"A Bulwark Against Errors More Fundamental Than Its Own"

Thus did Blessed John Henry Newman describe the Church of England.

The latest remarks of Lord Carey have brought out the usual suspects. But he is a figure of a vanishing generation, of liberals with Charismatic backgrounds, who assume their own experience to be theologically normative and who work from there. They have plenty of reason to be bitter as they age.

The Church of England, for all its many faults, is doctrinally more orthodox than at any other time in living memory, and far more so than in the 1950s. Precisely therefore, it has never been more critical of capitalism and of its wars. The old order was decadent, and, like the then Tory party with which it was so bound up, only had a mass appeal because people needed to rebuild their social lives after one or both of the World Wars.

You could not now be ordained in the C of E if you did not believe in, say, the Virgin Birth. It never used to ask, really. But it does now. And it has become more and more critical of what the political Right has become, as it has become more and more insistently orthodox doctrinally. Well, of course.

A lot of this has to do with having modern language liturgy. Only the most hardline Calvinist can believe the words of the Book of Common Prayer, and that was its intention. But by as early as the eighteenth century, it had become about the beauty of the language, whereas the whole point of it in its day had been that it was in normal speech, in contrast to the Latin Mass.

Once the liturgy was in normal speech again, then the clergy, at least, had to believe it all again. With all the implications of that. Not least, the political implications.

Of course, it could all go away again. Only the Petrine Office guarantees orthodoxy perennially, permanently, and in its pristine plenitude. "Conservative" or "traditionalist" critics of Pope Francis are thinking, speaking and acting like Protestants. Perhaps especially, like Anglicans.