Without the Church There is no Faith

I have been reading a bit of Benedict XVI's book Handing on the Faith in an Age of Disbelief. In his reflection on handing on the faith, the Holy Father speaks about the personalistic character of faith as the life enriching relationship founded upon knowledge and love. But he does not leave us there alone with an incomplete faith. He moves us from the personal "I" to the collective "I" in the phrase "I believe". The "I" is not isolated from the "we" and too often in practice that is exactly what some want to allow for when "individual" interpretations on very important sacramental, pastoral and not least ecclesial issues come before us. To have faith is an act of becoming a full participant into the community of faith and incorporated into her through time and transcending of time. The Holy Father drawing from de Lubac points in the direction in which we need to think about faith personally and collectively. I think there is an application for Anglo-Catholics here as we discern a way forward for the future so that we not lose faith personally and collectively. The great danger we face is a collective loss of faith by not being in communion with the whole Church by our believing together with the whole Church. This is where the dangerous neo-Protestantism of the C of E comes under the microscope.

Think about these words from Pope Benedict.

Therefore, whenever someone supposes that he can leave the faith of the Church out of catechesis to a greater or lesser extent, so as to experience it more immediately and accurately from Scripture, he is venturing into a zone of abstractions. For then one is no longer living and thinking and speaking out of a certainty that transcends the potential of the individual ego, the certainty of a larger memory that touches the very foundation and is touched by it; then one is no longer speaking with an authority that goes beyond the capability of every individual. Instead, one is dipping into that other sort of faith, which is a more or less well-founded opinion about unknown things. then catechesis becomes one theory alongside others, one kind of knowledge among others; in this way it can no longer be the learning and receiving of life itself, that is, of eternal life.

In a very scary way, this is where we are finding ourselves presently in our modus operandi in the C of E I believe. The Bishop of London and the Bishop of Chichester have allowed me to think more about this in their articles in the March edition of New Directions. Do we really see the great danger in divorcing the collective faith from the individual faith, particularly as we claim 'to believe'? This is something that we as Catholics within the C of E need to think seriously about and it is something that I am seeking to reflect on during this Lent. Why this issue seems to go unnoticed so often is troubling. One of the underlying problems is the thinking that we can be Catholic as individual congregations isolated from communion with other Catholics in an ecclesial way. How do we reflect on this? How do we act on faith in God and faith in the Church? With sacramental communion moving from being impaired to broken, what are the alternatives so that we have faith that is of the essence of eternal life?