TAC bishops’ meeting in South Africa

Bishop Brian Marsh on the Traditional Anglican Communion Meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, cf. Bishop Marsh’s Lenten Message on Ash Wednesday.

This source: Bishop’s Schedule 2012 – Diocese of the Missouri Valley – gives the dates for the Bishops’ Meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa as February 26th – March 5th.

Bishops Marsh and Strawn will be there, so will their host Bishop Michael Gill, as would be Archbishop Prakash. I expect Canon Gray from England would be going. Bishop Botterill? It is Lent and we are now occupied with more spiritual matters – but do keep your ears to the ground.

This is the meeting of those who intend to depose Archbishop Hepworth immediately and elect a new Primate. That will all happen now within the next ten days.

Ash Wednesday is here

I have a translation to do and then I will be celebrating Ash Wednesday. I burned a palm from last year to make ashes, which I will bless and then put on the part of my head that corresponds with the clerical tonsure. Lay people receive an ash cross on the forehead, clerics on the tonsure.

For me too, I will be going quiet except for anything of major importance, and will be posting on As the sun in its orb on spiritual, liturgical, theological and cultural subjects.

Now it is Lent, and we all have work to do on the inside. The lack of this work is what causes conflict between Christians and our own discouragement. I thank Deborah for her posting also on this theme of Lenten hiatus.

The entire time of Lent lies before us, and then the Easter Octave, and it will be spring. It will also be springtime in our spiritual lives and our various affiliations to this or that ecclesial body in which the one Catholic Church subsists through mutually recognised episcopates and Sacraments, without forgetting the common confession of Faith.

I have already said that this English Catholic blog represents a very dense history of one and a half years continuing from my six-month presence on the staff of the Anglo-Catholic. Those two years have seen many hopes, illuminations and disappointments, and also some home truths about Anglicanism – at least what we have made of it in both liberal and conservative camps.

Symbolically, As the sun in its orb represents the future, uncertain as many aspects still are. After Easter this year, all the ordinariates will be in place. All those decided to join them will have been received. Where there are no ordinariates, the ordinariate-bound will have joined their local Roman Catholic dioceses. I am uncertain about the continuity of the TAC, whether it will be through Johannesburg or according to the wishes expressed in the recent Archbishop’s pastoral letter. The raison d’être for the English Catholic is closing, representing as it does a painful past which will remain as a historical record like old books in libraries.

We all have our demons to exorcise and our spiritual eyesight to recover through faith and imploring Christ for forgiveness. Likewise, I wish you all a holy Lent and the illumination it brings.

Fasting from blogging over Lent

Hello all, I intend to fast from blogging and the Internet surfing it engenders over Lent.  If I have any major news concerning Ordinariate-related things I may post here.  And on Sundays I may pop in from time to time.

I’ll be back on Easter and will report on the reception of our Ottawa parish into the Catholic Church on  April 15.  After that, I’ll see whether there is any interest in my continuing here at The English  Catholic.

Have a joyous, holy and fruitful Lent!

 

A critical comment

Erratum: Having read a comment this morning on Valle Adurni, I have now corrected an error concerning the identity of the commenter Catholic Left-winger and I make no further attempt to guess that person’s identity. I apologise for any embarrassment caused.

* * *

I wrote an article here on this blog about a posting Fr Sean Finnegan put on his blog about the TAC, and I keep going back looking at the comments. One articulate comment has been added by a person using the handle Catholic Left-winger.

Dear Father [Finnegan],

I don’t wish ill to the Ordinariates at all and rejoice in their creation, However, I would wish to clarify some of your remarks:

a) the claim by the TAC to have 400,000 members is hard to substantiate. As one who has a deep interest in demographics and psephology, the figures seem to be based up on what I would consider ‘enthusiastic’ guesswork about the Church in Southern Africa and India.

b) Your suggestion that the TAC is stronger in Australia and North America than elsewhere is worrying because, before the break up in the USA and Canada, the numbers were estimated at best as 5,200 (USA) and a few hundred in Canada. In Australia, excluding the special case of Torres Strait (where they claim, with some justification, 1,000 members)which is requesting a seperate Ordinariate, the numbers are again a few hundred at best. Bearing in mind many are not applying to join the Ordinariate, the figures are quite small.

c) The position of Archbishop Hepworth was always going to be difficult given his two marriages and, as a Roman Catholic priest, being irregularly ordained a bishop. His recent decision not to accept the offer of returning to the Church as a layman has left many of his admirers somewhat upset (I count myself one of these) as he had said that he would accept the decision of Rome. I don’t belittle the difficulty of his position, I would say, however, that your statement is a little behind the curve as to his decision-making.

d) +Hepworth’s recent claims of abuse by a still serving priest (vehemently denied) have been dealt with in such a way as to leave many questioning his methods and his recollection. I don’t doubt his claims of abuse as a young man, but there appears to be a little of the political game-playing behind his recent public pronouncements about his allegations against the priest in question.

Part of the problem is the playing with words of many of the protagonists in this debate. Some claim that the Church was dishonest and individuals only (not groups) would be received. Of course groups are being welcomed in – it is important though that nobody be coerced so individual decisions have to be made. When people were received into the Church last Easter, they did so as groups for the Ordinariate – those who claim otherwise are being dishonest.

The issue of former Catholic Priests wishing, now married, to be received into the Ordinariates was always going to be no-no in terms of them continuing to exercise a pastoral ministry. It is interesting to note how many are claiming ‘special circumstances’ – well, they are all special if they are personal. It doesn’t make them dispensable in the eyes of the Church.

The issue of training, often glibly dismissed by many bloggers and posters, is very important; one cannot be ill-educated and ill-prepared. I have even read the argument for the reintroduction of the idea of the ‘simplex’ priest – not allowed to preach or hear Cofession – with very rare exceptions, I cannot imagine this being seriously considered.

I realise in reading this that some may think I am opposed to the Ordinariates, I am not – I think they are a work of the Holy Spirit and they will grow and be a vehicle of unity of Christ’s body. I think one or two of the comments already published about the Ordinariate of OLW are partial and, if I may say so, 18 people in Oxford would count as a large TAC group joining – I know priests of the Ordinariate who would not agree with the remarks published.

I think things will become clearer in the year ahead as more groups join. For what it is worth, I think the Ordinariate of the Chair of Peter will show us the way forward, with its mix of TEC, ACA and other jurisdiction Anglo-Catholics and the urge to evangelise already evident in the Anglican-Use parishes.

In the light of the Archbishop’s recent Pastoral Letter expressing a desire to unite a number of bishops and senior clergy “to protect their ecclesial identity” and create new structures, I would be grateful for searching comments about Catholic Left-winger‘s comment.

A Lenten reflection: bouncing back

On this Shrove Tuesday, I received an e-mail that moved me to the quick. It was not an insult in my regard, or a “dressing-down” for uttering blasphemy against the sacrosanct ordinariate-god and its tedious orthodoxy. It was rather a cri de coeur from one of the finest and strongest priests I have come across in recent times. I read words like – I am a broken man.

At first, my reaction was that men who cause other men’s hearts to break should be brought to justice and made to hear “For war crimes and crimes against humanity, death by hanging“. But, vengeance is not the answer, whether the “criminals” are Roman Catholic clergy, or our own whether they are on the train of illusions or continuing to live in the cloud cuckoo land of “Anglican sedevacantism”.

We have been living in cones of silence ever since that meeting in Portsmouth, finding ourselves in the midst of a mysterious conspiracy, but a conspiracy that went far beyond human cunning. The powers of the darkness of this world disguise themselves as angels of light, yet keep resistance down through secrecy, contradiction and confusion. Always suspect the situation in which no one is allowed to ask questions.

The comments of these last few days begin to reveal some clarity, though one that still oscillates back and forth with each wave of the sea. Some of the flotsam and jetsam of the TAC shipwreck tries to get aboard the Ordinariate, to be told that passenger tickets are dearer than what they can afford. The alternative is a pirate ship where anarchy, not law, reigns. Another alternative is swimming in the sea, giving up and allowing oneself to be drowned or taking a chance in a frail shallop or the lifeboat of the captain who drove his ship onto the rocks. The outlook for many of us is bleak, and no one can afford to be smug.

My seafaring analogies always have their limits, and we are left with the reality that many of us no longer belong anywhere. We face our own failures and that of those who at some time assumed spiritual responsibility for the cure of our souls. Maybe, I sound maudlin and bitter about these events, coupled with some of the old experiences I have described. I have not been raped by disgusting pervert priests, but I have been confronted with the difference between the priestly vocation as it is and the priestly vocation of my ideals (which were not exactly of my invention). My experience in the Church was always driving square pegs into round holes, always failing. I would even go as far as saying that the only church in which I found some measure of sanity and stability was so faulty that it and those responsible for it failed as I had failed in the “true Church”.

Failure is the word that will surely go with our ashes tomorrow and the words Remember, O man, that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return. We are broken men, as the Miserere reminds us The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart wilt he not despise. A piece of writing to which I often return is Oscar Wilde’s De profundis, the scathing letter so full of pathos he wrote from Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas. We all have our ghosts in one form or another.

Lent is likened to a battle, a true spiritual combat. The battlefield is our own soul. We read the many heroic sayings of Winston Churchill as he prepared to declare war against Germany in 1939. We think of things like “Good, so you have enemies. You must be doing something right!” The generations of my grandparents (very few of those are still alive these days!) and my parents as children remember that war, and how it was won by grit and determination, by people getting together and being determined never to give up.

Resilience is something that enables us to be knocked down and come back stronger than ever. For us all, there is a way forward and an alternative to being in the house of the living dead or what I term as the Church’s Death Row, that place of despair where one-time Catholic priests who blew their vocation are taunted for their failure. We have to have the ability to change our course and the trim of our sails. Haul in the mainsheet and feel the boat heeling to lee, and life begins again.

This will be the means by which God’s forgiveness can be found and accepted. This blog nears the end of its working life as Deborah prepares to be received with her parish community into the Archdiocese of Ottawa. I have myself been through a long process of discernment, and the vision becomes clear – both by having better eyes to see with and the fog dissipating enough to make the air more transparent. As the sun in its orb will be taking over as this blog remains as a historical archive of a turned page.

Resilience seems to be the ultimate art of living. At the centre of resilience is faith in ourselves, yet also a greater belief in God. Transcendence is possible by going beyond ourselves, our pain and sorrow, knowing that the evil is only temporary. One way to regain that mastery over ourselves is to begin to understand the events. I can’t help you because you will only shoot me down – you must discover it for yourself. When you do, you will have arrived at maturity and adulthood – and then you will rebuild. It is easier to be a victim and wallow in the morass of our misfortunes, but those who are profiting by the failure of others are now having to face their own failures.

Psychologists begin to discover that emotional scars are not an invariably valid phenomenon. We have the power to get over anything. I still have fearful moments when driving and see a car drawing up to its stop at the end of a side road too quickly. On one occasion, nearly twenty years ago, the car in the side road didn’t stop, and the van I was driving hit it in the side. In the exact circumstances, no amount of anticipation could have prevented it. The driver got away with a broken arm and shock, I with even less, just a couple of bruises and slight cuts. I was more concerned about someone who could have easily been killed! I will never forget the child in the back of the car screaming. The emergency services arrived quickly and the car was cut open with hydraulic scissors and the driver was deftly taken out of the wrecked car on a wooden board as a precaution against neck and head traumas. Road accidents are traumatic and the effects are lasting, but time cures everything.

We all have the capacity for pulling ourselves together. Adversity challenges us to react and turn it into strength. It is easy to allow ourselves to think that Lent teaches us to blame ourselves for everything. We are now having to learn to maintain our independence and ability to think outside the box, and draw boundaries between ourselves and our TAC bishops. We cultivate our intuition and ability to ask questions and give the answers that our hearts give us. It is not easy to be honest with ourselves. We know the answer, and we have to act on it. If we can think outside the box, we have initiative and know how to tackle the problems and elements that cause cognitive dissonance.

I think some of us are going to be proud as survivors, whether we continue as Christians in a church, or whether we have a complete turn-out at home and get rid of the destructive rubbish as Dawkins would call it. Unlike many Christians, I respect an atheist who can assume the consequences of his conviction, for it must be bleak. But, beware – a belief in afterlife and “spirituality” is not true atheism. Whichever way we decide, the only way is up – if we are not going to go down – and going down is never far enough down…

This Lent is going to be tough for many of us. We know the answers already, as we knew them in November 2009 when we first read Anglicanorum coetibus, or in October 2007 when three of our bishops went to Rome, one of them a Roman Catholic priest in an irregular canonical situation. We delayed the consequences, but the bailiff is now at the door.

There are two essential rules for getting from our Ash Wednesday to the glory of the Resurrection:

• If we are having to abandon one ship, our survival will depend on finding another. We can either afford the exorbitant price of a cruise ticket on the expensive and exclusive liner, take our chance with the pirates, or make our way in a boat to an island so that we can build a ship. It would be easier to do one of these things as a group and in relationship and friendship, but the important thing is to be outside the box and think for ourselves.
• Even if it is à chacun sa merde, we are here to care about others and have pride in doing so, to carry heads high and always be ready to extend the helping hand. We learn to solve problems and teach others how to solve problems without wanting some kind of control. Don’t just unlock the door, but give them the key.

I wish you all a good Lent, that each of you may find God’s forgiveness, and more so, that you each find the way through what you already know.

Fr Finnegan weighs in on the TAC

The good RC priest in England who runs the Valle Adurni blog, who has celebrated Sarum Masses in Oxford, has written The TAC.

He gives a sympathetic introduction for English Catholics unfamiliar with the TAC. He gives a fair description of Archbishop Hepworth and describes the October 2007 meeting in Portsmouth. So the Letter “caused something of a stir”.

The trouble is that Archbishop Hepworth had counted his chickens before they were hatched.

Fr Finnegan does his best to understand the issues brought up to begin with by Bishops Marsh and Strawn in America, and then by some other TAC bishops in other parts of the world. He has picked up on the matters described in the Archbishop’s Pastoral Letter.

Which is plain speaking enough. The issue of conversion is not really at the heart of the matter, though, for if these people really believed what the Catholic Church teaches, those things that Archbishop Hepworth affirmed in the Portsmouth Declaration, then the Roman Option would become the Roman Imperative (as someone else has said). What they want is Roman Communion without the Roman Faith, and that was never going to work. The faith of the TAC may be more like the Roman faith than is professed in most mainstream Anglican churches today, but it still has a way to go. Those who remain in the TAC will have been weakened by the current movement and some no doubt will feel profoundly hurt by it and probably betrayed by their own Primate. What their future is remains to be seen; if their differences are not too profound, they may seek common cause and communion with the Anglican Catholic Church or some other body. Those of the TAC who do seek Roman Communion, such as the famous St Agatha’s Church in Portsmouth (where in fact the mainstream former Bishop Robert Mercer was received into full communion a few weeks ago) will no doubt merge gently into the Ordinariates. In Australia they are likely to be the major player in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, since they already have their own churches and organization, and the mainstream Anglican church tends to be rather Evangelical, and therefore not a large provider of aspirants to Roman communion.

In some ways I feel saddest for those who really do share the Roman faith in their deepest heart but for whom the path of Roman Communion would involve what they believe to be intolerable sacrifice. Like the rich young man in the Gospel, they turn sadly away. In all this one can be deeply edified by the determination of Archbishop Hepworth; whatever else he may have said or done, he has committed himself to Roman Communion with an admirable single-mindedness, rendered all the more poignant by the fact that, as a former priest of the Adelaide Diocese, he is likely to have to surrender his own practice of the priesthood in order to achieve it. As a priest myself, I can only imagine what that prospect must feel like. We would do well not to belittle it.

A Catholic Glossary

• A Catholic Glossary

This is written by a Roman Catholic – we all need levity. Otherwise we would go crazy!

Personal Ordinariate: a juridical structure of the Catholic Church, specifically designed to discourage non-Catholic ecclesial bodies from seeking union with the Holy See, to undermine the faith of those who do enter the Church through them, to ensure that those who keep their faith and traditions are denied ordination or any position of influence or authority in the Church, and to ensure that any customs or culture they bring with them are destroyed and their members assimilated to the Prevailing Catholic Culture (see below) as quickly as possible.

Prevailing Catholic Culture: the customs of the Catholic Church, including the liturgy, music, and social mores, which have been specifically designed to depress believers and discourage them from taking any action to further Christian faith and morals, and to present as unattractive a picture of the Church to the outside world as possible, all the while still preserving the illusion of some of the Faithful that the Church is about God.