Why I Am Remaining an Anglican

Given the disarray of the Episcopal Church some of my friends and colleagues are jumping ship, abandoning ECUSA to join the Roman Catholic Church, one of the Eastern Orthodox Churches or perhaps the Continuum. Yet I for one have no desire or intention of becoming a Roman Catholic or, for that matter a Lutheran or a Methodist or a Baptist, or even a Buddhist, Druid or Mohammedan.

I have always been an Anglican in the Episcopal Church. God immersed me in this Church - into its various dioceses and particular parishes. I know nothing else. From Episcopalian priests and teachers I learned the Christian faith and came to know Jesus Christ. From within the Episcopal Church I received the Catholic religion - a religion that courses through my veins, and is in the very air I breath. The Catholic religion informs all my thinking, it moves my heart towards others when I would rather stay within myself and to do what is right when it would be easier to do what is wrong or nothing at all. Catholicism defines my character. I can be nothing else. No-one can take it away from me, no argument can dissuade me from my inheritance, no church can betray who I am.

Should we all then stay where we are and be content with whatever church or religion God has been pleased to place us? If so then those are right who say that one religion is just as good as another. But this betrays the Lordship of Jesus Christ, makes conversions obsolete by denying the Great Commission and deprives all evangelists of their mission.
Surely this cannot do and few if any really believe it in their heart. There must be some way of evaluating one religion over another, some standard for deciding that some other religion or church may be better than the one I now confess. What shall it be? As a Catholic Christian the only standard I can find is catholicity, wholeness, completeness or, in plain English, comprehensiveness.

Where beyond Ecclesia Anglicana may I find a greater Catholicity? As an Anglican I am already fed by what other churches have to offer: Scripture and the Catholic doctrine of the undivided church, sacraments given by Jesus Christ and His church through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a spiritual discipline formed by saints and mystics. I need nothing more; I can be satisfied with nothing less.

Catholicity or comprehensiveness is Anglicanism’s primary characteristic. This is its virtue; it is also its danger. For it is easy to confuse Catholicism with a vague universalism and comprehensiveness with an eclecticism that believes that differences make no difference. Without some kind of control, bizarre doctrines and esoteric rituals can run rampant. From time to time we must reign in the wild horses of heresy with the use of scripture and the apostolic tradition. Yet even when we think that we have defeated the enemy at the gate, the stampede of secular paganism still continues to assault the church, knocking on the doors of the faithful, rapping at the windows of officialdom, and gathering up uninstructed innocent converts in its embrace.

Within the confines of the Episcopal Church fighting the battle for Catholic orthodoxy these days can be very difficult, and I shall sometimes have to disassociate myself from many of ECUSA’s official actions and perhaps even place myself in a different Anglican province. Yet I cannot be anything other than an Anglican. As a follower of Jesus Christ I cannot become a pagan secularist. Nor can I abandon the apostolic ministry and sacraments by associating myself with one of the Protestant sects. My only alternative is to join up with some group of Christians who, like me, lay claim to Catholicity. So all that is left is Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism.

But both these options are out of the question. As a thorough going Catholic I am bound to deny all denials and negate all negations. Yet if I should join one of the Orthodox Churches, I would have to deny that I have ever been part of a real church, and if I became Roman Catholic I would have to deny that I have ever been a real priest or received and given real sacraments. But my Catholicity and my priesthood I can never deny. And even if I should leave the Episcopal Church, what difference would it make in the continuing battle for orthodoxy? Not one less women would continue to act as though she was a Catholic priest, nor would the Diocese of New Hampshire be shaken to its foundations.

No, it is not easy these days being an Anglo-Catholic in the Episcopal Church. For that matter it is not easy being a Christian wherever we are. We are under attack on all sides, the enemy often turning a church’s pastoral attempt to protect the faithful from error into a rigid legalism in which passive obedience becomes a substitute for the virtue of faith, and in which pastoral care is transformed into an ecclesiastical imperialism in which Western Christendom acts as if it still had powers long past, and the courtly splendor of a faded Byzantium continues to haunt the East. In reaction, the enemy turns the generosity of the liberal into little more than permissiveness towards the libertine, and the quest for the freedom of autonomy into an arrogant self assertion. Enthusiasm becomes emotional self expression, and formality a stifling formalism.

The Lord never said it would easy. He warned us that without His intervention the devil would fool the very elect. With St. Paul we must put on the whole armor of God and stand firm where we are. As an Anglican I must continue to fight for the Catholic Faith against all assaults of the enemy in whatever guise these may show themselves.

I have heard this kind of thing, stated more forcefully (and less thoughtfully) from a now retired Bp of the Episcopal Church. His less thoughtful way of saying it shows the pain of the position , and it's good for us to notice that and to minister to it, when we can. He says, "If I were to become Catholic I'd be saying everything I'd said was a LIE!"

Of course there is an important difference between a lie and a mistake. I think there are plenty of well-meaning and thoughtful people who disagree with me, and that doesn't make them liars. And plenty of us who trusted our parents and our childhood rectors believed the claims of the Episcopal Church and acted, at least for a while, with invincible ignorance and in good faith. So, to the extent that that describes the bishop, then he is certainly NOT a liar, or wasn't one.

There is another problem: As pastors, we see a few lives turned around, and our ministrations are involved. We see what certainly appear to be Divine blessings flowing, as it appears, through our what we sincerely think are our sacramental acts.

And, as AnAmericanMother says there are lay people who have been baptized in the name of the Trinity and with the affusion of water, and who have made a public and sincere commitment of mature faith in our Lord, and who then come to a service sincerely desiring to receive and sincerely believing that they DO receive the Body and Blood of Our Lord in the sacrament, undertaken with the intention of obedience to His command and hope in His promises.

Now my opinion, very likely wrong and erroneous, and possibly heterodox (in which case I beg for authoritative correction) is that we ought not to be astonished that the God who loves us so much , who wants all to be saved, who does not willingly afflict or grieve us, ... we should not be astonished if he responds by showering graces on such people with such holy motivations.

So there is what I will call an "attempt" at a sacrament, and there is a REAL blessing somehow resulting or otherwise associated with that attempt.

If that is a possible account, then it is just sloppy thinking to argue that "going over to Rome" would be a denial of the perceived reality of God's grace operating through one's ministrations.

IN fact, I would timidly offer that the increasing sense of a call to the Catholic Church might be a proof (or at least an example) of God's generous grace operating through those who stayed in their Anglican tents rather than obey the summons to join with others. After all, two things are true: "Better late than never," is one. The other is, that knowing you are late is rarely a good reason to dawdle or an excuse for not coming to the party at all.

It is, I suggest, a kind of faithlessness or despair to think that God would NEVER act in one's life and through one's ministry, that one had to deny all God's previous mercies because one perceived a summons to a fuller obedience in a community more closely tied to God's promises.

TO maintain (please stipulate for a minute, if you do not agree)(1) that God has pledged always to act graciously through ministrations of the priests of the Catholic Church; and (2) that He has NOT made such a guarantee concerning, say, Anglican clergy) does NOT require than one believe that He NEVER acts graciously through them.

I'm nearing the end here, thanks for holding on ...

Through the storm and smoke of my sins, I was given such grace that I occasionally, too rarely, was able to form an act of will to give myself and my ministry to God. In my frowardness I rarely hold true to that intention. But in His always astonishingly great mercy, God not only helps me renew that half-hearted self-offering, but, little by little, shows me what it means. I am only a baby, fit only for milk, not for the red meat of mature discipleship. But, by the grace of God, I sometimes and sufficiently free from perversity to desire more and more milk that I may grow and become stronger, and one day perhaps, prompted, supported, borne along by the Love of God and His angels and saints, herded, guided, chivvied, prodded and poked, and occasionally scourged, maybe I will prove to be at least not a total loss as a servant. Now that THERE would be a thrill beyond reckoning!

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