There has always been a strong strain of anti-Catholicism in the English church (mostly political in origin). But it is odd to see it in the "Anglo-Catholics" who usually avoid it like the plague.
The Anglican Black Legend lives on . . . .
There has always been a strong strain of anti-Catholicism in the English church (mostly political in origin). But it is odd to see it in the "Anglo-Catholics" who usually avoid it like the plague.
I think that you need to place the passage in the historical context of 1931 and the objective at that time of carving out an Anglo-Catholic identity within the C of E. As you know, Anglo-Catholicism is no longer entirely anchored to Canterbury, especially if one considers the Continuing Anglican movement that originated in the 1970s. Freed from a need to serve as apologists for "the English Reformation", Anglo-Catholic thought seems to be developing a greater self-awareness as an English speaking analog to Eastern Orthodoxy.
“The characterization here of Catholicism is a total straw-man, and almost entirely inaccurate.
There has always been a strong strain of anti-Catholicism in the English church (mostly political in origin). But it is odd to see it in the “Anglo-Catholics” who usually avoid it like the plague.
The Anglican Black Legend lives on . . . .”
Seems to me more a characterization of “Romanism” rather than Catholicism. I can’t say that Anglicanism ever attained that sort of Catholicism in the West that the first article claims for it. I simply am not familiar enough with it to know. But I do recognize some of the same attitudes which mark and have marked Orthodoxy for a couple of thousand years,... and for and from a period long, long before the Great Schism. That’s not anti-Catholicism, AM. If its “anti” anything, its anti-Romanism.