Migrating Anglo-Catholics: a tangled past & future.

The Reverend John Broadhurst's question hangs in the air like the smoke from his cigar. "What," he asks, "is the point at which an individual cannot walk down the same road in fellowship with another?" He leans his head back, takes a thoughtful drag. "At what point does a difference become a division?"

A leader of the Anglo-Catholic opposition to female priests in the Church of England, Broadhurst is responsible for pondering such fundamental queries. The church's ruling body, the General Synod, shocked Anglican conservatives on November 11, 1992, by voting in favor of female priests, jerking tears of joy from one side of the debate, tears of grief from the other. Though no women will be ordained until the legislation passes several parliamentary and synodical hurdles, the historic vote has forced the Anglo-Catholic contingent to outwardly organize, inwardly re-evaluate its place in a remarkably diverse church.

The dilemma facing Anglo-Catholics, whether to remain in the Church of England or to find a place in the Roman fold, was clarified on April 23 when Cardinal Basil Hume, archbishop of Westminster, announced the Catholic church's acceptance of unhappy Anglicans. The long-awaited invitation was offered with the stipulation that defecting clergy be reordained, and on the condition of an "individual yes" from every convert and "eventual total integration." Though the specific meaning of those words has not yet been determined, the historical implications of the announcement could not be denied. One reporter asked the cardinal if his statement marked the end of the over four-hundred-year-old schism between the two churches. Hume took a deep breath and said, "Could be."

The irony of the controversy is that disagreements over fundamental issues have existed in the Church of England for years. Indeed, many Anglicans feel the richness of their church lies in that it can accommodate hand-clapping Evangelicals, quiet middle-of-the-road Protestants, and Latin-chanting Catholics. But traditionalists have heralded the vote as an intolerable usurpation of doctrinal authority belonging only to the Catholic church. "Maybe we've lived in a cloud-cuckoo-land with Anglicanism," admits the Reverend Christopher Bedford, vicar of Saint Matthew's, an Anglo-Catholic church in London. "But never until the eleventh of November was it actually said that we would do something that actually contradicts [the Catholic tradition]."

The cardinal's announcement left much to be resolved. With entire parishes clamoring to secede from the Church of England, questions of group arrangements with the Catholic church and building custody have yet to be answered. How many Anglicans decide to cross lines will depend partly on whether or not the House of Bishops, when it convenes later this month, can agree upon some sort of alternative episcopal structure to appease traditionalists. Estimates vary, but the Catholic church in England guesses that up to three hundred clergy may convert and only time will tell how many lay people will follow. While a commission made of both Catholic and Anglican bishops will be hammering out the specifics of an agreement behind closed doors over the next few months, individual Christians are struggling to discern where they should worship each Sunday.

Saint Mary's is home to over one hundred Christians. Home of the highest Anglican rite in London and a well-to-do congregation, the ornate church draws worshipers from all over town. They come to celebrate Mass properly, brilliantly, with clouds of incense and a paid choir. Rodrick Gradidge, a die-hard Saint Mary's enthusiast, compares his church of forty-some years to a club, a place in which people may be themselves. Sipping his pint in a nearby pub after Mass, he explains that he will not leave the church, as he mistrusts the Vatican as a guardian of truth as much as he now mistrusts the synod. Dressed in a kilt, his grey hair in a braid, Gradidge exemplifies the sort of eccentricity characteristic of Saint Mary's. Indeed, the prospect of conforming to papal infallibility, to a universal authority, presents an ironic identity crisis for the Anglo-Catholic who has, for so many years, thrived on the extreme edge of the Church of England. Nevertheless, a future in a church which allows women priests is unsettling for Gradidge. "We can still say we are members of the Church of England and of Saint Mary's, and I pray to God we can always say that - but I don't know how it can happen," he says.

While Saint Mary's will lose a substantial fraction of the congregation, and maybe even its clergy, to the Catholic church, most will stay. There is an emotional aversion to the Catholic church for many upper-class Anglicans. Elizabeth Mills, who sits in the front-row pew at Saint Mary's every Sunday, says, "There's something rather dubious and lower-middle class about being nonconformist." The Church of England, throughout Mills's childhood, was always associated with affairs of state and society: "brownie" service, morning matins, the military medals her father wore to church. It was a singularly English experience that was very much attached to a specific building. The Irish Catholics, on the other hand, have historically been victims of discrimination in English society. They were outsiders and poor and worshiped in tin huts, she explains. Prejudice against Catholics, Mills says, "is deeply entrenched within the British psyche."

Such aversion to Catholicism is not to be found at Saint Matthew's, a parish surrounded by public housing developments in a poor, east London area. The vicar, Bedford, has written a letter to the Anglican bishop of London that asks for permission to move Saint Matthew's and all its assets to the Catholic church. The parishioners anticipate liberation. The Catholic church, they feel, will offer them a new spiritual home. This enthusiasm is fueled by the unwavering papalism of the clergy. "There can only be one captain of the church and in the end that's the pope," says Bedford. "The General Synod and [Archbishop of Canterbury] George Carey I have no time for whatsoever." Not long ago that would have been a fairly outrageous statement for an Anglican vicar to make. But the November 11 vote has, for the more ardent traditionalists, eliminated the need for the pretense of compatibility. At Saint Matthew's and similar churches, union with the Catholic church is no longer the guiding light in the far-off future; it is an immediacy.

The official Anglo-Catholic complaint about the November 11 vote is that the Church of England, as a branch of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church (and not an autonomous, Protestant sect), hasn't the authority to make critical doctrinal decisions such as who may enjoy the privilege of celebrating the Eucharist. Says Michael Barwick of Saint Matthew's, "I passionately believe the Church of England may not decide on its own." He struggles to pinpoint the passion. Touching on a thread common to all strands of the Anglo-Catholic opposition, he laments the increasing influence of secular liberalism in British Christianity. "It's the truth that's important and you can't vote the truth away," he says. "It [liberal theology] is such a mess it ceases to be anything you can have confidence in being true."

While the traditionalists condemn this breach of Catholic tradition all over the London Times's editorial pages, a less public mistrust of progressive ideology quietly drives the opposition forward. For many Anglo-Catholics, women priests are another manifestation of the potent liberalism imported from America that, once inside the church house doors, will only wreak more havoc on a timeless perfection. "We should be waiting for the dust of feminism to fall," says the Reverend Bill Scott, vicar of Saint Mary's. "It's very much living in a fog, as it were, and when one lives in a fog one tries to be as careful as one can until the fog lifts."

At no point in recent history has the Church of England been in such a fog as this. As most Anglo-Catholics will argue, today's controversy is about a great deal more than whether or not women should say Mass. It is about the fact that less than 3 percent of the English population darkens Anglican church doors on Sundays. It is about the escalation of crime and homelessness in Britain, and about the senseless murders, the sort formerly only heard of in American cities, that are being committed in London neighborhoods. While newspaper pundits complain of the corruption of British youth and the increasingly secular nation crawls wounded out of the recession, a divided Church of England is being forced to examine how it can maintain and, in many places, regain, its position as England's moral center.

Paul Jaskunas is a student at Oberlin College. He has been following the debate in the Church of England while studying in London this spring.