Communio: Was I Lying When I Was An Anglican?

When one makes a decision as we have recently made with regards to our ecclesial move and our making it public, one opens himself to critics and people's opinions. That is fair enough. Criticism comes with the territory of public ministry and writing so long as criticism is substantial based upon all the facts and is not defamatory of someones character I gladly welcome it. I have found it is always best and most peaceful when people simply ask questions rather than making assumptions. I say all of this as a precursor to one of the more substantive theological reasons that moved me to make this decision when I did.

As someone who embraced fully the Catholic movement in the CofE from a personal conviction through prior study as a Presbyterian Protestant minister in the States, I came to love the Catholic faith as a result of its beauty expressed in the Anglo-Catholic movement. I therefore am very grateful for all that I have learned to love over the past seven years as I journeyed into understanding more of the Catholic Faith. Two books as a Protestant minister really affected me in my journey into the Catholic movement in the CofE. One was Thomas Howard's book Evangelical is not Enough! and the other was Alexander Schmemann's book For the Life of the World. I read these two books 9 years ago. Then eight years ago Professor Bill Tighe sent me Dom Gregory Dix' book The Shape of the Liturgy and that was it for me as the journey got well under way. While I was reading these works I was also very much into biblical theology and imagery for liturgy at the time and read a lot in this area along with the biblical theology written by Bishop Tom Wright. His books The NT and the People of God and Jesus and the Victory of God were very instrumental in my journey as well. There were of course many many others but this is only to say that my journey into the Catholic Church is a journey that is much longer than my five plus years in the UK.

So, why did I make this move when I did? What theological reason gave me the push to jump? At the heart of my conversion were two issues that are very much connected. One is the obvious issue of authority and the second is the heart of it for me and that is communio. Now these issues are my personal struggles theologically that I wrestled with. But I want to focus on the issue of communio and the issue of authority that is very closely connected and inseparable with it can be discussed at another time.

First of all before I begin with my understanding of the communio issue that drove me to jump when I did, I need to say that the critique of the ecclesial solution for me is not a personal critique of my friends who remain in the Anglo-Catholic movement in the CofE. I believe they do so with great integrity. That being said, we often talked about an ecclesial solution to an ecclesial problem with regards to the question of women bishops and priests. As an Anglo-Catholic, I sincerely bought into the ecclesial idea of the Catholic structure of a priest in union with his local bishop. That is very important in Catholic ecclesiology and there is a bit of an issue that I began questioning with regards to my not being in communion with the diocesan but a provisional one due to issues of sacramental priesthood. At the start, this structure brings up many Catholic questions about ecclesiology but I saw the necessity of it due to difficult circumstances in a broad church. So, I embraced the ecclesial oddity.

Where things began to really challenge me was the relationship of the particular to the universal. That was where the Bishop of Chichester's address at the February 2009 FiF assembly struck a nerve within my ecclesial thinking. If it's not provision we were after but communion then the question of the particular in relation to the universal was now before me. To tie everything to the local and not also consider the theological relationship to the universal was not in my mind to give an ecclesial solution to an ecclesial problem. Communio means a whole lot more than merely the local relationship. I began to see as the Holy Father points out that the Church 'cannot become a static juxtaposition of essentially self-sufficient local Churches.' For to do so allows the local to lose its apostolicity. So, the question of unity moulding the communio moved me from the local to the universal. What I did not feel appropriate was to become a Catholic as a last resort and a response to some provisional structure that allowed me to simply exist in something that did not theologically hold the same view of the unity between the local and universal. What I theologically was wanting to know on that day in February was how any sort of provisional structure was going to hold together the vertical and horizontal. The only conclusion I returned to again and again in my head was the unity of the one Church in all places. Belonging to the local church in my Anglican situation did not allow me to belong to all in the world or even within my own communion. For my family and myself, I came to desire more as I watched what seemed to be the Anglican communion unravelling around the world. Something key to unity was lacking that would or could ever hold it together. I was longing to be at home everywhere and so the real ecclesial answer to an ecclesial problem was forcing me deeper into apostolic unity.

In order for there to be the 'ligature' (Benedict XVI) of catholicity the local must remain united to the universal. Can a community really give itself its own bishop? I was stopped in my tracks. The loss of this most important element of communio where the local is in union with the universal was the ecclesial solution to an ecclesial problem for me. I watched closely the inability of the Anglican communion to hold to account her communion partners for the apostolic faith where it was impossible to keep these provinces in line with catholicity meeting after meeting after meeting. So, I asked why this was so. The answer is communio; the local being organically united to the universal without which the church is wounded where she is to be most Catholic. So, what would be right later was right now and so for the sake of my family and spiritual care of them we jumped and swam. Faith does explode the self-absolutization of individualism and I concluded harmony with the testimony of faith with the successor of S. Peter is the answer to the issue of an ecclesial problem needing an ecclesial solution.

So, it was my decision that it was not about me building my own church. It was not about a party within a church. The Church is the Church of Christ, his body. Everything in my mind with regards to ecclesiology came to see that I had to personally do all to avoid any sort of attachment that would obstruct communio. I was not lying but seeking the prayer for unity of Jesus--a question Newman himself answered.