The Ongoing Homecoming of Dr Edward Norman

My reading has been a little behind due to recent hospitalisations and their aftermaths. But I have finally made my way through Dr Edward Norman’s The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History.

The chapters on the roots of the Reformation in Catholicism’s own reforming tradition, on the Catholic Reformation (alas, Dr Norman uses the term “Counter-Reformation”) as the true continuation of that tradition (not least in its Spanish expression, completely ignored in the English-speaking world), on the post-Tridentine missions to “all nations”, and on the relationship between Church and State during the Modern period, are superb and long-overdue additions to the mainstream of educated knowledge in this country.

Specific settings of the record straight would, however, have been welcome on such matters as the Church’s preservation of Classical thought and literature, the roots of science precisely in the content of the Faith, the Spanish Inquisition, the attitude of English Catholics to the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, and so forth.

But this is a remarkable book, not least in that it manifests in practice that a critical historiography is totally compatible with the Catholic orthodox to which, for some reason, Dr Norman has still yet to submit formally, four years after undertaking very publicly to do so, and even a year after publishing this book.

Within three of the early years of the present decade, one of Britain’s, and especially England’s, most misunderstood and unsung prophets went from “the first attempt to define Anglicanism since Thomas Cranmer” (according to The Daily Telegraph) to possibly the most devastating analysis of the Church of England ever written. Yet still he waits at the Flaminian Gate of Rome.

Some Catholic accounts of Dr Norman have called him “Low Church” (a term that no one ever uses in self-description). But in fact he comes from the bottom-line orthodox Middle Church tradition far more prevalent among the laity. These often have to put up with very liberal clergy, especially in rural areas where it might be logistically difficult and socially impossible to attend another church, at which the situation would probably be just the same anyway.

So, then, An Anglican Catechism (2001) puts on record the religion in and on which many of us were brought up. Certain more hysterical elements claimed at the time that Dr Norman had sold the pass on homosexuality; but this is not in fact the case, and it is difficult to see how any such conclusion could reasonably have been drawn.

An Anglican Catechism is orthodox on Trinitarian and Christological matters, broadly Catholic on ecclesiology and sacramental theology (with the usual significant caveats), and what its author probably then saw as qualified in its Calvinism where soteriology is concerned. Now, of course, he would doubtless agree that this is not in fact what, in Secularisation, he calls the Church of England’s “half-rejected digest of Calvinism”, but rather Augustinian Catholicism less than perfectly expressed.

This Catechism is totally pro-life, and upholds the highest standards of sexual morality, including so lukewarm and hedged-about an endorsement of artificial contraception within marriage as to constitute, quite obviously, no endorsement at all, but rather the reverse.

Furthermore, as also in the other books under review, Norman does much to dispel his reputation as, oxymoronically, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite intellectual. Was his a guiding influence behind the legalisation of abortion up to birth, and of destructive experimentation on embryonic human beings?

Or behind the destruction of the stockades of working-class male employment, and thus of patriarchal authority within those families and communities, communities that opponents of patriarchy would do well to compare before and after that destruction?

Or behind the maxim that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation? Or behind the accompanying misdefinition of liberty as the “freedom” to behave in absolutely any way that one sees fit?

Of course not! Yet such is Norman’s “Thatcherite” reputation that the following quite long quotation is in order:

“An approved conduct of economic activity must tend to the creation of wealth which is as widely available to members of society as is compatible with effective wealth-creating processes. The means of production, distribution and exchange, whether in public or in private ownership, should be arranged with a definite moral purpose: justice in society.

This implies, for example, the legitimacy of the organisation of labour; of reasonable profits for those who risk capital; a regulation by public authority of wages and conditions of labour; statutory control of minimum requirements for terms of employment to secure dignity in labour; provision for health and safety; decent housing; holiday benefits; protection for investors in private enterprises; fair taxation (which, to achieve what may be considered fairness, may include a redistributive element); access to transport; protection for savings.”

Furthermore is endorsed:

“Social provision, including a public health service, with its attendant ancillary benefits; state pensions for the elderly and disadvantaged; guaranteed payments to those who are sick; education at public expense; free and equal access to justice; the discouraging in ordinary circumstances of capital punishment; support for measures to foster racial and sexual equality; measures which recognise the advantages of social diversity where this is beneficial to the whole society.”

All this, and totally pro-life too? Welcome home, Edward Norman!

And so, first to Secularisation (2002), and then to Anglican Difficulties (2004).

Secularisation begins thus: “Christianity and modern materialist Humanism ought to be at war with each other and they are not. Why should this be so?” According to Norman, the regularly churchgoing remnant of the population, and its large but declining hinterland of occasional churchgoers, has effectively concocted from various secular sources current in the culture something that they have declared to be Christianity, but which is not in fact any such thing.

He sees this problem as particularly serious in the Church of England, where the very institution itself has massively bought into the secular creed. In his preface, he writes that, “The leaders of English Christianity [in which, at this stage, he still saw the Church of England as the leading element] appear completely integrated with the idea of the ‘plural society’, largely, it is to be supposed, because they make the common error of defining it almost solely around issues of ethnic rather than moral diversity.”

However, we are in no position to be complacent: “Even within the Roman Catholic Church, with its greater uniformity of self-identity – as one would expect of a truly international body – the laity (and even a few clergy) are drifting into habits of thought, and attitudes about the acceptance of religious authority, which share much common ground with the national Protestantism.”

This book contains many gems. It recognises, as so few do, that the decline in church attendance was already at least a century old by the 1960s. It discerns that the true Western liberal problem with Islam is precisely its insistence on organising cultures and societies in accordance with specifically religious principles.

And it expresses the alarm and astonishment of many of us, both that the attitudes of the 1960s remain so prevalent in ministerial formation when they have long since gone by the board in academia generally, and that what those attitudes have become in practice (Political Correctness and the like) is actually dependent on the rotten capitalist system that it therefore cannot critique.

The only real quibble is with the claim that bishops need not have considerable experience of parochial ministry. Anglican friends also challenge very forcefully Dr Norman’s suggestion that any such requirement is being applied in fact, saying that they only wish it were so.

This complaint recurs in relation to Anglican Difficulties, in which, however, Dr Norman lets rip to brilliantly devastating effect. Quite rightly, he identifies the rise of Anglo-Catholicism as the root cause of the present crisis; although he does not say so, his arguments against it, which have been those of Anglo-Protestantism since the outset, have also been those of the Catholic Church for just as long.

The attempts to hold together fish and fowl, not in the Catholic sense of an orthodox position and various types of dissent (treated as such, because deserving to be), but as equally legitimate, has made the Church of England institutionally incapable of taking any sort of decision.

How true this is. For example, one might reasonably have expected the admission of women to the presbyterate to have been a one-clause measure. But instead, it was in fact effected by a dreadful piece of legislation declaring, in its first clause, that “women can now be priests”, and in every rambling subsequent clause (indeed, in the very fact of subsequent clauses), “but not really”.

As Dr Norman writes, this is the only schism in Christian history to have been legislated for by the leaders of the body thus afflicted by schism. One might add that it leaves the Church of England actually bound together precisely by the absence of a common order, as well as by the absence of a common body of doctrine or a common liturgical life.

Unity means simply being paid out of the same funds, a situation in principle capable of being extended ad infinitum, to everyone willing to pool their assets in return for all their clergy’s being paid and housed in the style of the Church of England’s.

The Church of England’s new Common Worship is totally misnamed, and effectively allows congregations to make up the Sunday services, and clergy to make up the occasional services, to suit their own perceived therapeutic needs. The only way that one could now go into two Anglican churches in England and find them both using the same service would be either if they both used the Prayer Book (very unusual) or both used the Roman Rite (actually illegal).

It is true that some people do dreadful things to our own Liturgy, although of course this is becoming much less common. And anyway, those are abuses, whereas Common Worship has actually been designed to express middle-class solidarity in the cause of personal therapy, and to enable people to keep on living in the Sixties and Seventies into their own sixties and seventies.

The Church of England does not in practice condemn abortion or fornication. Indeed, the latter is endemic everywhere beyond the Evangelical wing, including where apparently the most “traditional” liturgical lives are maintained, since these often co-exist (as among our own reactionaries) with the most bizarre theological and other opinions.

Nor does the Church of England condemn either capitalism or Marxism, although Dr Norman’s contention that it used to take a strong line against capitalism will raise plenty of eyebrows. When, exactly?

As for the Marxism, the Church of England has retained the vocabulary and rhetoric, as filtered through the ideologically unserious Liberation Theology of yesteryear (most characteristically Marxian, not so much in its content as in its academic upper-middle-classness). But the words are used to mean something directly dependent on capitalism red in tooth and claw, and of benefit only to the very few material beneficiaries of that crumbling system. In all of this, it is much like some Catholics. But it is utterly unlike the Catholic Church Herself.

I feel an agony writing this, because there are so many good people in the Anglican and the various Nonconformist bodies. But the days of those bodies as Cardinal Newman’s “bulwarks against errors more fundamental than their own” are over, and were really over a very long time ago. Those who are not so fundamentally in error, by no means only Anglo-Catholics or Conservative Evangelicals, need to get out.

Of course, as we are so often told, “Rome has problems, too.” But Her problems are not fundamental to Her being. She recognises them to be problems, rather than inevitable facts of life. And She therefore has ways and means of dealing with them. People who are wrong can be, and are, told that they are wrong, something that the Church of England can never tell anyone.

All of which makes the whole project of An Anglican Catechism, in itself, a bit of a waste of time and effort, interesting though is the little book thus produced. The Secularisation is now complete, such that the Anglican Difficulties have become insurmountable. As Dr Edward Norman has now all but recognised, and will undoubtedly come to recognise.

And as many more must now be made to recognise, in all courtesy, and in all charity properly so called.