“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.
If there was ever a possibility for this “Anglo-Catholicism,” along the Orthodox model, it seems to me it was cut short by the political developments of the 17th Century. During the 18th Century, both “high church” and “low church,” elements in the Cof E. were heavily influenced by the reform tradition. John Henry Newman, who came from an evangelical family to Oxford, followed this “Third Way” until he found that his bishops were not bishops in the traditional sense but governmental officials in a sense that no Orthodox/Catholic bishop ought to be. Erasmianism has been the fatal flaw in the C.of E. The Liturgical Movement dressed up the priests in catholic looking garments, and there was a return of sorts to early Anglicanism, but it could not carry the day.