The future church of England
A. N. Wilson
Roman Catholicism in England Edward Norman (OUP £9.95) tatistics can be manipulated to prove almost anything. If the Archbishop of Canterbury were presented with a set of figures to show that the majority of practis- ing Christians in this country were Roman Catholics, he would probably react with the sort of scepticism we should expect from Mr Scargill on being told that nearly half his union members were now back at work down the mines. Whatever the stat- isticians say, however, it is palpably ob- vious to any observer of the ecclesiastical scene that the Church of England is quietly dying, and dying beyond hope of recovery. The only areas where it seems to be thriving are among evangelicals, whose manner of presenting the faith is (I sus- pect) unhelpful to those practising and believing Christians who could not keep up the level of fervour and good humour which membership of an evangelical con- gregation would appear to demand.
When we add to this picture the undis- puted fact that the 'ordination' of women to the priesthood will persuade many Anglicans that the State Church has finally taken leave of its Catholic roots, if not of its senses, one sees why the Roman Church in this country continues to attract custom- ers, and goes from strength to strength. The buildings in which they worship are usually vile. Their liturgy is appalling, and usually conducted with incompetence. There are dozens of intellectual objections to certain Catholic claims about the papacy and the Virgin Mary. Hundreds of objec- tionable incidents spatter the lurid pages of Catholic history. But for most practical purposes, the RC is the church of this country. For the truth of this to dawn on you, merely imagine a convert from athe- ism or some other religion asking you, `Which church should I join?' Would one seriously contemplate sending them off to a church which not only uses a different liturgy from one parish to the next, but also seems to entertain contradictory sets of beliefs? Who would join a church whose bishops publicly stated that they did not believe in creeds? No, one's convert would obviously be better advised to find the nearest RC church. In 20 years' time, the C of E will only be patronised by those, like myself, who belong to it by habit or accident. Those starting from scratch and most of those who really mean business will be RC.
The history of the RCs in the. last 400 years is therefore a subject with which all English Christians should be acquainted. And who better to tell us about it than the Dean of Peterhouse? This particular monograph is part of a series in which distinguished persons have been asked to compress their thoughts about enormous subjects into about 100 pages. Having disagreed with almost everything I have ever read by Dr Norman, I turned to this book eager for the excitement of a clash with a mind very different from my own. I must own that I was slightly disappointed. The book is a miracle of compression, and it is all most elegantly turned. The author is extremely polite about everyone, a fact which, given his previous publications, I found mildly eery. One keeps rereading paragraphs to see where the sting lies, but there doesn't appear to be one. He is judicious to the point of dullness — or, almost to that point. There is actually something close to brilliance in the essay, particularly when he gets on to the 19th century and describing, in his own elegant phrase, how 'the most ultramontane of prelates had been acclaimed by the most Protestant of peoples'. The prelate was Manning, of course, who more or less invented the modern RC church in this country and is directly responsible for the state of things which I have outlined.
The reason he got away with it is to be found in the wrongness of Dr Norman's phrase, 'the most Protestant of peoples'. I don't think that describes the English at all. Most of them are indifferent (or very very faintly hostile) to religion. They al- ways have been. That is why they have allowed such religious calamities as the suppression of the monasteries, or the abolition of the Church itself under Crom- well's Protectorate, or the setting up of the General Synod of the Church of England, to take place almost without a murmur. I was glad that Dr Norman included the highly revealing anecdote about Father Maurice Child, an Anglican priest who was turned down by the Army selection board when he offered his services as a chaplain during the First World War. In answer to the question, 'what would you do for a dying man?' he said, 'Hear his confession, and give him absolution.' The `correct' answer should have been, 'Give him a cigarette and take any last message he maY have for his family.' This is highly indicative of English hie' ferentism in matters of religion. Even in the hour of death, it is faintly bad form to take God and all that stuff serionslY- Religious nations, even in the days of technology, broadcast the Angelus, or calls to prayer from the muezzin, as punctua- tions to the radio or television day. We have 'Thought for the Day', or, for the really pious, Thora Hird choosing her favourite hymns (bless her). But there is a catch, which will make the next hundred years of religious history 01 England rather interesting. In spite of the preponderance of indifferentism in the Church of England, it has always pro- duced, until the present generation, men of high intellectual weight and deep personal holiness. An Anglican, dismayed by the antics of the present hierarchy and the unbelief of contemporary theologians, has a great tradition to draw upon: a tradition which contains names as various and as impressive as William Law, Samuel John- son, or, more recently, Westcott, Darwell Stone, Sir Edwin Hoskyns, Inge, Hensley Henson, Charles Gore, Gregory Dix — name a tiny handful. The RCs, paradox- ically, don't have much tradition at all When Newman joined them, he kissed a volume of St Athanasius and, with tears rolling down his cheeks, muttered, 'Nov! I belong to you.' But while modern English RCs can look back to the fathers and doctors of the church which they have 10 common with the Anglicans, they do nor have a great Native inheritance for the reasons which Dr Norman gives us here-- starting with penal times, continuing through the period when Manning forbade Catholics to attend the university and int° the time when the Roman clergy continued to be drawn from the uneducated classes. There was no serious tradition of English Catholic intellectual life which was not In need of constant injections of vigour from converts and immigrants. Intellectually speaking, the Anglican is the heir of a great and slowly unfolding inheritance. The En" glish RC of the present generation can look. back — when he surveys the bishops and theologians of his church — upon genera- tions of bigots, ignoramuses and illiterates.• In this treatment of these, particularly 10 his paragraphs about recent Cardinal archbishops of Westminster, there are. many English Roman Catholics who will feel that this eirenical Protestant author has been too polite. But they will enjoy his essay, as I did, for its lucidity and balance.
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