Cutting Through The Cantuar

It is not my custom to soil the Anglican nest. Had I not been hatched in it, then I might never have known the essential doctrinal and moral principles of classical Christianity, mediated by the whole Augustinian patrimony of the West, for the sake of all of which I now rejoice to find myself in the full visible communion of the Petrine See. But a few things I will say, if only because no one else seems willing to do so.

First, the Anglican Communion, far from being centred on the Church of England, was largely founded by people who disliked it intensely, and who had deliberately gone to the ends of the earth so that they could escape from it and start again from scratch. Almost every part of it is therefore either monolithically Evangelical or monolithically Anglo-Catholic, depending on its specific origin. The links that it maintains in these islands, in North America, in Australia or in New Zealand are almost, if almost, exclusively in that same vein.

Secondly, those links do of course extend in both directions. Thus, Evangelical or Anglo-Catholic American congregations have recently experienced no difficulty or delay whatever in obtaining like-minded bishops from Africa, Asia or Latin America. The same could perfectly easily happen here; indeed, that process has already begun.

Recognition by Canterbury is neither here nor there, and those American dioceses which have amended their constitutions to replace references to the Episcopal Church with references to the Anglican Communion simply do not have the Church of England in mind at all. Indeed, it is abundantly clear that neither side in America has ever even heard of the theory, so cherished within the Church of England as a delusion of imperial grandeur, that unity with Canterbury is of the slightest importance, never mind being of determinative importance.

And thirdly, in the increasingly unlikely event of a Lambeth Conference next year, why should those American bishops who have made flagrantly racist remarks about their African brethren be permitted to set foot in this country? Their compatriots David Duke and Louis Farrakhan are not so permitted, and nor should be these prelates.

Likewise, since he is a Swiss (i.e., a non-EU) national, it would be perfectly simple to exclude Hans Küng, whose repeated disparaging references to Pope John Paul II’s Polishness have long made him the voice of the age-old Teutonic racism against the Slavs, only tolerated because he is Swiss. That Exclusion Order should be issued forthwith.