Traditionalist Catholics

Una Voce is an organization to promote the Traditional Latin Mass in the Catholic Church. At their conference in Providence, Rhode Island this weekend there has been a list of impressive speakers, including Father Joseph Wilson who kicked off the conference with a talk that sparked a lot of laughter. The serious side of his talk, however was that he showed that things since the Second Vatican Council have gone terribly wrong. The audience of traditionalist Roman Catholics, many of whom will drive over a hundred miles to get to a Latin Mass, couldn’t have been more enthusiastic, and Father Wilson finished his talk to standing approbation.



Where we went wrong was that in spite of the Council, much of what has happened since then has been motivated by self affirmation. By this we can understand “sexual autonomy.” Fr. Wilson said, “You could have put the Mass in English, but you didn’t want uncomfortable reminders that sexual autonomy is not right.”

The Mass in the Catholic Church in style and atmosphere is now very different from what it was before the Council. The use of the vernacular is only one of the differences, and probably the least important. One of the most obvious differences is the use of the free standing altar and Missa versus populum instead of ad orientem. As I understand it, the rubrics of the Roman Missal simply require that the altar be free standing so that the Bishop may go all around it when he consecrates it. This was explained to me by no less a figure than Dom Louis Bouyer. The rubrics of the Missal assume that the priest will be facing East because he is directed at certain points to turn and face the congregation. There is no requirement that the priest celebrate Mass from the back of the altar facing the people. There is also no prohibition either, and so the liturgical reformists have changed the whole atmosphere of the Mass from a holy sacrifice to something that looks like a Protestant Communion Service.

In today’s Mass, the priest comes out and begins with a dialogue with the people. The different options for this in the Missal are so clumsy that most priests end up ad libbing it. For the first part of the Mass the priest sits in a chair, sometimes in front of the altar, and sometimes behind the altar, but elevated so the priest may be seen over the altar. Fr. Wilson derisively refers to this as his Captain Kirk Command Chair. “What is wrong with this?” we might ask. The problem is that it puts the emphasis on the priest rather than on the sacrifice of the Mass. There are other deficiencies, too, which are quickly pointed out by Latin Mass enthusiasts. When a prayer which once existed in the old Missal is nowhere to be found in the new, or is radically changed, they expect that there is some kind of conspiracy to undermine the Faith.

I could not help but draw a comparison with Continuing Anglicans who feel the same way about the new Prayer Book as Traditionalist Catholics feel about the Novus Ordo. They are very similar, and very similar arguments are put forward in support of the position. In the case of the Continuing Anglicans, since the Congress at St. Louis in 1977 when they split from the Episcopal Church, they insist on using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer or the Anglican Missal which is derived from that. Mass is celebrated ad orientem with much kneeling, and frequently with ceremonial that comes from the pre-Vatican II Mass.

Traditionalist Anglicans have been “balkanized” since their split, and there are now probably close to forty denominations or jurisdictions tracing their origin to St. Louis or even before. The current crisis in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality threatens to split them even more.

For the most part, the Traditionalist Catholics are still in full Communion with the Pope, but some of the fringe groups are not. The Church is making a concerted effort to keep them within the fold, and the recent appoint of Bishop Rifan as Apostolic Administrator, who was present at the conference, gives them a sense of stability. This is a little bit like the Ecclesiastical Delegate for the Anglican Use in the Catholic Church. Both the traditionalist Catholics and the Anglican Use sense that they need something more, and both are talking about a separate rite or at least a prelature.

One of the other speakers at the conference was Fra Fredrik Crichton-Stuart who is the international president of Una Voce. He is a colorful personage from Edinburgh, and is a professed member of the Order of Malta. On Saturday Morning he acted as server for the Rite of Braga.



Bishop Rifan played the organ before and after the Mass. At Sunday's Solemn High Mass, he will pontificate from the Bishop’s throne with the permission of the Bishop of Providence.



Fra Freddy in his talk admonished the participants not to attack the person, but to attack the policy. Much of the problems Traditional Latin Mass people have is getting permission to have it. There are some Catholic bishops who will allow any priest to celebrate the Tradional Mass; others will not allow it at all.

I talked with a number of people from Holy Trinity in Boston, and they are unhappy because the plan for them is to merge with a church in the Chinatown district. The church where they presently worship will be closed. Holy Trinity “The German Church” is a beautiful old church in fairly good condition. Although it is in a poor district of the city, it has a good parking lot and very good facilities. Chinatown, on the other hand, has no parking and the church is not as good. This congregation which numbers close to 300 people has been struggling for a number of years. They have to make do with a rotation of four or five priests, many of whom are quite old. The conspiracy theory which many of them feel is unavoidable is that the Archdiocese wants them to die out, and so they are being marginalized in this way.



The Anglican Use in Boston has a similar problem. For a while we were worshipping at St. Aidan’s Church in Brookline, which is an English Style church, still with its High Altar at the East end of the church and a very fine altar rail. But it was already slated to close when we went there. At Saint Aidan’s we began to grow. I think we gave false hopes to the native congregation. Since then, we have been using the convent chapel at St. Theresa of Ávila in West Roxbury and our numbers have dwindled. Repeated requests for us to find another church have come up with nothing. The Archdiocese of Boston wants to consolidate and close churches, not give churches to small groups.

So, in summary, there are a lot of similarities between the Traditionalist Anglicans and the Traditionalist Roman Catholics. Many of the same cultural issues have caused the crises in their respective churches. In the case of the Anglicans, the result has been fragmentation. There is a danger that this could happen to the Traditional Catholics too. But Pope Benedict seems very favorable toward the Traditional Latin Mass, and he is favorable toward the Anglican Use in the Catholic Church too.

C. David Burt

There is a Future for the Episcopal Church, but is there Hope?

At the gathering of the Anglican Communion Network in Pittsburgh this weekend, participants are being prepared to make a decision about the Episcopal Church.

Archbishop Gomez: "I am a member of the Windsor Report Team, and I do not think ECUSA has even started to apologize for what they have done."

Archbishop Akinola: "Bishops of the network must realize time is no longer of their side -- this is your Kairos moment to make up your mind what to do. Some of you have one leg in ECUSA and one in the network —well as we [pointing to the other archbishops present] have broken communion with ECUSA: “Are you ECUSA or Network?."

Next summer the General Convention of the Episcopal Church will be the test. If they fail to back off on the matter of homosexuality, there will be a split.

In Egypt the Archbishop of Canterbury remarked that it is a tragedy when the church creates facts on the ground that foreclose discussions. I commented on this over at Global South: http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/article/questions_to_the_archbishop_of_canterbury_q_a_transcribed/

One of the facts on the ground that is abundantly clear is that The Network, The Global South, The Windsor Report, and all that, is not about the earlier problems which alienated about a million people from the Episcopal Church, myself included. No, at Pittsburgh today the changes brought about by the General Convention of 1976 are triumphant. Take a look at all the women in vestments in this procession: http://www.ctsix.org/1/2005/11/Procession-From-Thursday-Night.cfm

The realignment of Anglicanism is clearly well under way, and it is now just an argument about what it means to be Anglican. If Archbishop Akinola can be Anglican without being in full communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury (This is where it is headed), then I can be Anglican while being in full communion with the Pope. I don't think it has become meaningless to be Anglican yet, however.

The sad tragedy of all of this is that it is so easy to overlook the fact that Christians should be united and in full communion with each other. This is clearly our Lord’s will for us, and it is one of the things I learned as an Anglican. When I made my decision to go with the Saint Louis crowd, and later with the Pastoral Provision crowd, I was acting for the sake of the unity of Christians. For me it was clear that The Episcopal Church had created facts on the ground that millions of catholic-minded Christians, Roman, Anglican, and Orthodox, simply could not accept; even some Protestant groups were against the ordination of women. So with a quick remembrance of St. Vincent of Lerins and the Fathers of the Church, I sided with the majority down through time.

My advice to those who are struggling with church division today, whether in ECUSA or in the Continuum, is to do the same. Unity in the Church can not be had without the See of Saint Peter. Sadly, the future for ECUSA and even for the Network may be somewhere different.

C. David Burt

Intelligent Design

The Board of Education in Kansas is the first to mandate the including of intelligent design in the science curriculum. I suppose many people have read Dan Brown's book, Angels and Demons. This is a book that easily sweeps one up in a frenzy of Vatican intrigue and scientific speculation about the big bang and creation ex nihilo. Mary Baker Eddy would be ecstatic! Her dogmatic assertion that there is no such thing as matter would fit in with this idea.

My understanding of the big bang theory is that astronomers and physicists have observed that the universe is expanding. Extrapolating back from that, they propose a point from which this expansion began and they postulate a big bang. Well, a big bang from what? one might ask. From nothing—creation ex nihilo. Now Star Trek comes to the rescue: antimatter! The idea is that the material universe must also have a mirror image — an antimatter universe. But where is it? What is it like? Scientists have managed to create antiprotons by colliding subatomic particles, and the next step they are aiming at is the creation of antihydrogen atoms. If the big bang was what we think it was, it involved the creation of matter as we know it and an equal amount of antimatter which somehow became isolated from the matter because if matter and antimatter were to come together they would cancel each other out and return to nothing. In Dan Brown’s book a scientist working secretly at CERN actually produces some antimatter and it is contained in an electromagnetic field so that it doesn’t come into contact with matter. The scientist is murdered and the canister containing the antimatter is hidden somewhere in the Vatican. When the battery for the electromagnetic field shuts down, there will be a tremendous release of energy. There also happens to be a conclave going on to elect a new Pope, so you can see the gripping quality of the story.

The viewpoint of intelligent design is that the big bang could not have just happened and therefore it must have had an intelligent cause. This is an attractive hypothesis, one that I like very much, but it is not scientifically proven, so it has no place in a science curriculum. It belongs in the philosophy class or in the religion class. Intelligent design goes on to suggest that what we understand as evolution was all guided by God rather than simply a random process based on the survival of the fittest. This too is an attractive hypothesis, but it is not scientifically proven.

As a science teacher and as a Christian, I have no philosophical trouble balancing the seeming contradiction between pure science and pure religion. The gap between what scientists know and what God presumably knows is still enormously wide. I am convinced that science is here to help religious understanding, not to hinder it. Most religions seem to be based on a primitive understanding of nature. But Christianity postulates a divine intervention in history, and one might simply say that since the birth of Christ human knowledge of God has been ratcheted up quite a bit. At the same time, and perhaps indirectly because of this new theological awareness, human scientific inquiry has undergone a tremendous expansion. We have had to refine and modify our religious understanding in order to fit in with what we now know about the physical universe. Far from weakening one’s religion, this tends to make it stronger, because the enormity of the universe and its complexity simply inspires awe.

I don’t know what the push for intelligent design in schools is driven by. I wouldn’t say ignorance, but it obviously has something to do with evangelical fundamentalism. These are people who have somehow backed themselves up against a wall when it comes to the Bible. For them the Bible is the Word of God, and if it says God created the World in six days, that’s what happened. I had a student in my biology class who sat in the back of the room and read his Bible. His pastor had told him that biology teachers were teaching Darwinism and that was against the Bible. No manner of protests on my part that Darwin was a clergyman who believed in God could alter his opinion, the evidence of humanoid bones dating back millions of years to the contrary not withstanding.

What is the good of including in a science curriculum something that will encourage students to discount the evidence for highly substantiated scientific theories? What are you going to put on a quiz: first give the evolutionist answer to the question then give the creationist answer? Let the scientists do their work and let the theologians do theirs too. They should listen to each other, but not intrude into each other’s fields of study.

David Burt

On the Anglican Use Yahoo Group AnglicanUse@yahoogroups.com there has been a lot of discussion about the possibility of a large number of disaffected Anglicans seeking to be in full communion with the Holy See. The disintegration of the Anglican Communion is well advanced at this point, with a major rift between the Global South and the North American, European, and British parts of the communion. People are already talking of a "Lambeth Communion", a "Traditional Anglican Communion", and a "Global South Anglican Communion". There can be no clearer evidence of this rift than the symbolic action of Peter Akinola, Archbishop of Nigeria, excising all reference to Canterbury from the Constitution and Canons of his church.

In the United States, the disintegration is particularly pronounced and chaotic. Even before the fateful decision of the Episcopal Church to ordain women in 1976, groups of dissidents had left the Episcopal Church and formed so-called "continuing" bodies". But the big split over the ordination of women and changes to the Prayer Book took place at the Congress in Saint Louis, MO, with the release of the Affirmation of Saint Louis. http://www.acahome.org/tac/library/docs/affirm.htm . More recently, the ordination of an avowed and practicing homosexual man as Bishop of New Hampshire has resulted in another crisis, if not an outright split. The Windsor Report http://www.anglicancommunion.org/windsor2004/index.cfm in its attempt to hold things together seems to be too little too late, and groups are already mobilizing to adjust to the inevitable realignment in the Anglican Communion. The principal groups are the Network http://www.anglicancommunionnetwork.org and the Forward In Faith http://www.forwardinfaith.com/ . The "Continuum" stemming from Saint Louis is a veritable alphabet soup of jurisdictions. These are groups that are clearly out of communion with Canterbury. Some are not in communion with each other, and some are now in full communion with one or another historic apostolic See. Most say that they would like to be in full communion with Rome or Orthodoxy, but as of this point only the Pastoral Provision for Anglicans in the Roman Catholic Church and the Western Rite Vicariate of the Antiochian Jurisdiction of the Eastern Orthodox Church have been able to achieve this treasured status, and they are both small.

The Network seems to be primarily concerned with the issue of homosexuality and they don't see the ordination of women as an issue. They still cling to the Anglican Communion seing some hope in the Windsor Report. They hope for some kind of renewed evangelical Anglican Communion with all of the bad guys out. The Forward in Faith movement, although still ostensibly still in the Anglican Communion, is allied with the Traditional Anglican Communion, and they reject the ordination of women and favor reunion with Rome.

The different responses to the crisis of Anglo-Catholics in the Episcopal Church goes back to a rift in the Anglo-Catholic leadership in the Episcopal Church over the General Convention Special Program 1967. The American Church Union under Canon DuBois and some of the conservative constituencies of the Southwest were not in favor of allocating church money to empower grassroots organizations dealing with social problems in the country. Liberal Anglo-Catholics, particularly in the Northeast were in favor of this initiative, and so the result was the formation of some Anglo-Catholic organizations that were separate from the American Church Union. At the General Convention of 1976 the American Church Union saw there was a schism in the making and called for the strongest response possible. But the liberal Anglo-Catholics of the Northeast said we don't threaten to leave; we threaten to stay. While the Congress in St. Louis was in the planning, the Evengelical and Catholic Mission did everything it could to prevent a clean split of Anglo-Catholics from the Episcopal Church. Now to over-simplfy things, the continuing churches and the Roman and Orthodox groups are the product of the American Church Union and Saint Louis, and the Network and Forward in Faith are the product of the Evangelical and Catholic Mission, many of whom are now saying to the Saint Louis croud, "You were right! We should have listened to you."

I recently returned from the Synod of the Anglican Catholic Church, held in Grand Rapids October 24-28 as an official observer representing the Anglican Use Society. I am a former priest of the ACC, and I am now a layman in an Anglican Use Congregation of the Pastoral Provision for Anglicans in the Roman Catholic Church. There was considerable interest in my presence at the Synod, and part of my reason for being there was because the Metropolitan of that church, Brother John Charles, had sent a letter to Cardinal Kasper requesting formal discussions leading to full communion. It is well known that Archbishop Hepworth of the Traditional Anglican Communion, another continuing church body, had made a similar request and had even had some discussion at the Vatican. I have heard that Archbishop Akinola has said to Archbishop Hepworth, "Well, if you are going to do it, don't do it without us." Archbishop Hepworth, recently criticized for perhaps making too much of his contacts at the Vatican, has said that he will not be speaking with media about this until he can do so together with his ecumenical partners. http://www.themessenger.com.au/news.html .

Of course this has led to speculation that a large portion of those disaffected from the "Lambeth Communion" will seek to come into full communion with the Holy See together. Whether they know about this in the Vatican or not is anyone's guess, but I think this is something to pray about.

David Burt