Roman option.

DAVID DOOLEY

In November 1992 the Church of England--the mother church for Anglican communities in the old Commonwealth and in the United States--decided to allow women ministers. Thus an opportunity of grace presented itself to the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom: would they accept Anglicans coming over from the Church of England seeking the "Roman Option" as a bloc or only as individuals? This is the subject of William Oddie's book The Roman Option (London, HarperCollins, 1997, pp 256, softcover only available in Can $19.00). David Dooley discusses what was involved and how the "liberal" faction within the Catholic Church discouraged Anglican conversions.

William Oddie is the author of an excellent study of feminism's impact on Christianity, What Will Happen to God? (1986) This book is more uneven, but parts of it are fascinating. The reader will be left wondering, "Did things really happen this way? Did the feminists really hoodwink the English Catholic bishops and block the movement of Anglicans to the Church of Rome?" Anyone who thinks that women's ordination would solve the problems of the Church ought to read this book, and reflect on what happened after the General Synod of the Church of England voted to take such a step on November 11, 1992.

Women's ordination

In Dean's Yard in London, lady deacons in clerical collars sang jubilant songs and drank champagne straight out of bottles. Dr. David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, hoped that opposition to the decision would turn out to be a matter of "huffing and puffing but little blowing down of houses." But many reacted like an Oxford cleric who said, "When I heard about the vote, the first thing I did was to take off my clerical collar, and put on lay clothes."

In many churches, the theme of the sermon on the following Sunday was, "The Church of England as we know it and love it and to which many of us hoped to dedicate our lives is no more." Anglicans of this stripe had thought of themselves as members of the Church Universal, with three branches: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican. Now they felt that the Church of England had abandoned its claim to be of apostolic origin, and had become merely a Protestant sect. A Notting Hill vicar asked what options were now open, and answered his own question: "They are like the options open to anyone who suffers a bereavement."

Oddie, a former Anglician minister who had already become a Catholic, approached Dr. Graham Leonard, the retired Bishop of London, who was known to have Catholic leanings, and convinced him to submit an article to the Catholic Herald outlining what the possible options were. Leonard pointed out that the legislation would not become effective for a year, so that there was time to think; but, he said, "we must make it clear beyond any shadow of doubt that we cannot accept the change." Stressing that people who felt as he did ought to strive to stay together, he also said, "We must seek to be admitted to the communion of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, and to do so not as individuals but as a body of those who are committed to orthodox belief and practice."

Move in a body

Far from being dead in the water, as one reporter expected, Leonard's initiative became front-page news in the national dailies and on radio news programmes. It was discussed at a conference of the Catholic bishops, and following this Cardinal Hume issued a statement to the effect that Leonard's proposals should be examined carefully.

Oddie follows in considerable detail the twists and turns of subsequent negotiations; but they can be summed up in three quotations he puts near the beginning of his book:

"This could be a big moment of grace, it could be the conversion of England for which we have prayed all these years. I am terrified now we are going to turn round and say we do not want these newcomers. We have prayed for Christian unity and now it could be happening: a realignment of English Christianity so as to bring us closer together, in two blocs, instead of lots of blocs" (Basil Cardinal Hume, February 1993).

"Basil tends to go over the top rather; we had to claw him back from the edge of the precipice" (Crispian Hollis, Bishop of Portsmouth, Eastertide 1993).

"What are the English bishops afraid of?" (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Eastertide 1993).

Leonard made it clear that the great majority of those who had written to him were not extreme Anglo-Catholics, but "just C. of E."--ordinary Anglicans who wished to stand by the traditional doctrines. For them women's ordination was not the real issue; it was the final straw, the end of a process of liberalization and secularization, marked by the fact that the Church of England now claimed the right to make unilateral decisions about both doctrine and the apostolic ministry. Most of the Anglicans looking to Rome hoped that they would be able to preserve something of their own tradition, especially their liturgical style, avoiding the banality of current Catholic usage.

At a meeting on March 27, 1993, the Cardinal warned that there were major decisions to be made, but that two things coming from Rome would encourage them. The Vatican kept in mind, he said, a quotation from Dom Lambert Beaudoin, "united, not absorbed," which implied that they could enter the Church and retain something of their own background. Second, "the Holy Father has also asked us to remember Acts 15, verse 28." When they looked it up, they found that it said, "For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things." If it was not clear what the "necessary things "were in this situation, the Pope's message certainly seemed to be one of encouragement.

On March 27, then, a breakthrough seemed possible. When the Cardinal spoke to his own clergy on April 1, however, he assured them that no new structures would be stablished, that any concessions made to groups of Anglicans would be temporary, and that the realignment of English Christianity would be very gradual: "We are not going to rush into anything."

March 27-April 1: the feminist counter-attack

What had happened in the interval? It had become clear that many Catholics, including some very obdurate bishops, were in no mood to be flexible. Bishop Crispian Hollis, the villain of the piece in Oddie's eyes, was claiming that many of his colleagues were worried about "single-issue" converts--even though Cardinal Hume had been telling the bishops for months that it was not a single-issue question. Hollis thought that Hume had become dangerously over-enthusiastic about the Roman option. He even said to one supporter of it, "But don't you see that the Cardinal has gone mad?"

Probably few of the Anglicans attracted to Catholicism realized the extent of the divisions among Catholics themselves. One day Dr. Leonard bumped into Lord Longford, himself a convert, and a board member of the prestigious (but not orthodox) Catholic journal The Tablet. "We're all against you at The Tablet," he told Leonard, "we're all in favour of women priests." As Oddie says, the last thing Catholics in favour of women's ordination wanted was an influx of Anglicans opposing it; the last thing the "liberals" wanted was converts more submissive to Rome than they were themselves.

Sister Myra Poole, founder of Catholic Women's Ordination, said it would be intolerable to allow hundreds of Anglican ministers to join the Catholic Church together:

These people probably have no idea how radical the Catholic Church is and just do not realize how strong we are on things like liberation and feminist theology. . . .Their outdated ideas could put back the progress we have been making by 100 years. I can assure you that there will be quite an outcry if they come across en masse.

According to Oddie, Bishop Hollis had never been known for excessive deference to authority; "I've just had another letter from that bloody Delegate," he said to one startled group of laity, brandishing a letter from the Papal Nuncio.

More pertinent to the Roman Option question was his support for Mary Grey, a professor at the highly radicalized Dutch Catholic University of Nijmegen and an advocate of the goddess movement. When a chair of theology became established on the merger of the Catholic La Sainte Union College with Southampton University, and Mary Grey was the person appointed, it was widely suspected that Bishop Hollis was responsible for her selection. In Low Week 1993, she had an article in the Times opposing the Roman Option, in which she mounted a strong attack on the idea of authority in the Catholic Church. What she disliked about the prospective converts was that they would swell the numbers of those defending the Vatican and ignore "those of us within the Catholic Church inspired by a very different notion of authority.".

At a time when so many liberal Caholics were irked by the Magisterium, for Anglicans to say that they had come to see the need for it was hardly going to win them the sympathy of the radical element. As Oddie writes, there was a war going on into which the Anglican refugees had innocently stumbled, only to find themselves the targets of sniper attacks:" Refugees they might be: but they were not perceived as neutral. The Cardinal himself had unwittingly affixed targets to their backs."

No corporate conversion

On April 26, 1993, Cardinal Hume gave the reponse of the English bishops to the Anglican approaches. Everyone present agreed that the Cardinal had given a brilliant performance, though no one was sure exactly what he had said. But the idea of whole parishes moving to full communion with Rome, yet preserving something of the Anglican cultural heritage, seemed to be ruled out; the expression "united, not absorbed" had been replaced by "their eventual total integration."

There might have been many Anglican parishes desiring union with Rome whose hopes were dashed, Oddie speculates, by lack of imagination, coolness, or even in a few cases outright hostility on the Catholic side. There were of course many individual conversions--including that of Bishop Leonard, who is now Father Leonard, an ordained Catholic priest.

It is a somewhat depressing story which Oddie tells, and tells well--the story of a failure of Christian charity. Nevertheless, he is not depressed by it himself. His book is an object lesson, emphasizing the need for understanding of prospective converts rather than suspicion of their motives. In his opinion, women's ordination has opened up a future for Anglicanism radically different from its past: it is now a Protestant church, which should align itself with Methodism and create a united Protestant front. Anglo-Catholicism and ARCIC--the ecumenical dialogue between Anglicanism and Catholicism--are dead, but the Catholic Church has become a more influential part of English life than it has been since the Reformation And the process of change and conversion is going to continue, involving "more pain and more healing, more petty stupidity and more inspired vision; . . . but in the end all this will be cast aside by the glorious Grace of God, sweeping through his people and bringing them at last safe home."

D.J. Dooley is Professor emeritus in the Department of English, St. Michael's College, University of Toronto.