Thursday 16 October 2014

Asunder

I had promised several people, including myself, that I would not write about the Synod until it was over, if then.

But oh, puh-lease! As the late Michael Vasey, of Strangers and Friends, once said to me, "I don't agree with outing, but some people are asking for it."

He was talking about a leading Anglo-Catholic who is now in the Ordinariate. And who is by no means the worst of those who are now in that.

"All very Anglican," says Mabel of this and that. Well, yes. But no more so than extravagantly High gay men who are obsessed with the evil of divorce.

And no more so than self-conscious traditionalists who are convinced that the Church is about to fall into error, or has already done so.

Leaving them as a faithful remnant, more-or-less outside Her institutional life at least above parish level, and even then with a fairly elastic definition of the parochia.

They are as Anglican as people who think that synods can and should change doctrine in conformity to secular society.

Thompson is also the Queen Regnant of a very particular church within the Church in Britain, inhabiting islands in an ocean of cultural Anglicanism, if anything.

Islands of private schooling. Islands of Tory voting. Islands in the South outside London (and not even all of that) or certain other historical pockets of immigration, mostly Irish, and mostly quite a while ago now.

There is nothing intrinsically un-Catholic about being privately schooled, or a Tory, or a suburban or shire Southerner, or a Telegraph Group journalist.

But it does make you odd within the Church in this country. It does cut you off from the full breadth and depth of Her life, and leave you cleaving to Rome because you have nothing in between.

Thompson writes for those Catholics. He writes as one of those Catholics.

He also writes very definitely from one side of traditionalism's, like Anglo-Catholicism's, own most divisive issue, that of male homosexuality.

He will be called to account sooner or later. My money would now be on sooner.

No comments:

Post a Comment