Frankie and Benny — Popes, Profs and Pragmatics.

Hope springs eternal in Rome, with prayers and good wishes from around the world. I felt a big flutter of positive energy, watching Pope Francis’ first hour in his new job. He seemed immensely calm but warm, centred in the moment and modest. I can’t imagine him in Mister Punch Prada gear, a plus point for me and future Vatican tourists who might otherwise not be able to tell which man in a white cassock was which.

It looks as though there will be no confusing them. Circumstantially, people feel more at ease with an all-rounder. Historians may look out for signs of transition from the rule of an intellectual to that of a perfectly educated and intelligent man who seems confident, relaxed and centred in the moment.

Intellectual giants always, usually unintentionally, intimidate others. Nobody loves a Big Brain Alien. More significantly, Intellectuals inhabit a large room stocked with big ideas, that can become their primary reality.
To someone with a powerful electric screwdriver every protusion is a screw. This can deliver quick results with some protrusions, but others, like nails and boils, remain stubbornly resistant.

Intellectual giants see the progress of the world as the evolution of big ideas. A process of syllogism, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, drives their big brainy world, the one that really matters. Other people start from the other end and deal with their in-trays in more pedestrian but effective ways. Things move on because they were dealt with, and everyone else feels life is more than an eternal seminar group.

To intellectual giants, issues arising from changing sexual mores are challenges to sources of authority, revisionist mountains made of molehills, waves beating against the rocks of the eternal shore. The progress of civilisation is at stake. To a priest struggling with imposed celibacy, or a young lad contemplating hanging himself from very shame, all the Big Ideas around this mean nothing, nor to the millions whose gut instincts drive them, often unwittingly, one way or the other. Failure to see this whole picture holistically makes the puzzle impossible.

It would not surprise me if the new Pope's dogmatic beliefs were basically to the right in terms of issues, but I would expect him to be less imprisoned by them. A leader with a strong sense of pragmatic reality and faith that is concrete rather than abstract, shrewd rather than subtle, could do much good. The honeymoon will be over soon enough.

I’m trying to enjoy it hopefully, and the parallel process that is unfolding in the Church of England...

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

Are 400,000 Church of England laypeople, 2,000 clergy and 50 Bishops imminently going to go RC, just to capture the predicted numbers in various Fleet Street Organs? I very much doubt anything like that number are sufficiently into fear, surprise and and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, but we’ll see in a couple of years time.

Ben Hecht once suggested

trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Indeed. One interesting take has come, not from a journalist, but Oxford Church History professor Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Observer:

John Paul II and Benedict have created the most centralised regime that Catholicism has ever known – a far cry from its state in either the medieval period or the Counter-Reformation. It is with an anxious ear for those alternative voices, not much different from those of mainstream wishy-washy liberal Anglicans, that Pope Benedict seeks to encourage those who think like him beyond the walls, and to bring them inside the fortifications.

Much is left unsaid amid the present triumphalist crowings of those Catholics who see this as a victory over a feeble, tottering Anglicanism, since Anglicans are temperamentally disinclined to blow their own trumpets. The Church of England is not about to disintegrate, as anyone who knows its day-to-day life, rather than listening to what journalists say about it, will be aware. Most Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals are fed up with all the name-calling, intolerance and calls for revolt...

There is one killer fact about the pope's present move. "Traditionalist" Anglicanism is a shotgun marriage between incompatible groups: extreme Anglo-Catholics and extreme evangelicals...

Their alliance with the traditionalist Anglo-Catholics has been one of convenience, because both sides cannot stomach women in positions of clerical authority (for entirely opposite reasons) and hate the idea that homosexuals might be just part of the spectrum of boring normality in God's creation. (Anglo-Catholics are more muffled in their outrage on this one, given how many of them are gay themselves.) So the pope's move will split the traditionalists down the middle and reveal how fragile their alliance is. The best law in church history is the law of unintended consequences.

In one sense, this is a storm in a teacup, stirred by an elderly cleric in the Vatican with a private agenda and a track record of ill-thought-out policy moves. In another, it is a fascinating moment in a confrontation as much a struggle for the soul of the Church of Rome as of the Church of England. Once we have got past the screaming headlines, we should keep an eye open for the real story.

The Church of England has always functioned as more of a coral reef than a model trainset, mainly because that’s how Christianity was usually done in these islands before the sixteenth century, and the English were characteristically averse to clericalism and control. For Protestants unsatisfied by such pragmatism, there were New World colonies. The people with get-up-and-go got up and went, especially after the Civil War, leaving the rest of us a rather pragmatic, unassuming, and messy lump. Since the 1830’s, those sufficiently scared of the modern world to be attracted by New Model Ultramontanism usually ended up by becoming Roman Catholics. Thus all the Vatican politics behind the denunciation of Anglican orders in 1893 — a quaint marketing ploy for a different, positivist, age.

Anglo-Papalism, an idea that first appeared in the last quarter of the 19th Century, only takes in a small section of Anglo-Catholics in the C of E. They may be colourful people, but any historical assessment has to take into account everybody else. Something similar could be said of extreme Prods. The vast bulk of the Church of England has always been more multifaceted, its Protestants closer to Richard Hooker than Walter Travers — boring, but true.

It could be that a Coral Reef Church, with an open and creative base in the Creeds, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, might eventually turn out to be as sound a home for faith and holiness, as one predicated on Imperialism and control. Like Professor MacCulloch, I suspect this question will be answered over the next hundred years or so bottom-up, rather than top-down.

Small Earthquake in Rome?

Serving in a part of the Lord’s vineyard with a valued but proportionately tiny Anglo-Catholic strand (for the past four hundred years, anyway), I am surrounded by silence about the latest Vatican scheme for special Angican ordinariates. I have to admit I don’t know what an “ordinariate” is, but some of my Anglo-Catholic friends who claim they do are delighted, so I’m glad to share their joy.

Not being of a Chauvinistic/ Imperialistic bent about religion, I’ve always thought people should serve within the denomination in which they can best be discipled. All denominations are only delivery systems for the Kingdom, after all.

This new scheme has some rather odd resonances — if a clergy colleague came to see me to say they believed God was calling them to be a Baptist, if that’s discipled, I’d be delighted. If the Baptists then announced they had a special scheme for Anglicans where you could be a Baptist but also, as a former Anglican, you could carry on doing infant baptisms, my eyebrows would raise.

How jolly postmodern of them, I’d think, but wait a minute. Assimilating a lot of people who perhaps have struggled, and some might even say haven’t made a raging success of living within their own tradition, you’ll get two sorts of “convert”:

1. people who really should try out and perhaps are called by God to be part of the Roman tradition. Becoming Roman Catholics will enable them to be better disciples, so the whole Church of God, every denomination, is enriched — the wealth of one Christian expression is the resource of all: Hip, hip, hooray!
   
   
2. people who aren’t terribly good at living in any tradition on anything but their own terms. “The disciplines and relationships of Community are for the little people...”

This second sort of “convert,” often has what St Benedict called the Gyrovague personality. The symptom, says the Rule, is a compulsive habit of “murmuring.” Gyrovagues will carry on inexorably being as they are, because their aproach to authority is personality based and they can’t help it.

The latest special offer may not be good news for the Pope’s own people. There are, for example, genuine Roman Catholic clergy who have faithfully and heroicially struggled and somehow managed to live sacrificially within their Church’s discipline, because they sincerely believed it was necessary. Where does it leave them to know that Auntie in Rome is now doing a PostModern family promotion for married Anglicans, but they’re not invited? However delighted I might be, were this me, that Auntie is now being jolly and Post-Modern to the Anglicans, I’d hope she manages to find some way, after all these years, of being jolly and Post-Modern to me…

Liturgical Terrorism or the future?

Fifty years ago, most denominations had some degree of closed communion — people were generally nice about it, but the denomination was the gatekeeper. Since the 1950’s this rather Brethren way of doing Church has largely broken down in the West.

People who are not personally excommunicated are admitted on the basis of baptism, and the whole Church, not the denomination is the medium of the Sacrament. The institutional denomination is only trustee for the Lord, to whom the Sacrament belongs.

In the good old days saying the Lord’s prayer with other Christians was a mortal sin for Roman Catholics, but that was many years ago. Conciliar theology has a structure to support Eucharistic hospitality, which is only offered in certain closely defined circunstances.

In Hanover in 2005, my eyebrows raised as the (now retired) Cardinal Archbishop of Mainz described the current restructions in his denomination as a “thorn in the flesh.”

In Bremen I stayed with a delightful Catholic host, who told me the hot ticket for Saturday morning’s Bible Study was Fullbert Steffensky, Professor Emeritus at Hamburg.

He was now a Lutheran, having started out as a monk of Maria Laach — the place Adenauer found sanctuary from the Nazis in 1934 (though that’s not quite the whole story of the monstery at that time).

The Bible Study considered Genesis 16 and Hagar the slave woman. She is not entirely outside God’s blessing, and we were led into considering the probem of religious absolutism and the inability of some Christians and others to believe God has blessed anyone but their in-group. He leapt straight from there to an incident at the Berlin Kirchentag in 2003, where large crowds had been banned from intercommunion. What right had ecclesiastical authorities to try and deprive the people of God of hope? As I mentally fell off the seat, given the style distance between the presentation and our customary stately Englsh ecumenical quadrille, the preacher continued.

The basis of Communion is the mercy, gift and call of God, not what he scathingly called “die Einheitlichkeit in einigen Sätzendes Bekentnisses. (loosely, “the oneness of a sit-down of acquaintances”) It was pointless for ecclesiastical authorities to say the Church wasn't ready for such a thing, if all they meant was that they weren’t. Now, Ecumenical diplomats, sit down somewhere comfortable and pour a stiff drink, as I quote the published text:

Wir können nicht darauf warten, bis die letzten fußkranken Mitglieder von Kirchenleitungen angekommen sind und das Mahl für erlaubt. (very loosely, “We can’t wait for the last lame duck Church leaders to catch up and join us at the table...”)

Dr Steffensky very much hoped that at future Kirchentage people would just go ahead and eat as the Lord commanded, concluding

Auf Dauer werden die Bischöfe schon fördern, was sie nicht verhindern können. ( loosely, “The Bishops will soon enough require what they can’t prevent.”)

Boooom! Right, my English Ecumenical Chums. This is certainly Provocative stuff that you wouldn't hear in a gathering of 125,000 Christians in England.
Is it “Liturgical Terrorism” or the Future?

Cardinal Newman on development...

...no bones about it. Best weekend story has to be Ruth Gledhill’s, that after 118 years there’s nothing recoverable in Cardinal Newman’s grave. Andy the gravedigger once told me human remains last 80 years in a hardwood coffin, 25 in MDF. Andy was right.

Some saint stories feature incorruptible bodies — not this one. I have to confess that relics put me off not on; When I learn that one medieval collection contained “a piece of bread eaten at the last supper” I rather agree with Luther in thinking that by 1517 the relics business had reached a kind of silly vanishing point. Newman will have to be a culturally English rather than Mexican saint.
The Cardinal himself, being dead, yet speaks.

And what does he say? His 1845 Essay on Development, almost Copernican in its impact, asserts that in the providence of God the only way to do real theology is live, contextual and dirty — Skip to the fundamental last sentence if you like:

whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. Nor does it escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become wore vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same.
In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

If Newman is correct about this, measuring orthodoxy by simple conformity to what has been said or done in the past, becomes impossible. “Traditionalists” take note, and “Progressives,” too —
all your notions can only be proved in the crucible of real shared discipleship over extended time.

My second favourite Newman quote? It’s the epitaph he devised for his memorial:

Ex Umbris et Imaginibus, in Veritatem

“out of shadows and fantasies, into the Truth...”

On Shoulders of Giants...

I was touched and honoured to represent the diocese yesterday at a very special moment — Henry Chadwick’s memorial service in our Cathedral, of which he had been dean from 1969-79. The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster led the prayers, honouring a key ecumenist. Professor Chadwick was a masively learned and perceptive historian, who knew from his Evangelical roots how discipleship feels from the inside, and laboured to develop an honest historical basis upon which Christians could understand their origins, and use this understanding to grow together in love.

Like other students of my generation, my view of early Christian history was based largely on Chadwick’s scholarship — glancing along my shelves I see the short Penguin History that first kindled my awareness of the subtlety and complexity of early Christianity. Just along I find his Contra Celsum translation that still commands its field after fifty years, an immaculate study of Boethius, and the fruit of his mature reflection — a wonderfully comprehensive History of the Church from Gallilee to Gregory the Great and East and West: the making of a rift in the Church.

One highlight of the service for me was a quote from John Donne’s Meditations that Professor Chadwick loved:

The Church is Catholic, universal. So are all her actions. All that she does belongs to all. When she buries a man that action concerns me. All mankind is of one author and is one volume. When one man dies one chapter is not torn out of the book but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation. And his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another...

Pope drops Yahweh from the Team

As the rest of life goes to hell in a handcart, the Catholic News Service reports that the Vatican is fighting back:

In the not-too-distant future, songs such as "You Are Near," "I Will Bless Yahweh" and "Rise, O Yahweh" will no longer be part of the Catholic worship experience in the United States.
At the very least, the songs will be edited to remove the word "Yahweh" -- a name of God that the Vatican has ruled must not "be used or pronounced" in songs and prayers during Catholic Masses.

Back in Hebrew class, alongside rabbis-to-be, I imbibed traditions of reverence surrounding the Tetragrammaton in the Hebrew Scriptures. In an old git moment I have to admit this gave me an abiding and instinctive personal dislike of 80’s songs with jingle tunes and words like “Yahweh, we love you.”

The ban will, however, have to be properly policed:

All you need is Hope

Springing eternal for me yesterday, with Leslie Stephen, Diocesan Director of Education. We visited Liverpool Hope University to follow up our Indian Educational Visit last year. Thanks to Professor Bill Chambers, who looked after us fantastically.

LHU is unique among UK Universities — Deep Christian roots, fully Catholic, fully Anglican, fully engaged — a real community of faith and mutual learning. The name came from the street connecting Anglican and RC Cathedrals, and the famous double act between Anglican bishop David Sheppard and Catholic Archbishop Derek Worlock is part of its DNA, which lives today between Archbishop Patrick Kelly and Bishop James Jones. Liverpool is a world class city, with a history of deep sectarianism transfigured by realism, warmth, flair and passion for life.

If the Virgin brand is about breaking new ground, Liverpool Hope is about fully relational community education springing from lived faith. It spills over from academic activity into Hope One World — a programme for actively connecting with the real world. Most UK university education conforms to a dreary seventies norm, where people basically behave like the cast of a Malcolm Bradbury novel. Christians have to keep their heads down, justify themselves, and pretend their faith is a hobby rather than a way of life, along with anyone else who calls into question its vapid, arrogant, unreflective secularism.

LHU proves there is an alternative. This is not about reversing the enlightenment — quite the reverse. World class academic work goes on here. LHU is just more connected, adventurous and spiritually aware. The difference shows up in the ways people relate to each other. One phrase stuck with me from our various meetings with Vice-Chancellor and heads of department — “Work at the relationships and miracles will happen.”

This way of living and learning relies on inspired leadership from Professor Gerald Pillay (Can he really be the UK’s only black ethnic minority Vice-Chancellor?) and colleagues. In Apartheid South Africa, he experienced the “Liberation first, education later” idea, but came to realise that the education was liberation. His passion is generous, faith based, transformative education.

Liverpool Hope is a strongly alligned community. Again and again, from the ways academic and support staff interacted to the ways they buzzed around our concerns, Leslie and I felt we were among gifted colleagues who basically liked and respected each other, and were willing to work hard together for something that mattered. Things people often idealise about vaguely — social inclusion, ethos, excellence — are worked through here with a rigorous practical commitment.

We came away with plans for five projects about staff development in academies, headship recruitment and support, backing trainee teachers for whom teaching is a vocation, our India link accessing the Hope One World process, and resources for our heads and governors in focussing and fostering ethos and values.

Again and again, Leslie and I felt this is a place they actually understand and live what we were talking about. We believe there’s big benefit in this partnership for our 280 schools and, most precious of all, our 48,000 school students. We’ve lit the blue touchpaper, anyway...