The Sheepcat

felix hominum, RIP

A long-time friend of this blog's, the Anglican priest Joseph Walker, a.k.a. felix hominum, has passed away. He led a pilgrimage this spring to Turkey and the Greek island of Patmos, so we were shocked to learn several weeks ago that he was gravely ill.

I appreciated Joseph's great love for children, especially his passionate defence of the lives and dignity of those, born and unborn, with genetic abnormalities. And almost anyone with siblings or children will be able to relate to his light-hearted "Liturgy for the Blessing of a Mini Van."

He had much to say about marriage and the struggles within the Anglican Church of Canada. I enjoyed his mischievous pokes at the church's bureaucracy, sometimes through the persona of  the Venerable Eustace Smithley-Jones. and at its highly selective invocation of tradition. He told me many people sent the latter link around, though few were bold enough to acknowledge it publicly.

He and I shared a few pints in the course of my visits to Edmonton. In our amiable sparring over Catholicism, for which he had a healthy respect, I was a little awed by his historical and philosophical learning. 

Joseph greatly admired Dante's Purgatorio, on which he wrote a series of Lenten reflections. May any actual experience of purgatory for him be brief, and may he swiftly come to see the Beatific Vision. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Update (20 August): Please see the obituary and a series of memorial reflections by Joseph's good friend Tim Chesterton.

Anglicanism Isn't for Me

The news that I’m preparing to attend an Anglican academic girls’ school reunion has prompted a friend of ours to inquire about my view of the Anglican church. And it’s a fine day for him to have posed the question, because (in the Novus Ordo calendar) May 4 just happens to be the feast of the martyrs of England and Wales. (Canadian readers, please note that, in our country, today is instead identified with Blessed Marie-Léonie Paradis, because she was Québecoise.)

Although I was, like The Sheepcat, partly from a United Church clergy family, I was raised high Anglican. At age 8 I started asking hard questions about Anglicanism, and at age 13 I made my profession of faith for reception into full communion with the Catholic Church. My experience of thirteen years at an Anglican school – I chose to stay there following my conversion – had little to do with my decision to become Catholic; much of the Scriptural instruction I received there was very helpful, and I am very grateful for many blessings from that time, especially that of friendship. It did matter that my grade 3 classmates and I talked about whether or not we self-identified as Protestant; it was my early understanding that I simply belonged to the English branch of the Catholic Church, a claim which didn’t withstand scrutiny.

My objection to Anglicanism did not arise for the same reasons as many others’ in the ’70s – abortion and women’s ordination (which I do oppose but didn’t understand as a little child); huge crises of conscience were triggered amongst certain adults with the first ordination of a woman to the Canadian Anglican clergy, on November 1, 1976.

And I’m glad I wasn’t so sophisticated as to fully comprehend the politics around me. Rather, I was young and simple enough to be struck by the whole question of origins. In fairness, my Anglo-Catholic environment was pretty Roman-friendly; and the parishes where I was baptized and raised were linked with the Oxford Movement.

Every year church school [Sunday school] students like me were given a faith-related gift. Mine included a Bible-based story book, a statue of Our Lady, and a rosary. Except for the belief that the Queen was the Head of the Church, I was taught nothing inconsistent with Catholicism, and in fact, I received much better catechesis than many of my cradle-Catholic contemporaries. I even believed in the Real Presence (and I was horrified to learn later the early history of Anglicanism that was so destructive to the Sacraments). I didn’t know that I wasn’t being taught mainstream Anglicanism.

One Sunday thirty years ago – it was a warm morning between Easter and Pentecost – the church school teacher moved our class outside to the lawn, and set about introducing the Apostles’ Creed. “And who were the Apostles?” she asked. Hands went up. One child said they were the Disciples. Another child said they were the Evangelists. And a third child changed my life by saying, “They were the Catholics.”

Big wow. Did that mean there were people who were more like the Apostles than us? How could that be?

See, no Anglican child I knew was ever taught about Henry VIII, because no parents or teachers wanted us to emulate him. So at 8 years old, when I realized that Jesus had founded one Church and Henry VIII another, and I was in the latter, I felt cheated.

I would like to think that, had I lived in Henry VIII’s time, I would have been among those like Erasmus and Thomas More, who advocated Christian humanism and tried to reform the Church from within, perhaps at the price of my life. In university I eventually did a fourth-year paper on how Henry’s personal violation of the marriage covenant led to the wider disruption of communion and the inevitable break, in 1930, with the sexual morality with which Christians have been identified from the beginning. The fruits of a church founded on adultery have included desecration of the Sacraments to ensure a break from apostolic succession; and in turn, doctrinal confusion. (Doctrinal confusion later challenged the Catholic Church, which is now in the midst of a reform-of-the-reform.) And the schisms continued exponentially after the foundation of Anglicanism and other early Protestant churches, so that today we have thousands upon thousands of Christian denominations.

I very much resisted leaving the best world I had ever known till then, but nothing was ever the same after that Sunday. I was happily enrolled in a Catholic Sunday school the next fall. At 13 I converted formally and eagerly to Catholicism, making my profession of faith for reception into full communion.

Others on that lawn were on a similar pathway, and my Anglican church school teacher became my Catholic Confirmation sponsor. As I grew up we lost touch, though I did see her briefly upon the passing of our old pastor, another convert. She went to Quebec and became a Sister in the Congregation of Notre Dame. I heard her news through other convert friends, and was able to write to her before my wedding to The Sheepcat. I extended a printed invitation along with a handwritten letter acknowledging that she would probably be unable to attend, because of illness and frailty. The Sister wrote back, declining the invitation as expected, but telling me two great things.

First, she was confident that our marriage would be successful, because I had known to describe The Sheepcat as “a gift from God.” Second, she has prayed for me every day of my life. Another big wow! From our various wedding guests we received small gifts and large gifts and no gifts and fancy gifts – but this Sister’s intangible gift was the best of them all, and without it, I don’t know how I would have turned out. (Subsequent to our engagement, I joined The Sheepcat in teaching Confirmation at our parish. I tell this anecdote to our students, to encourage them to carefully choose holy sponsors.)

As for the rest: A couple of the Anglicans I knew as a child have become large-E Evangelicals; almost all the rest are now Catholics or Orthodox Christians who are also small-e evangelicals. Meanwhile, most current Anglicans my husband and I know are either swimming the Tiber as a group, or struggling within the various fractured remnants of the Anglican Church of Canada. “The time [has] come when people [do] not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, … accumulate teachers and … stop listening to the truth and [are] diverted to myths” (2 Tim 4:3-5).

I’m too hungry to have stayed in a church setting without nourishing food. As a Christian who accepts the Creed, I’m left with the fundamental issue of what to do with John 6. Here are some chapter excerpts:

v 51: “‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.’”
v 55: “‘For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.’”
v 60: “Then many of his disciples who were listening said, ‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’”
v 66: “As a result of this, many (of) His disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied Him.”

Typically, only those Churches (Catholic and Orthodox) which maintain apostolic succession teach that Christ is truly present on the altar as He promised to be. Sacred Tradition is sacred. Other traditions may not be.

The Good News of the God-Man with the Mysterious Footstool

When the Rev. Tim Chesterton of St Margaret's Anglican Church asks people what the essence of Christianity is, he's often told it's "Love thy neighbour." But as he points out, "Gospel" means good news. "Love thy neighbour" is not good news – it’s good advice.

Which verse from the Old Testament is most frequently quoted in the New Testament? A lot of people think it’s ‘love thy neighbour’, but it isn’t. The most frequently quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament is Psalm 110:1: ‘The LORD says to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet”’. Over and over again, when the early Christian preachers tell the story of what God has done in Jesus, they quote this verse....

So the Gospel comes back to this shining conviction: God has made his Son Jesus Christ the Lord of all. And as Lord of all, Jesus is gathering together a people for himself, a people coming from every tribe and language and people and nation. He is making them citizens of the kingdom of God and teaching them the way of life of that kingdom. This is where ‘Love thy neighbour’ fits in, you see; it’s not the centre of the good news, it’s a consequence of it.

Read the whole sermon.

Link thanks to felix hominum.

Change Is Afoot in the "Ex-Gay" Movement

The president of Exodus International, Alan Chambers, has confirmed to Ex-Gay Watch that the organization he leads has shifted direction, turning away from public policy in order to concentrate on ministry.

Since the first day we entered into policy discussions and activism it was a struggle for us. I felt strongly about the issues we were defending, but conflicted about the fact that we might be alienating people that simply wouldn’t call us for help because of the perception that we were becoming a partisan and political organization rather than a ministry for all.

Not long ago, Wendy Gritter, executive director of the Toronto-based ministry New Direction, gave the keynote address at the 2008 Exodus Leadership Conference (PowerPoint presentation, 29 MB audio recording). As Warren Throckmorton describes it,

The mission of New Direction is “creating a safe place for same-gender-attracted people to journey towards wholeness in Christ.” The focus of New Direction appears to be much more focused on Christian ministry to same-sex attracted people as opposed to mediating change of sexual orientation.

He quotes Wendy:

[W]hen we look at those who now have their stories on the Beyond Ex-gay website…we also ought not to be patronizing?  There can be this subtle sense that ‘you just didn’t try hard enough….but see we did.’ How can we engage relationally with those who have come to different theological understanding than we have?

There is much to digest here and in the lengthy comment thread that Wendy's talk initiated at Warren's blog, but it seems to me that we are witnessing a historic development in the way evangelical Protestant churches and ministries deal with homosexuality, in that Exodus has really been the flagship for an approach focusing on orientation change.

Exodus, along with its charismatic and evangelical allies, has boldly--dare I say "loudly"?--proclaimed the reality of God's power to deliver people from homosexuality. But affirmation of the truth of divine deliverance from bondage of any kind needs always to be held in tension with acceptance of the reality of thorns in the flesh (2 Cor 12:7-9) which God in his providence allows us to learn to live with. Call this, if you will, a theology of suffering--which the great Catholic mystics always affirmed but which some churches (especially ones influenced by Pentecostalism) have been loath to recognize.

Now, while the Exodus approach has grown out of churches that stand very firm on the teaching that homosexual acts are always sinful, the same cannot be said within the context of the Anglican Communion, at least in North America and the United Kingdom. There too, though, it's notable that the Zacchaeus Fellowship (to which I belong as an associate member) has emphasized its pastoral calling.

We want it known that we are neither an ex-gay ministry nor a counselling ministry, although we do refer people when asked. We are not a political lobby group but a pastoral fellowship. We are not militant, but we try to exemplify the love of Christ in everything we do and say.

The sad spectacle of the moral and organizational collapse well underway within the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church points to the need for vigilance lest a healthy sensitivity to the voices of people who feel marginalized by the Church lapse into relativism. I heard recently that the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada and the moderator of the United Church of Canada apologized for missionaries' declarations that Christianity was superior to indigenous North American spiritual traditions. Sorry, but that won't do. We need to remain firmly attached to the true Vine (John 15), or we will bear no fruit.

Chances are very remote, though, that Exodus will go mushy any time soon. The change that Wendy Gritter calls for is truly welcome. Let the brittle bits of caramel be folded back into the pliable, leavened lump of dough. A fuller Christian message affirms complementary aspects of teaching rather than defending one truth at the expense of another. Courage, the Catholic apostolate to people living with homosexual attraction, has never emphasized orientation change but rather chastity and discipleship.

Two years ago, Alan Chambers and Michael Bussee along with many others batted around the idea of retiring the "ex-gay" label. As I wrote back then,

[T]he ex-gay claims and ex-ex-gay counterclaims are kind of irrelevant when moral codes are based not on private judgment but on the guarantee to God's people of "the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error" (CCC 890). In other words, there's a lot we don't know yet about the etiology (CCC 2357) and potential changeability of homosexual desire, but no outcome of these controversies can undermine the basic call to every last blessed one of us to live our whole lives in chastity, be it within or outside heterosexual marriage (CCC 2337-2350, esp. 2339, 2342).

Link thanks to Warren Throckmorton.

Anglican Disunity and Rome

I can't get my head around John Bentley Mays's take on Anglican-Catholic relations (link via Deborah Gyapong).

But before shouting a merry “Welcome Home!” to them [the Traditional Anglican Communion], it’s worth thinking about the pickle into which the recent tumults in Anglicanism are putting Catholic officialdom.

Up to this point, the Catholic Church’s talks with Anglicans have proceeded on the understanding that there was a single Anglican body in the conversation — the one made up of those churches who recognize the spiritual leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

How so? The TAC has been out of communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury for more than a decade and a half (and has been in dialogue with Rome since the early 1990s).

But should the Anglican Communion fragment into so many pieces, as now seems possible, who, exactly, will Catholics talk to? The liberal, mainstream denomination, which ordains women and (in the  United States, anyway) approves the ordination of openly gay priests and bishops? Or the breakaway Anglicans who do neither, and are therefore of one mind (in this respect, anyway) with Catholicism?

It's not for me to decide, but surely the Catholic Church will talk to whoever is willing to talk with her. I can't imagine that The Episcopal Church will be remotely interested in negotiating much of anything with Rome, given TEC's intransigence towards the rest of the Anglican Communion to which, for the time being, it still belongs. But Rome has been talking with Eastern Orthodox Churches and even the Mennonite World Conference, an heir of one of the radical streams of the Protestant Reformation.

The fact that at one recent powwow the Russian Orthodox got huffy over the presence of the Estonian Orthodox and walked out didn't stop talks from proceeding fruitfully among the rest of the participants. Neither should any talks between Rome and the TAC interfere with Canterbury's own relationship with Rome.

And what’s to be done about those Anglicans who are now seeking full union with the Catholic Church? For Catholics to treat with a whole bloc of disaffected Anglicans runs counter to Vatican policy regarding the Anglican Communion. Were the Vatican to admit the TAC to membership, the move would almost certainly be viewed by Anglican mainstreamers as gravely divisive to the up-to-now usual Catholic-Anglican relationship, and it might squash future ecumenical encounters altogether.

Nonsense. It would be one thing for Rome to openly woo en bloc those "disaffected Anglicans" who currently belong to the Anglican Communion, and this it has not done. The Catholic Church is called to evangelize all men, but it should reach out to Christians active in other ecclesial communities in a way that will not jeopardize the long, slow work of restoring Christian unity. It is another thing altogether, though, for Rome to receive an overture from a group that has long been estranged from Canterbury and that shows not the slightest interest in accepting the current doctrine and governance of the Anglican Communion.

Surely the TAC is not some sort of Taiwan seen by the People's Republic of Canterbury as a renegade island that really should be reunited, by force if necessary, with the Anglican mainland. No, it's gone. Canterbury has more important things to worry about.

Update: let me backtrack slightly. In seeking the "wider unity of all Christians," Canterbury must of course envision this to involve breakaway Anglicans too in the end. A single sentence in the 44-page statement of the International Anglican – Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission points to some sensitivity. "In order to safeguard the cohesion of our engagement in the ecumenical movement," it urges close consultation when either body "engages in a new ecumenical partnership with another church" (para. 123). To what extent this might refer to the TAC is not clear. 

As for Rome's interest in the current Anglican crisis, it is to encourage unity among whatever elements of the Anglican Communion still submit to the authority of Sacred Scripture.

The TAC is unusual in having affirmed from the outset its "intention to seek and achieve full sacramental communion and visible unity with other Christians… who hold the Catholic and Apostolic Faith." Unity regrettably is not such a priority for some of the other groups that have been splintering off from Anglicanism. In liturgy and ecclesiology many of the Anglicans least willing to accommodate TEC's heresies are far indeed from Rome.

The logic of schism is self-perpetuating. The more isolated the community, the harder it will find to be drawn to the fullness of the Catholic faith, having once defined its existence in opposition to and separation from what it sees as the corruption of other ecclesial bodies. If the mindset is one of avoiding the taint of bishops who are soft on homosexual sin and lax with regard to scriptural authority more generally, then such groups will find ample reason to steer clear of the Catholic Church, because we have corruption aplenty.

The more fruitful question, of course, is which body has, despite the shortcomings of individual members of its hierarchy, faithfully preserved the teaching handed down from the Apostles. But that's not how members of a splinter group are apt to see it. So let us pray for the unity of all Christians--and trust that in his own perfect timing God will reveal a way forward through the thicket.

Update (5 December): Okay, so it seems Cardinal Kasper isn't so keen on the idea. How to place this in context?

• He's not the Pope.
• While negative remarks about the Cardinal can be found fairly readily within St Blogs, his actual positions taken as a whole appear quite defensible within Catholic orthodoxy.

As for ex-Anglican groups with a questionable commitment to unity, I'm not even all that sure about that anymore. I'm kind of beginning to wish I'd kept more of my opinions to myself. Well, live 'n' learn.

I'll say I've been pretty surprised by the proportion of my modest traffic here that has landed first on my earlier just-passing-on-the-news note on the Traditional Anglican Communion. Something's in the air, all right. I just wish I knew what.

Traditional Anglican Communion Seeks Sacramental Union with Rome

Long-awaited news from the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC):

The Bishops and Vicars-General unanimously agreed to the text of a letter to the See of Rome seeking full, corporate, sacramental union.

Hallelujah! Ut unum sint!

For those wondering what the Anglo-Catholic movement is all about and how many Anglicans are likely to join the Catholic Church any time soon, this explanation by J.D. Treat, who left Canterbury for Rome fairly recently, is worth reading.

The Bovina Bloviator Jumps in the Tiber

Another Piskie, the Bovina Bloviator, says, "Good-bye to All That" and jumps in the Tiber. God bless him.

Link via FrZ.

Well, I'm Glad He Cleared That Up!

The plunge of the Anglican Diocese of Niagara into the abyss continues unabated. The Very Rev. Peter Wall, dean and rector of Christ's Church Cathedral in Hamilton, has clarified in a letter to The Anglican Planet (not yet online--I'll post a link when it does go up) that its recent headline "Cathedral sponsors nightclub" was incorrect. No, the good rector explains, what the cathedral sponsored was an event at a nightclub.

Fine, plenty of churches are involved in events such as Theology on Tap that are held in pubs. But the event in question was Winter Pride 2007, "a festival organized by the local GLBT community in Hamilton." He goes on to explain:

There are many members of the Cathedral community, both gay and straight, who support and actively participate in PRIDE events, and the Cathedral has been a proud supporter of PRIDE events for several years.

I bet there are. And this is compatible with Christian life and witness just how exactly?

No particular kind of activity (as you salaciously imply) is in any way endorsed, nor, indeed, is the particular club involved in any way the focus of this support.

Right. I guess by "no particular kind of activity" he means to disavow a connection to the sadomasochistic club that the TAP article pointed out is held monthly at the nightclub. But let's take a look at another sponsor listed in the same ad, the gay sauna Karel's Steam Baths. Could it possibly be that Winter Pride endorses promiscuous gay sex? If it doesn't, then it's unlike any gay pride festival I've ever heard of, and Karel's might want to re-examine its marketing.

Wouldn't a church defending the sanctity of committed same-sex relationships want to be a tad careful about actively supporting an event that promotes the less restrained aspects of gay culture, lest it lead the faithful into error? Recalling that bit in the gospels about millstones, you know.

I had the displeasure of attending a concert at Christ's Church Cathedral a few months ago. The music was technically very good, if not really to my taste, but the venue gave me the willies. Featured most prominently in the bookstall was Tom Harpur's Pagan Christ. Talk about bad vibes. It's going to take an exorcist to restore that place to its proper Christian glory, I swear.

Lord, have mercy.

ECUSA's Bishop Steenson to Cross the Tiber

This is big. The Episcopal Bishop of Rio Grande has announced his intention to resign. According to Matt Kennedy and other sources, it is confirmed that he will become Roman Catholic.

Sarah Hey interviewed Bishop Steenson just before the ECUSA House of Bishops meeting in New Orleans opened, and before his decision was made public.

For the church to be truly Catholic, everybody has to be a part of it and at the table, and that was heard quite often today ... In order to be true to our character as a catholic church, we have to make sure that it's catholic in the sense of everybody being there. And what I liked--Bishop Ackerman I thought was brilliant at that point because he said--he reminded people that there are a lot of folks that aren't here because they are so alienated because of the teaching and the practice of The Episcopal Church. And they're not represented, and where is their voice, if this is a genuinely catholic operation? To say nothing about the saints, and the apostles, and the whole great tradition of Christian belief that has been consistent on this point all the years (7:20).

Steenson grew up in the the Evangelical Free Church and was drawn to Canterbury as a young adult, becoming an Episcopal priest in 1980. Listen to the more personal closing segment of the interview from 13:30 on.

Christ has always been a very close part of my life. My parents, even though they didn't raise me to be a sacramental Christian, they certainly raised me to be a credal, Biblical Christian, and as early as I can remember I've been taught that you have to give your life to Christ if you hope to be saved, so it's always been a part of my life (15:55).

While I enjoy the personal relationships, I yearn for a passionate commitment to Christian truth, and the catholic faith, and I realize at so many levels, I just can't go where The Episcopal Church is going. The difficulty for people like me is, we're trying to be faithful to our ordination vows, and we're trying to live in charity with one another, so we want to do that, but yet we're coming--well, we're not coming, we passed it a long time ago, where we have to say we can't go there. In conscience, we just simply can't go there. It really is wearing on the soul, on the body, and on the emotions. Spiritually for me the most important thing I've had to work on in my life is to not give place to anger in my life, because it clouds judgment, it darkens understanding. I've worked so hard on that. I'm not always successful at it, but I just feel that, for me, that was the most important thing I had to do. For whatever God might be calling us to be and do in the future, we can't walk into it with hearts full of anger (17:52)

I'd never heard of him before this weekend, but he radiates Christian patience and gentleness.

In the combox at StandFirm, look for William Tighe and FrKimel (Pontificator), and this little nugget of common sense, responding to objections to the departing bishop's invitation to Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to meet with the clergy of his diocese:

KJS is TEC’s _primate_. She’s not just a random person. If people can’t cope with accepting her as their Presiding Bishop should they even be clergy in TEC?

Yes, being immersed in ECUSA-speak in the full depth of its muddiness has a paradoxically clarifying effect, in that one can't help but eventually realize it's vastly different from the shocking boldness of the gospel. Some choose one, some choose the other, but the choice has to be made. I've never been Anglican but I reached the same conclusion years ago in an ECUSA-like Mennonite congregation.

Meanwhile, you will see a few individuals lashing out at the Catholic Church in general and at the forum's Catholic members in particular. As the crisis in the Anglican Communion deepens, let us pray without ceasing.

When the Ecclesial Shoe Is on the Other Foot

Diogenes highlights the remarkable transformation of one Jim Naughton from "secessionist poacher" (as a dissenting Catholic) to "curialist gamekeeper" (as a diocesan official in the Episcopal Church).

Link via Stand Firm.