Posted on 06/23/2008 1:10:17 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
I was reminded recently of Cardinal Newman's famous comment regarding the Anglican Via Media as a "religion on paper". According to him, when he and his Tractarian friends had tried to reinvent the Ecclesia Anglicana as a replica of the patristic church, what they ended up with was a church that never existed -- not within the formative Christian centuries or later. They had sought to create an ideal Church, perhaps the ecclesiastical counterpart to utopian social experiments of the same time. Marx and his spiritual heirs sought the Primeval Commune. Anglo-Catholics sought, and still seek, the Primitive Church.
As a confirmed ecclesiastical idealist, I submit that Newman's church is, and always was, a church on paper. I don't mean the Roman Church which he later joined nor the Anglican Church which he left. I'm referring to the church of theological reflection logically separated from the church of practical experience.
The Paper Church goes by many names. First and foremost there is the New Testament Church. When I attended Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, my chiding Evangelical classmates vowed to find me a "good New Testament church" in order to deliver me from the errant Episcopal Church -- errant not because of the apostasy of recent decades but because of its perennial apostasy of catholicism and traditionalism. The comment under my breath regarding the church of the New Testament was, "Oh, you mean the church that had neither New Testaments nor churches."
For the early Newman there was the Undivided Church of the first Christian millennium, catholic but pre-Roman, reformed but not Protestant. In describing it he and his Tractarians gave rise to a lasting genre of Anglican revisionist history, adapting (for example) the Articles of Religion to doctrinal statements from the Council of Trent. They claimed to have located a stratum of latent ecclesial essence -- what William Reed Huntington later called "the Church Idea". Since then the pastoral task of Anglo-Catholics has been to actualize this platonic Idea of Church, of which all concrete instances are withering imitations. The catholic revival in England led to a renewed vision of Anglicanism as the Generic Catholic Church. Such was the pastoral commitment underlying the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral in the emerging era of ecumenism. The final ascendency of the catholic revival in the American Church was formalized with the adoption of the "new" Prayer Book of 1979.
For Newman the term "religion on paper" was purely derogatory, and so is the analogous "church on paper." It refers to a church of illusion, a pseudo-church, and -- as Newman the convert would call it -- a heretical church. In its defense it is a "potential" church. The present Pope has affirmed it as partaking of "ecclesial reality". Still it is not the true Church, which is always and everywhere coterminous with the Church of Rome.
I would like to propose another identity for the Paper Church which captivates the ecclesiastical fantasy of every generation. It is the church of reflection logically separated from the church of history; the church of theory as distinguished from the church of practice. Like the platonic Idea, it is what every Christian church imitates and none equals.
Ever since Newman Anglicans have performed a ritual called "swimming the Tiber" -- i.e., converting to Roman Catholicism -- following the realization that the church whose sustenance they sought over the years has been a church of their imaginations. They have come at long last to recognize that the church of Reality is the Church of Rome. Anglicans today flee their jurisdictions en masse seeking solace in what they hope will be a church that eschews the new paganisms of the postmodern era, typified by the churches of Liberal Protestantism. For some this move may be an attempt to escape a dysfunctional local parish or denomination. For others it may signal a genuine spiritual conversion or at least an open-eyed willingness to submit to spiritual authority. For still others (as in my own case a decade ago) it may be an expression of personal restlessness and a driving compulsion to escape the accompanying angst which turned out to be self-generated.
In each of these cases I have noticed a tendency to criticize the church one is renouncing on the basis of its failures in practice while praising the church to which one flees -- typically the Roman Church -- based upon the latter's theoretical integrity. In other words the convert is comparing apples and oranges, comparing the chaotic moral adventures of some of the Anglican Churches with the most exquisite formulations of the Roman Catholic Church. Typically the convert makes this comparison unconsciously, when he has emotionally already changed his affiliation. He is making straw arguments to support his decision.
A man can be expected to praise the woman he has chosen to marry, being intoxicated with her charm and strength of character. The woman he almost married but finally rejected will appear in comparison to be hopelessly flawed. Here again we are comparing apples and oranges. We are making a very understandable straw argument.
When I stood poised on the theoretical bank of the Tiber a decade ago, I had mastered Anglo-Catholic historiography with (for example) its haughty disdain of the Reformation as "that Protestant revolt." I had given my own magisterial approval to the doctrines of Rome. I had determined that the flaws of the Episcopal Church were the inevitable outgrowth of her defective theology and of the dissolute nature of Protestantism from the beginning. And yet my clay feet remained fixed on that platonic precipice.
In my particular case I found that I was stuck in my professional and personal life. It was a welcome and all too convenient diversion to project this upon the Episcopal Church, even if my critique of her theological deformity was otherwise sound. What I had longed for was to be transubstantiated or transmigrated into a new set of personal circumstances -- like Dorothy, to be propelled out of Kansas by a contrived calamity. The matter of converting to a new community of live persons, whose local history overshadowed the abstract "history" I had studiously come to advocate, was something I had not really considered.
I know that my case is not typical of every convert to Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, I have met several for whom my case was illustrative and assisted some in stepping back from a precipice which for them would have been a springboard to further illusion and crisis.
What I have not failed to encounter in countless conversations with would-be converts to Roman Catholicism is the tendency to compare Roman theory with Anglican (or Protestant) practice, as if one were converting from the church of crumbling imperfection to the shimmering Church of pure contemplation. Until Jesus comes back this latter Church will be a Church on Paper.
One of the great successes of the Tractarians was redefining “traditional Anglican worship” as having all the pomp and ceremony of a high Tridentine mass. Those who oppose the theological innovations (I know, “innovations” is an understatement) of the last few years are automatically assumed to be Tractarians or “Anglo-Catholics.”
The Roman Catholic church is home to many sinners, for sure but still the incomparable beauty of being able to live an intense sacramental life has no equal.
To anyone considering swimming the Tiber—come on over! The water does have sharks and no one can promise that the journey will be easy. But it is worth everything!
The Roman Catholic church is home to many sinners, for sure but still the incomparable beauty of being able to live an intense sacramental life has no equal.
To anyone considering swimming the Tiber—come on over! The water does have sharks and no one can promise that the journey will be easy. But it is worth everything!
It was a long journey. I began to listen to EWTN and became great friends with Fr Paul Keenan. He showing me by quiet example about his faith.
I saw something there that was missing in my life.
I held off crossing over, I think because I did not want to hurt my moms feeling.
Like most moms I believe she knew what was in my heart, because one evening when I got home from work, she told me she found something at a yard sale I might like.
She handed me a Catholic Bible, and said, "I think you are one already."
After her death I began to attend one of the local Catholic Churches. After attending for a year I began RCIA classes.
It was a little difficult telling my brothers and sisters.
I was really struggling until, the night before the Easter Vigil, I had a dream that I was sitting in the pews and I looked over and there was my mom sitting right next to me.
None of my family challenged me, after hearing that story.
Without a doubt it was the best decision I ever made.
It’s no easy decision to make. After a tangled journey I’ve come back to my grandmother’s church, the Presbyterian.
One does not turn one’s back on one’s grandmother, esp when one’s own mother is a Unitarian.
My minister has been a source of strength and hope over a long personal crisis. These people have been friends for me, I am not about to just leave my church without a good reason.
All the same, I grow aware of that reason. Ever since blessed John Paul II died I have been paying attention to the One True Faith. I watch ETWN, I listen to Bishop Sheen, who my grandmother also watched faithfully. I hear the patient feet of the Hound of Heaven, I can not evade them forever.
If it is to be so, let me dive in without hesitation.
I’m a former Assembly of God (a stoic German, that didn’t work lol), Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran etc etc...My wife, who is devout Catholic never pressured me to convert when we got married. I did agree to raise the children Catholic since I did not have any solid foundation in a specific church.
Eventually, I wanted to learn what my children would be learning so I educated myself...eventually I felt the call to the Church. It has been a process for me, immersing myself into the Church with different intensity levels at different times. ...I’ll say this, I’ve felt the Spirit so strongly in the Catholic Church taking the Eucharist...and in the simplest of words in the Mass....”Jesus, Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, ...Have Mercy on us”....simple yet deeply meaningful and powerful.
Love it on this side of the Tiber.
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