roman Catholic recourse to the litugical Use at Rome.

In much of the Church of England and other Anglican / Episcopal churches, Anglo-Catholic practice has made strong inroads, yet Anglo-Catholic theology remains in flux.

What Anglo-Catholics believe can be highly debated even among people who identify themselves as such. In agreement with the Oriental Orthodox Churches and Eastern Orthodox Churches, Anglo-Catholics — along with Old-Catholics and Lutherans — generally rest their case on the authority of Vincentian orthodoxy. This canon of St. Vincent of Lerins is accepted as the rudder for divining the Catholic and Apostolic Faith of the undivided Church: "What everywhere, what always, and what by all of us has been credited, that is truly and properly Catholic."

The Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles make distinctions between Anglican and Roman Catholic understandings of doctrine. Because they were purposely written in such a way as to be open to a wide range of interpretation, Anglo-Catholics have defended Catholic practices and beliefs as being consistent with the Articles, yet the Articles, because of their harsh tone, have never been regarded with much favor by Anglo-Catholics. Anglo-Catholic priests often hear private confessions and anoint the sick, regarding these practices (as do Roman Catholics) as sacraments; whereas more Reformed-Protestant-minded Anglicans generally think of them as merely optional sacramental rites. (The classic Anglican aphorism regarding private confession is "All may, none must, some should").

Anglicans share with Roman Catholics a belief in the sacramental nature of the priesthood, the sacrificial character of the Mass, and the Real Presence in the Eucharist, but Anglo-Catholics lay great stress on these points to counter the tendency of Evangelicals to try to promote ideas such as lay presidency at the Eucharist. Some Anglo-Catholics encourage priestly celibacy, and until the 1970s many rejected the possibility of women receiving Holy Orders. In recent years, though, many Anglo-Catholics have accepted the ordination of women. Anglo-Catholic parishes have traditionally been associated with work among the poor and alliance with leftist causes, to the extent than one epithet for Anglo-Catholics has been sacramental socialists. In many places, Anglo-Catholic parishes also drew a large following of gay communicants, and many Anglo-Catholic parishes have been at the forefront of inclusion and acceptance for openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people — including non-celibates — in the priesthood and throughout the Church. Many Anglo-Catholics have embraced other aspects of so-called "liberalism" such as the use of contemporary and inclusive language in Bible translations and the liturgy.

On the other hand, some Anglo-Catholics have reacted strongly against these trends, and have increasingly sided with the politics of Evangelicals. So, while the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic movement began partly as a reaction to latitudinarianism, secularism and Evangelicalism in the Church of England, the movement's heirs in the contemporary Church are far more diverse and in many respects more inclusive. The movement Affirming Catholicism is an example of the more progressive approach to Anglo-Catholic theology and practice. A growing number of Anglo-Catholics are part of the interfaith Progressive Reconstructionist movement.

On the other hand, most of the groups making up the staunchly conservative Continuing Anglican Movement regard themselves as Anglo-Catholic. A minority of Anglo-Catholics (sometimes called Anglo-Papalists) consider themselves under Papal supremacy even though they are not in full communion with Rome. A significant portion of Britain's present Roman Catholics are former Anglicans or their descendants. Many Anglo-Catholics seek eventual reunion with Roman Catholic Church and the other branches of the Church catholic.

In the Anglican Communion three terms are frequently — but not always correctly — used to denote the parish's style of worship: High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church (or Latitudinarian).

"High Church" is generally used to describe moderate to advanced Anglo-Catholicism.
"Low Church" is used for Anglicans of a more Evangelical or Reformed-Protestant theology who emphasize the primacy of scripture, salvation by grace through faith alone, and — usually (with the notable exception of the Australian Diocese of Sydney) — worship based on the official prayer books but with much less ceremonial. Sydney Diocese does not mandate the use of any prayer book and worship services in its parishes are often considerably at variance with the shape of traditional Anglican liturgies.
The term "Broad Church" is sometimes used for those "middle-of-the-road" Anglicans who are somewhere between the "high" and "low" traditions, or those who stress that there is room for diverse traditions in the Anglican Communion. Attending the Eucharist at a Broad Church parish nowadays is likely to remind one most directly of attending a contemporary Roman Catholic Mass.

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History

What has come to be called "Anglo-Catholicism" has a long history within the Anglican Church. From the time of the founding of the first monasteries at Glastonbury in Britain, around the fourth decade A.D., there has been an apostolic line of bishops in the British Isles. Indeed, the first group of missionaries to the Celts of the British Isles are documented as having been compatriots of St. Joseph of Arimathea, and to have been commissioned for their evangelism by the Apostle Philip (who then held the Ephesian See at Hieropolis), sometime around A.D. 47. King Arvirargus of Somerset and his sons, Coilus and Marius, deeded the first lands for the Christian monastic communes around Yniswitrin (Glastonbury).

Abbot-bishops continued to lead Christians within commune-settlements in the British Isles, peacefully co-existing with local pagans, until the Bishops of Rome (Popes) sent St. Patrick and St. Augustine of Canterbury to the Isles as missionaries, specifically to get the Celtic Christians — whose practice, having derived from St. Philip the Apostle, was more akin to that of the pre-Chalcedonian Christian East (parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and India) than to that of Rome and some of the Christian Church of Continental Western Europe, which used Roman rites — under the authority and rites of the See of Rome. Some of their ancient liturgies can be found in the remnant of the Stowe (Lorrha) Missal.

In A.D. 664, the Abbess of Whitby, St. Hilda, convened a synod of Celtic bishops that began the process of placing the bishops in the British Isles under the Patriarchal jurisdiction of Rome. By the end of the reign of English King Richard II, in A.D. 1400, the popular right of appointment of Archbishops to their Sees, held by the King, had been ceded to the Roman Pope. British bishops were under direct Roman authority for several more centuries.

It should be noted that, from the start of Christianity in Britain until the reign of Henry VIII (see below), the convening and arbitration authority of the Bishop of Rome, as primus inter pares (first among equals) was — theoretically — accepted, even though the jurisdictional power of the Roman Pope was far less than it grew to be. Some suggest that this was due to communication difficulties in the first centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire but, in fact, parallel issues with Roman Ultramontanism were developing in countries throughout the Christian East.

When the Reformation broke out on the European Continent, the tide swept up England as well. Nevertheless, King Henry VIII remained staunchly a Catholic in theology and liturgy, while some reformers (such as Bishops Ridley and Latimer) wanted to follow the radical reforms of Geneva. Henry VIII restored the right of the Sovereign to appoint the Archbishops to their Sees and repudiated Roman usurpations of that right; yet he did this less for the pleas of his bishops (who were chafing under Roman control) than for his own self-interest in obtaining an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It was under the reign of Edward VI that the English Church was reformed with a sparer liturgy in the common vernacular and the tolerance of variant and new theological positions. These reforms were reversed, briefly, during the reign of the staunchly Catholic Mary I who resumed communion with Rome as part of a general campaign to end the Reformation in England and Wales. Consequently when Queen Elizabeth I took the English throne, she sought to steer a via media between what her bishops felt were the excesses of Rome, on the one hand, and those of Geneva, on the other. Thus was born the Elizabethan Settlement, and the promulgation of a single Book of Common Prayer, for whatever theological party was to use it within the Anglican Church. This marks the birth of a special ethos for the Anglican Church. This ethos, peculiar to Anglicanism, was championed by the Elizabethan divine, Father Richard Hooker.

From that time, through Archbishop Laud and the Caroline divines, up to the time of the Oxford Movement Tractarians, and the Anglo-Catholic Congresses, to the present day of Affirming Catholicism, there has always been a strong theological party within Anglicanism which has sought to stress apostolic continuity all the way back to the apostle Philip. Despite Roman claims to the contrary in Pope Leo XIII's Apostolicae Curae (1893), the Anglican Archbishops of Canterbury and York have claimed, starting with their official response, Saepius Officio, that there is an unbroken apostolic succession in the Anglican priesthood, and that the historic episcopate has been in the British Isles from the earliest days of the Church. Rome does not dispute the latter point, inasmuch as the Catholic Church has continued to exist in the British Isles. Rather, the Catholic Church maintains that this episcopate was disrupted by the Ordinal of King Edward VI.