C. David Burt's Weblog

2010-10-14T10:38:00.001-07:00

Operación San Lorenzo

The Chilean mine rescue completed yesterday has caused me to think about Anglicanorum coetibus and the rescue of Anglo-Catholics. There are many parallels. It is a good idea for those of us who are involved with the Anglican rescue effort as well as those who are being rescued to consider now the elements that went into the successful rescue in San José, Chile.

The miners, trapped since August 5 and thought dead, were out of touch with the surface for a number of weeks and survived on the very small amount of food they had in the mine. Fortunately they were able to find water. But until contact was made with the surface they began to despair that anyone would try to find them. They understood only too well the difficulty. But the 33 miners kept their heads and used their mining skill to assure that they would survive long enough. They had faith, they were organized, and united.

The Anglo-Catholics who have left the Episcopal Church and other Anglican provinces over the years are like the miners trapped beneath the surface. They have lost meaningful communication with the their own church and have not established communication with the Catholic Church. They have despaired of ever being rescued. They suffer from disunity. So comparing them with the analogy of the Chilean miners, these Anglicans have kept the faith, but they are in a state of disarray perhaps due to their despair.

But a rescue operation named after St. Lawrence, the patron of miners was underway without them knowing it. Assisted by NASA scientists, the Chileans developed a careful plan for the rescue. When a small borehole was introduced from the surface to the mine, communication was restored. The miners again had hope that they might be rescued, although they were only too aware of the difficulty of the operation. A feeding tube was inserted and the miners were given at first a carefully concocted nutrient as well as needed medications for those with serious health problems. If they had been fed normal food immediately, they probably would have died. So they were at first denied food that they might have wanted in order to save their lives.

Is there an analogy here? The small borehole could be the first communication between Anglo-Catholics and the Vatican. The Anglicans asked for intercommunion. The result was a denial of that request but instead the Vatican offered a process leading to full organic union. Although the Anglo-Catholics, trapped as it were by their circumstances, would not immediately be in full communion, they would be in a very real sense in partial communion leading to full communion.

Meanwhile the Chileans were beginning three larger boreholes, plan A, plan B, and plan C. They didn't know which one would be successful. As it was, the one with a new innovative hammering bit was the one that broke through first.

Perhaps we could say that ARCIC was the first borehole, and the Pastoral Provision for Anglicans, which allowed married Anglican priests to become Catholic priests was the second. The Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus looks like the breakthrough. But what does it mean?

In the actual Chilean mine rescue, one of the first things to happen was to prepare the borehole to make sure it was safe, so that it wouldn't cave in. This took a number of days. The miners themselves had to prepare things on their end. There had to be a good deal of communication and coordination.

The analogy here would be the promulgation of the Apostolic Constitution and the setting up by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of channels of communication and the development of a plan for the ordinariates. Then it must be assured that the plan is safe, so Bishop Wuerl, for example, has been asked to be a facilitator and set up an office to receive inquiries and to assist Anglicans who wish to form the Ordinariate in the United States. It would not be good for the plan to go of half cocked and end up in disaster. On the Anglican side, there needs to be careful preparation too, and this is made difficult by the fact of disunity among the "Continuing Anglicans".

After they had lined the borehole to stabilize it, the chilean rescuers used a bullet shaped cage named Phoenix II that was lowered on a steel cable operated by a power windless. Some rescuers first descended into the mine to help prepare the miners to be rescued. One of the first concerns was the psychological condition of the trapped miners. Throughout the operation the rescuers maintained a fantastic esprit de corps like a soccer team complete with shouts and cheers. The discipline of the miners themselves was one of the things that made it all possible.

Perhaps the preparation of Anglo-Catholics to be rescued is the most critical part of what is going on. Some have deep misgivings. Some think the whole thing will cave in. Some may be thinking, "out of the frying pan into the fire" and thoughts like that. A tremendous amount of sensitivity and patience is needed here.

The rescue operation could not happen all at once. It was only possible to bring out one miner at a time in an operation that seemed to take about 40 minutes each. Each miner had to be prepared with medical equipment to constantly monitor his vital signs as he was brought to the surface. Decisions had to be made about the order of rescue. Family members had to be prepared at the other end. On-site medical facilities had to be prepared to handle 33 or more patients. The President of Chile and even the President of Bolivia had to be there to welcome the miners and to lend to the effort.

The bringing of Anglo-Catholics over to Rome, even groups, can not realistically be done all at once because conversion is an individual choice. So in the Pastoral Provision, and in the Ordinariate as perceived, individuals make their own profession of faith in the Catholic Church. Then if they wish they are reunited again in a community that preserves their Anglican patrimony. But while the operation is going on, there needs to be a tremendous esprit de corps as there was in the Chilean mining rescue situation. Catholics must express and show their solidarity with their Anglo-Catholic brethren. The hearty shout down the tube as a miner is still 15 or 20 meters below the surface, "¿Compañero, Cómo te encuentras?" and the hearty "abrazos" as he emerges from the cage is emblematic of the solidarity between miners and rescuers, and should be the mark of the enthusiastic welcome Catholics offer to Anglo-Catholics who are coming home. This may be difficult in a Catholic Church today that seems ambivalent about its own identity and is full of many Catholics who distrust Anglicans for various reasons.

So one by one the miners stepped out of their cage wearing dark glasses so they would not be blinded immediately by the light. Some knelt and prayed. One held up a bible that had been forced down the small tube. Some brought up rocks and presented them as souvenirs. One made it a point to show he could still kick a soccer ball. Others received their hugs in apparent bewilderment, and all were taken on a gurney to triage for evaluation and medical treatment. Few could hold back their tears as those feared lost were restored to their families. It was like lazarus being brought up from the dead.

Any Anglo-Catholic who joins the Roman Catholic Church, no matter in what way, will experience bewilderment. After the small confining situation of being a "Continuing Anglican", stepping out into the larger Catholic Church can be an overpowering experience. I can tell you it is true because I have done it. The first impulse is to kneel down and thank God. Perhaps another impulse is to try to show people that you can still run and leap about. Bringing in some token of the past may be a natural and worthy effort. But the biggest thing is to adjust to the new reality. Post traumatic stress disorder is well identified in the case of service men and women returning from combat. Far less understood, perhaps is the stress of becoming a Catholic. This may particularly be a problem in the case of Anglican priests. I guess I would say I am one who is still trying to be faithful to my vocation as a priest even in circumstances where I can not easily do it. I pray that my brothers who are coming in now will find it easier.

The final act of the rescue operation, after the last rescuer left the mine, leaving the lights on, by the way, was for the president of Chile to give a speech thanking the rescuers and all involved and placing an iron lid over the top of the rescue hole and placing a rock upon it. The rescue operation was a complete success. Not a single life was lost, and the mine was officially closed with the promise that there would not only be safety reforms in the mining industry in Chile, but in its fisheries and agriculture as well.

How I wish for the day when the cap can be placed on the borehole that has been funneling Anglicans into the Catholic Church for many years! But realistically we know that the rescue operation is still going on. There may even be the need to bore further holes deep into Anglican territory.

2010-03-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

I feel compelled to weigh in on The Anglican Communion Covenant, a document proposed to forge a greater unity between constituent churches in the Anglican Communion. In essence, it is a Constitution, something the Anglican Communion has not had up until now. Obviously it is a reaction to the state of impaired communion resulting from the election and consecration of the Bishop of New Hampshire and other similar sources of tension within the communion, although no specific issues of this kind are mentioned in the Covenant itself.

I read it with a sense of empathy because of course I was once in the Anglican Communion and I still consider myself Anglican in orientation, even as a member of the Catholic Church. Since this Covenant is intended to broadly clarify who is in the Anglican Communion and who isn't, I read it with the idea in mind to check myself to see how far I have drifted away from contemporary Anglicanism or how far it has drifted away from me. Certainly the need to maintain unity in an ecclesial body is very important and although I find myself outside the communion I was once a part of, I deeply sympathize with their need to try to hold it all together. So the idea of proposing a Covenant for the Anglican Communion is clearly a good thing.

One of the things that first struck me was the curious use of the word "covenant" as a verb. It is clear that the English language is flexible enough to give license to such usage, but I wondered as I read it if this was indicative of some kind of innovative attitude that lies behind the writing of this document. The second thing that I found myself asking was whether it was necessary to have something as as lengthy as this document is. Given the fact that churches within the Anglican Communion will be asked to ratify it, the nine pages of text, as noble as it seems at first sight, may offer too much opportunity to quibble over things.

One thing the Covenant is not, however, is a "confession". It is not a doctrinal statement, although it presumably incorporates Anglican doctrinal statements by reference. The Anglican Church can be contrasted with many other Protestant denominations in not being a confessional church. In other words there is no one comprehensive outline of the faith that all adhere to. Some would like to make the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion into such a confessional statement and require more than mere assent to them, but that idea has never been universally popular in Anglicanism since the 39 Articles relate primarily to issues of the Reformation period of history. There is in the covenant a clear reaffirmation of the famous Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral in section 1.1, but adds two more points, vague though they may be: shared patterns of liturgy and shared mission. Given the fact that these two points are added to the four of the quadrilateral means that they are especially significant.

The really central and constitutional aspect of the Covenant is the focus on the instruments of unity: The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates Meeting. These four instruments of unity are the way the Anglican Communion works through consultation, mutual responsibility, and interdependence. Put another way, if your church is not represented in these groups, you are not in the Anglican Communion.

The document anticipates the need to maintain the Covenant and to resolve disputes, and it gives authority to The Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion to monitor things, ask churches to postpone or forego some impending controversial actions they are contemplating and generally keeping an eye on what churches are loyal to the Covenant and what churches may be going astray. It will be interesting to see how this operates in practice.

Of course the big question is whether or not the Episcopal Church can or will adopt this Covenant. My guess is that they will ratify it and continue to do pretty much what they have been doing all along, which is to excuse their innovations with the claim, "The Holy Spirit made us do it." Of course it is precisely this arrogant go-it-alone attitude that the Covenant is intended to address. We shall see. Does the Covenant have teeth in it enough for the Anglican Communion to be able to say that The Episcopal Church has failed to live up to the agreement? I tend to doubt it.

Does it come too late? I think so. Anglicanism has already "spilled out" of the Anglican Communion. The "Continuing Anglican Churches" stemming from the St. Louis Congress of 1977, the Western Rite Orthodox parishes and the Anglican Use Roman Catholic parishes have just as legitimate a claim on Anglicanism as do the churches in communion with the Church of England. They are unlikely to see the covenant as a way back to being in communion either together or with the See of Canterbury. If these groups form the fringe just to the right of the Anglican Communion, it is just as likely that there will be former members of the Communion forming groups on the left. The Australians who favor lay presidency at the Eucharist come to mind along with some Evangelical groups that have a claim to Anglican heritage.

While I may not be the only person to say this is too little, too late, it is clearly the way toward the future for the Anglican Communion. The failure to do something like this will certainly and inevitably lead to more fragmentation, but it will not end the current situation of a tragically divided and alienated ecclesial body. I feel the sense that I am crying over spilt milk, and in a sense I am. It is just that the Anglican Communion before it became so divided showed so much promise in its missionary and ecumenical endeavors. Inevitably many more people, like myself, will be compelled to seek to fulfill their Christian vocation and ministry outside of that fellowship. Thank God for the generosity of the Catholic Church in making a place for Anglicans with the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus.

2009-11-09T13:11:00.000-08:00

The Apostolic Constitution "Anglicanorum coetibus" has been promulgated by the Pope on November 4th, memorial of St. Charles Borromeo. This may be seen as the culmination of much hard work and prayer on the part of many Anglicans and Roman Catholics who have made this possible. I only wish some of the people I have known had lived to see this day. Particularly I can think of Canon Albert DuBois, Father W. T. St. John Brown, and Father Joseph Crookston, OSF. They and many others, too numerous to mention, worked and prayed for the day when Anglicans and Roman Catholics could be in full communion with each other.

Of course this will not be for all Anglicans. Many will say. "Thanks, but no thanks." because some of the standards maintained by the Catholic Church are inconvenient for them. Others still think incomprehensibly that Anglicanism can be rescued from falling into apostasy and heresy. But the Vatican has given the signal that we can no longer wait for Anglicanism to straighten itself out, and the pastoral need of those seeking unity with the Holy See has a priority over cordial ecumenical relations with Canterbury.

It is now time for the Anglicans who for many years have said they want to be reunited with the Holy See to come home. There isn't likely to be a better moment than this, and the scruples that some may have are far outweighed by the opportunity to be again united in mission and to be excused from the moral folly that seems to be the mark of Anglicanism in recent years. Now is the time to get on with the commission God has given us.

I am sensitive to the fact that the Forward in Faith Movement in England wants to continue the fight to head off the acceptance of female bishops in the Church of England and to insure a place for Anglo-Catholics in the C of E. My friends, that battle is lost. It was lost when other churches in the Anglican Communion ordained women and when the Church of England eventually accepted it. There were eloquent speeches at the recent Forward in Faith Conference urging people to hold firm and to continue to work to uphold the catholic faith in the C of E. I have seen this all before. When the Episcopal Church voted to ordain women to the priesthood, there was a strong group that said, "Do not leave, but continue to work from within." They were wrong; the battle was lost, and they failed to realize it. I fear Forward in Faith in England is making the same mistake.

I would be the last to say that what lies ahead will be easy. The erection of ordinariates throughout the world will require hard work and dedication. We may not be popular in some circles, even in Roman Catholic circles, But this is what we must do. Rome has said "Yes." To our request. It would only be the meanest of Anglo-Catholics who would not welcome this invitation and do everything possible to bring it to fruition.

C. David Burt

2008-04-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

Pope Benedict XVI's Mass today at the National Stadium in Washington DC was criticized by Father Neuhaus today on EWTN as being very multicultural and perhaps not to the liking of the Pope himself, who has expressed himself frequently as favoring the traditional music of the Catholic Church. Of course the Pope showed no sign of not liking the music. One wouldn't expect that he ever would show any sign of displeasure at something so carefully prepared and presented by so many American musicians. One can say that the occasion was extraordinary in that it brought together thousands of American Catholics in one place for a Mass that surely must have posed many logistical and diplomatic stumbling blocks for the masters of ceremony and protocol who planned it. In my opinion it was very well done indeed, and there was something for everyone.

From a musicological standpoint, there was perhaps more Latin than we would normally find in any Catholic Mass in the United States, but the Latin formed the foundation of the musical texts at many points with other languages interspersed. Gregorian Chant found its expression as the musical basis for many of the musical themes presented as new compositions. The introduction of Latin American and Native American instruments and rhythms during the Communion was entirely appropriate, and, if I were to complain about anything, it would be the fact that Placido Domingo unavoidably upstaged the Pope himself with his rendition of Panis Angelicus. Of course, I am just kidding. It was operatic, but thoroughly appropriate for the occasion, after all, the Pope is the Bishop of Rome, Italy.

The music intended for the congregation to sing was eminently singable. There were none of the sentimental faux-folk tunes that still blight the air in many Catholic parishes. The Sanctus was perhaps the most familiar setting of all, and the people sang it with gusto. At the end, I was greatly gratified with the hymn, "Alleluia, Sing to Jesus" which sounded to me like it was right out of the 1940 Episcopal Hymnal with its wonderfully moving bass line. The people clearly knew this hymn and sang it enthusiastically even though it could be easily dubbed a Protestant hymn.

The Mass was a votive Mass for the Holy Spirit, and the Collect of the Mass made me sit up straight when I heard Pope Benedict read it, for it was none other than the Collect for Purity. Of course Cranmer took this beautiful Latin prayer and made it an invariable introductory prayer to the Communion Service. So here we had a Mass which began with the Collect for Purity and ended with "Alleluia, Sing to Jesus". I doubt if it was an intentional bow to the Anglicans and Anglican converts like myself, but it was certainly appreciated.

So, if Father Neuhaus thinks the Pope didn't like the music, my guess is that the music may not have been exactly what the Pope was expecting, but that he could not fail to have approved of it.

C. David Burt

2007-10-22T10:45:00.001-07:00

2007-10-22T10:41:00.001-07:00

2007-10-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

Rome Pilgrimage

From September 22 to September 29th over 100 people connected with the Anglican Use converged on Rome as pilgrims hailing from such places as Scranton, San Antonio, Arlington, and Houston. I was a happy member of the Scranton contingent led by Father Eric Bergman, the newest of the Anglican Use Pastors. Father Phillips and Deacon Orr of Our Lady of the Atonement, San Antonio, led their group, which included the choir of Atonement Academy. Father Noble and Deacon Barnett of Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston led their group, and there was a group led by Father Hart of Corpus Christi, Texas. Father Hawkins of Arlington, Texas put in an appearance during the pilgrimage. Archbishop John Myers, the Ecclesiastical Delegate for the Pastoral Provision, was already in Rome, and he and his Secretary, Father Stetson met with us and participated in most of the liturgies. Bishop Vann was also there. So all in all, most of the Anglican Use was there in Rome. The Archbishop, Father Stetson, and Bishop Vann stayed at the North American College, and the rest of us were in hotels. Our hotel was about a mile from the Vatican. Joe Blake, the President of the Anglican Use Society flew over to be with us for a couple of days and to hold a meeting of the Anglican Use Society Board of Directors.

The Archbishop met us for Mass at St. Peter’s Chains on Sunday shortly after our arrival. I had prepared music for the Masses Sunday through Wednesday, and we had a combined choir of 14 people. On Monday the Anglican Use Mass was at the Venerable English College. On Tuesday it was at the North American College, On Wednesday we went to the Papal Audience where we had preferred seating. Some of the Anglican Use Pastors were able to greet the Pope. In the evening the Novus Ordo Mass was at St. John Lateran. On Thursday the Anglican Use Mass was at St. Susanna with the Atonement Academy Choir singing. In the evening we sang Evensong with Cardinal Law at St. Mary Major, and Friday the Novus Ordo was celebrated by Archbishop Angelo Amato in Latin at St. Peter’s with the Atonement Academy singing.

Aside from Masses, our time was taken up primarily with touring the sights in Rome and eating in restaurants. The favorite dish in Rome seems to be macaroni and cheese with bits of bacon. A plate of that can cost as much as €12.00! I went with the Houston group to the Taverna dei Gracchi, just up the street from our hotel. The waiter asked, “Quanti personi?” and I answered “dieci”. He opened a double sliding door and there was a formal private dining room with a table set for ten. I knew then that we were in trouble. The whole meal cost about €700, and the waiter wasn’t even Italian; he was Greek! From champagne to grappa we were treated with the best meal you can get in Rome.

The high point of the touring for me was the Scavi Tour in the excavations under St. Peter’s. There you may view the relics of St. Peter. The whole Vatican is exceedingly impressive; that goes without saying. But when you cut through all of the pomp and extravagant excess of art, which really makes you tired if you try to see it all in such a short period of time, you realize that what it comes down to is that little box of bones lying only a matter of yards away from where he was crucified upside down. This is the most important thing. The pope is a prisoner in the Vatican, only a few yards away from that famous tomb, and he must have the worst job in the whole Church; everybody wants to greet him personally or to give him a gift or something, but the man cannot possibly greet everyone personally. So he greets and blesses the crowd, and he greets a few in the name of the many. For us, when he greeted some of the priests in our group, we rightly felt that we were being given special recognition. I viewed the tombs of all of the popes who lived during my lifetime, from Pius XI to John Paul II. They are all buried within a few yards of the bones of St. Peter. And the present successor of Peter, except when he is traveling, is always very near this place, and he must know that his bones will soon rest there in the same crypt too. Please pray for Pope Benedict XVI.

2007-08-21T06:26:00.000-07:00

An Anglican Covenant

The Draft Anglican Covenant looks like a vanilla version of Anglicanism, but one must observe carefully what it does not say along with what it does say. Most glaring, in my opinion, is the lack of any truly catholic ecumenical perspective; there is no view either toward reunion with Anglicans of the continuing churches or with the great catholic communions of Rome and Orthodoxy.

Would it be too much to hope for some statement, however bland, in favor of maintaining the apostolic ministry of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons in apostolic succession? While the Anglican Communion is certainly split on the issue of homosexuality, it is equally split on the issue of ordination of women. The Windsor Report accepts the ordination of women as a fact of life within Anglicanism and this "covenant" by failing to mention the issue at all does the same thing. I thought that Women's ordination was still being tested and that, hard as it might be to imagine it, the final verdict on the question might still be, "No". A covenant such as this implies the tacit acceptance of WO, and this is out of the question for Anglo-Catholics, Biblically based Evangelicals, and even broad-church Anglicans who yearn for unity with the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

So much for what it doesn't say; now for what it does say: By emphasizing the 39 Articles, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the limitation of the sacraments to two only, the covenant alies itself with a certain brand of Anglicanism that seems to be going out of its way to affirm itself as Protestant and not Catholic. I thought that in the light of ARCIC we had moved beyond this. My question is, "Are these touchstones necessary?" Again, the effect is to make Anglo-Catholics extremely uncomfortable.

I am not entirely convinced that the Anglican Communion needs a covenant at all, especially since the purpose seems to be to define who is "in" and who is "out". In any case, this one may unintentionally put people or groups "out" that might better remain "in". A covenant such as this is a dangerous thing. In any case, the people working on it would do well to examine the Affirmation of St. Louis, which is another attempt to define who is truly Anglican and who is not. The effect of the Affirmation of St. Louis was to leave its adherents outside the official Anglican Communion. That was not its intention.

Finally, does the draft covenant actually exclude the people it is intending to exclude? It says that where there are disputes the matters should be submitted to the Primates Meeting, and the Primates will offer guidance and direction. There is no language in the covenant that would compel churches to accept the admonition of the Primates, nor is there any clear language on how a church would be declared to be outside of the covenant relationship. If an unrepentant ECA is to be excluded from the Anglican Communion by this covenant, I would say it won't work.

The Anglican Communion would be better off without a covenant and would be much better off without this one.

C. David Burt

2007-03-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

Episcopal Bishops Reject Dar es Salaam Communiqué

A couple of months ago, I went over to my old Seminary for a memorial organ concert. After the concert I had the opportunity to talk with the current dean of The Episcopal Divinity School, Bishop Charleston, and I remarked somewhat pointedly that while Gordon Conwell Seminary was now accepting Episcopalian and Anglican students, EDS may now have a niche market preparing people for ministry in the "new" church. The bishop actually seemed to agree with me if he didn't agree with the underlying presumption on my part that this was really a bad thing.

You have to put yourself in their place to really understaind the point of view they represent. The Episcopal Divinity School has come a long way since I graduated from ETS in 1968. Before I went there, it was the civil rights movement. While I was there, the Vietnam War was the great issue. When that was over, the ordination of women became the new issue, and now that the ordination of women is solidly accepted in the Episcopal Church, it is the gay and lesbian agenda which is the new issue. The seminary community sees itself as being in the forefront of these great social justice issues, and I believe it can quite rightly take pride in being on the right side of the first two: The Civil Rights Movement, and the Anti Vietnam War effort. Once they moved on from those issues, like rebels without a cause, they lost sight of the fact that justice for one group may entail injustice to another.

This is the current situation. They affirm that the ordination of women is a matter of justice, and they affirm that same-sex marriage is also a matter of justice. Bishop Charleston has launched out on some initiatives of his own aimed at achieving reconciliation. These are all well meant, and who can argue against the plea, comming from many sides, that ask, "Why can't we just get along?" In Massachusette, gay marriage is now the law, even though the Episcopal Church hasn't actually officially started doing it yet, but the justice issue is put quite simply, if the Commonwealth views this is a positive thing, why should people be thrown out of the church? The general view of things here is that the discussion is over on this issue, and we are moving on.

That, of course, does not satisfy everybody, and here is where the justice argument backfires. If you belong to a church that accepts the marriage of homosexuals, what if you don't happen to believe that to be in accord with Holy Scripture? The same was true with the ordination of women. If you belong to a church which ordains women, what if you don't happen to believe that women are called by God to be priests. Both issues effectively "un-church" the individual who can not assent to the new teaching. This is why it is a justice issue. It does no good to say that the fathers of the church in the past were mistaken and we now have a more enlightened point of view.

While the Episcopal Bishops express the desire to continue in the councils of the Anglican Communion, They have now rejected all external authority. Here is what they say to the Dar es Salaam proposal, "It is a very serious departure from our English Reformation heritage. It abandons the generous orthodoxy of our Prayer Book tradition. It sacrifices the emancipation of the laity for the exclusive leadership of high-ranking Bishops, and for the first time since our separationf from the papacy in the 16th century, it repalces the local governance of the Chrurch by its own people with the decidsions of a distant and unaccountable group of prelates." So the one thing that could pull the Episcopal Church back from the brink of separation from the Anglican Communion they have rejected with nothing but a wan appeal to be able to continue in the councils of the Communion. Of course they have made some important points here, but I would say that their rejection of the Dar es Salaam Comuniqué is a fatal mistake.

What the bishops of the Episcopal Church don't seem to realize is that dissatisfaction with the church's ability to correct doctrinal error has been widespread for many years. For the Bishops of the Episcopal Church to have quite a number of jurisdictions that left the Episcopal Church over the issue of the ordination of women is no great recommendation for their leadership in the direction of reconciliation. To have a large group of dissident congregations and even dioceses under the jurisdiction of African archbishops, as seems to be developing now is likewise no great claim to fame for their powers of reconciliation.

There is something in the Episcopal character that seems to think they can overcome any crisis through the grace of God. This stems from hubris, pure and simple. It is the attitude that we know better and that those who disagree with us, given time, will come around to our point of view. Katharine Jefferts Schori preached a interesting sermon in which whe talked about vision. Refering to the Rublev icon of the Trinity, she pointed out that each member of the trinity looks in a different direction. She went on to draw on her knowledge of biology to say that there are some kinds of fish that have eyes that are divided in such a way that they can look at things above the surface of the water and below the surface at the same time. She goes on to say that the blesser of the Gospel invites us into a deeper seeing. "When we have seen that blessing, however, briefly, it begins to rise into more easily visible depths, it comes more clearly into focus and into what we call 'normal reality.' ...To see as God sees is to bless what is into the reality of the (sic.) God's reign." There you have it. The expression of complete confidence that whatever the Episcopal Church perceives or believes, even it it seems unusual, is God's view of things. There is not even the slightest hint that the Episcopal Church might be mistaken.

Well, it is all very sad. The Episcopal Church is or was an important part of the Anglican Communion. Certainly the Anglican Communion will never be what it once was after this. One has to ask, will it be able to continue on in anything like the positive influence it has been so far? I think it could if it were to quickly gather back in the continuing churches alienated by the antics of the Episcopal Church. But that is probably too much to hope for.

C. David Burt

2006-10-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

The Pope and Islam

I have thus far refrained from commenting on the Pope's lecture at Regensburg, but I received an e-mail from an old correspondent with whom I have debated extensively on the merits of Islam and Christianity. You can read that correspondence on the Islam to Christianity Yahoo Group.

Here is my reply to the letter I just received today:

Dear Faisal,

Thank you for taking time to respond to the Pope's University of Regensburg lecture. It is quite clear that this pope is not as soft on Islam as Pope John Paul II was, but I think he is sincere in saying that he wants intellectual dialogue with Islam. I don't know if he anticipated the furious reaction from the radical Islamist faction or not. I tend to think that he may have expected it but that he trusted that the elements of reason and moderation in Islam would also stand up. If it results in a healthy dialogue within Islam itself, it must be viewed as a good thing. You are part of that dialogue, and I commend you for taking the time to read the Pope's lecture carefully.

I probably wouldn't have read the Pope's lecture myself if it were not for the Islamic reaction, so it has also provoked a debate within Christianity about what we should think about Islam. Either the lecture was ill advised and stupid or it was a calculated bid to spark dialogue. I think it is the latter. Because of the position of the Pope in the Church, people are unused to hearing him speak in a way that may be in error. But he was speaking at a University where lively debate and dialogue goes on all the time. In fact he made a great point in saying that there were not one but two Theological Departments at that university, and that he hoped that there would be frank dialogue between them. The lecture was not about Islam. The contrast between Islam and Christianity was being used as a case in point.

The argument that violence does not pertain to the nature of God is a clear Christian teaching. The Emperor's statement that Islam seems to entail a lot of bloodshed is a point well taken, and you have not contradicted it. Instead you point to violence in the Old Testament as an indication that violence is God's will as if this could justify violence. Your characterization of the crucifixion being an act of violence on God's part towards the man Jesus simply does not coincide with Christian teaching and you know it. Even Mohammed seemed to realize that the crucifixion makes no sense if Jesus is merely a man, therefore according to the Qur'an he escapes crucifixion by some trick and someone else dies in his place. The settled Christian interpretation is that Jesus, as God, accepted crucifixion and that this ultimate sacrifice is the propitiation for our sins. Far from being violent on God's behalf, the crucifixion shows Him submitting to a violent death. I don't have to teach you this, but even if you don't believe it, you need to understand that this is the basis of the Christian abhorrence of violence in the name of religion. This has been the crux of the debate between you and me, and I believe the Emperor and the Pope were touching on the same issue.

You have listed ten instances where you say the Pope breached the very reason he was arguing to uphold. I beg to differ.

Number 1: The lecture was not addressed to Muslims, nor was it about Islam. The "offending" remarks were simply made in passing to support the main thrust of his argument.

Number 2: His using of this example was deliberate in order to spark dialogue between Christianity and Islam.

Number 3: Neither the Pope nor the Emperor would have agreed with you at all on the divine authority of the Qur'an. On the matter of abrogated teaching, it is my understanding that this is a matter of debate within Islam. The Pope was not distorting the reality of scripture.

Number 4: The conversation between the Emperor and the Persian scholar took place while the city of Constantinople was under siege by the Turks. Islam had wiped out the Christian Church in North Africa and now was threatening to invade Europe. This was the historical background of the dialogue, not some genocide that you blame the Christians for.

Number 5: The Pope said that the Emperor did not mention the distinction made between People of the Book and Infidels. The Pope went on to characterize the Emperor's challenge as brusque and to us unacceptable.

Number 6: The Catholic Church does recognize Islam as a genuine religion, and anyone who knows Islam would have to agree that there are many elements of peace and beauty about it, but this does not mean that the Catholic Church endorses Islam as a true religion in any sense. The only thing true about it is that we seem to be worshiping the same God.

Number 7: You claim that Christianity is oxymoronic. You and I have debated this in the past and I won't comment on it here.

Number 8: The Pope would agree with you that violence is part of Man's nature—his fallen nature. But the Emperor said that violence is alien to the God-given human soul.

Number 9: The reason to love God is not out of fear of Him. Sure, "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." But what do we really mean by this? Certainly we mean that at the very least we should be concerned about transgressions. But that is just the "beginning" of wisdom. Where does it lead to? I would say that it leads to loving intimacy with God and the sanctification of the soul. Hell is something to be concerned about, however, because it is real. Islam does not contradict this. So is it violence to warn people not to fly in the face of God's merciful goodness?

Number 10: This also relates to something you and I have debated in the past. I have rejected your insistence that God might will one truth for one person and a contradictory truth for someone else. I think the Pope was fascinated with this seeming paradox in Islam. "Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry." Here is a big difference of opinion between Christianity and Islam.

You say, "The Ten marks of Papal breach of reason accumulate to characterize Christian misconceptions of God Whose Purpose is that we should Know Him, not reformulate Him by way of Greek inspired incarnation."

Obviously I do not agree with any of your ten marks, but do you agree that God's purpose is that we should know him, or do you disagree with that? Quite apart from Greek philosophy, it seems quite clear to me that the Old and New Testaments show God attempting to break through to us so that we should know him.

You say, "It is clear that Theologically, Christianity has polarized itself from Jewish and Islamic Omnipotent Monotheistic Godhead. 'Yet we can meet at the point of human reason despite the intractable mystery of the Triune Godhead, in matters of common interest for mutual welfare.'"

Is this you speaking, or is it what you think the Pope means? I don't think the Pope would invite Islam into some kind of theological dialogue with Christianity. I think he would welcome cultural and intellectual dialogue, however. One of his main concerns is freedom of religion in Islamic countries, and the big question of Turkey. Should that country be admitted to the European Union?

Peace,

David

Begin forwarded message:

From: MFRahman
Date: October 16, 2006 11:05:35 AM EDT
To: 'MFRahman'
Subject: Pope's speech - Examining the Logic.

MFRahman. 8 North Drive, Champs Fleurs. 683 4698. 16/10/06.

Greetings to all.

Examining the Pope’s Logic and Religious Assumptions.

The object of the Pope in his now controversial address at The University of Regensburg on Tuesday, 12 September 2006 is clearly as he has claimed - to initiate dialogue with Islam and perhaps other faiths to come to common ground.

Since there were no formal Muslim representatives present on that auspicious occasion, he would have intended that his message was to be transmitted to his target audience via the mass media.

Now, even the insulated Holy Father must know that the media thrives on sensationalism and innuendo and is ever ready to exploit differences and conflict.

Thus we must record our First observation of the Papal breach of the exercise of reason which he sets out most of all to promote.

Given the legendary volatility of Muslim response and particularly at a time when Muslims are hyper sensitive from experiencing very real global persecution because of the responsive misdeeds of its fringe elements to decades of injustice, the resultant outcry to the extracted quotes was predictable. That the carefully crafted address was prepared in advance by a sectarian leader whose every word is news calls into question the exercise of reason employed if not the ulterior motive for its deliberate phrasing. Let this be observation number Two of Papal breach.

In quoting “the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus” ’ circa 1391 dialogue, he credits the emperor with knowledge of Sura 2:256 which reads: ‘There is no compulsion in religion’ but dismisses this fundamental law with the words “this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat.” To support this aspersive statement he continues: “But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war”.

Both the emperor and the Holy Father must also know that the entire Quran pre-existed its revelation to Muhammad (sas) and that the sequence of revelation has no abrogating effect on Its revealed Law. How could they know? The Quran so states of itself repeatedly. The exigencies of chronological revelation are in fact prophesied in the Old Testament which promises “The Book shall be offered to him who cannot read saying ‘Read’ and he shall say ‘I cannot read!’” and further that the book shall be revealed in bits and pieces “a line here… a line there… a law here, a law there…”. The Quran was constantly being arranged under Divine Instruction as to form and sequence as it was revealed fragmentally in Divinely orchestrated circumstances to facilitate it.

Is it reasonable for the Holy Father to distort the reality of Scripture?

Mark number Three of Papal breach.

The referenced conversation, one must bear in mind, occurred in the wake of Christian crusading genocide which makes the arrogance of the “erudite” emperor sheer hypocrisy, of which the Holy Father ought to be aware as much as he would be of the centuries of Papally supported Inquisition which followed. Reasonable? Mark Four of Papal breach.

The Holy Father equally dismisses the relevance of Quranic distinction between People of the Book and pagan Idolaters which the erudite emperor disregards. He does not feel it necessary to correct the errant emperor’s breach. Mark Five.

History records that in the intervening years between the emperor and John Paul, Islam has been increasingly Papally discovered to be a genuine religion of Peace and beauty emanating from the Abrahamic traditions. All that Muhammad (sas) brought has found increasing acceptance by millions of Christians who have embraced her. The “erudite” emperor’s tirade is the least worthy reference to quote. Mark Six.

Now to examine the theological underpinnings of the Holy Father’s thrust. “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. ‘God’, he says, ‘is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature.’”
Here we have the foundational basis of Atheism established by Christian Doctrine.

Christianity is based upon the faith of salvation by the blood of Jesus shed in violence by men created by God. Judas was born for his role in the New Testament words of Jesus. God’s Will which denied Jesus’ plea for rescue according to Christianity, was that Jesus must drink of the cup he feared. The entire creation proceeds on violence in the food chain we know so well. Yet Christian faith is based upon a stout denial of these realities and seeks to characterize God as a surrealistic impotent being who must struggle to redeem his creatures from an uncontrollable evil which emerged of its own power.

Men of reason dismiss this as dyslexic theology and either reject religion or seek Islam today. The tenets of Christianity are oxymoronic despite the crystal clarity of the Biblical Omnipotent God Who created both good and evil for His Own Purpose. We have arrived at number Seven in Papal breach of reason albeit canonized.

But what the words of the Holy Father do in agreeing with the paradigm of the emperor is to misperceive the thread of argument, to create a straw argument that is illogical. The violence of men who aberrantly enforce religion cannot characterize God. Violence as we well see is entirely compatible with the nature of man. As to God’s Nature, what do we know of that? He is the Creator of nature and is above His Creation being unaffected by any of it. To the simplest mind, God is Transcendent and Other. Mark that Eight.

Now as absurd as all else, Christianity uses violence as much as all other faiths to coerce men into obedience. Threats of hellfire and damnation are the stuff of faith. “Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” Faith if not reasonable is based upon mental abuse. How does a loving Christian God accomplish acceptance of salvation? He Commands Love and extorts obedience. How can one Love on Command? The emperor’s erudite words endorsed by the Holy Father ring hollow: “Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".”Mark Nine.

The words which the Holy Father cannot comprehend because he prefers Greek philosophy to Scriptural Integrity are “But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.” He pays scant regard to Biblical Guidance. Mark Ten.

The Evangelist John chose to confound Genesis by re-interpretation and set the stage for the deification of a man contrary to explicit Scripture. “Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: ‘In the beginning was the λόγος’. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.” Far from the final word on God, John gave the first word on Christian Scriptural deviance.

The metamorphosing of Christian faith from scripture to convoluted man made doctrine has accomplished for atheism what Socrates warned of false notions in general: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss.” Christians indeed suffer a great loss today for Jesus warned “In vain do they worship me, taking for Precepts the Commandments of men”. To all such he will say as promised: “Get away from me you wicked people! I do not know you!”

The Ten marks of Papal breach of reason accumulate to characterize Christian misconceptions of God Whose Purpose is that we should Know Him, not reformulate Him by way of Greek inspired incarnation.

It is clear that Theologically, Christianity has polarized itself from Jewish and Islamic Omnipotent Monotheistic Godhead. Yet we can meet at the point of human reason despite the intractable mystery of the Triune Godhead, in matters of common interest for mutual welfare.

MFRahman.

2006-08-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Church of England to have Women Bishops

Those of you who know me are certainly aware that I opposed the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church back in the 70s and that issue primarily drove me out of the denomination. Now, why should I be concerned about Women Bishops in the Church of England? The reason I am concerned is that I see signs of an unhappy compromise in the making. This, of course, is the typical Anglican way of living with conflict, so why should I be surprised? But it is insidiously misleading and souls will be led astray.

At the recent Synod in England, July 7-11, 2006, (let's see if I can get it right) two significant votes were taken. One vote was to pave the way for the consecration of women as bishops by declaring that it was not a doctrinal issue in the C of E, and the other vote was to reaffirm a previous vote about the Ordinal (Canon A4) saying that the orders conferred ought to be considered as valid by all in the church. Never mind the fact that since 1993 clergy and people have been allowed to dissent from accepting the ministry of women priests, now there is a vote on the books which insists that the ministry of female bishops must be considered as valid. It seams to me that this leaves anyone totally out in the cold who considers the ordination of women to be impossible from a doctrinal point of view, for whatever reason: biblical, theological, or from the standpoint of apostolic tradition. While the English are famous for their ability to "muddle through", one finds it hard to see what they can do to patch this muddle up.

One of the suggestions being made is for a third province. The Church of England presently has two provinces, Canterbury and York. A third province would cover the same geographical area as both those provinces but would be allowed to dissent from the ordination of women. They would presumably also not allow gay ordination or gay marriage. But they would still be in the C of E and they would be in communion with other Anglican provinces world-wide. Geoffrey Kirk has suggested that this would create a "museum piece" of the part of the church that would be in the Third Province. I quite agree. But even more, I can not conceive of how it would work. I mean, what is the point? Isn't this just unity for the sake of unity? Isn't it at root a face saving device whereby we agree to disagree, but we remain "in communion"?

The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be preparing the way for a two-tiered Anglican Communion. Provinces willing and able to sign a covenant would be able to participate in Anglican meetings like Lambeth, but those who do not sign the covenant would be associate members. This almost presumes and would even provoke the break-up of the Episcopal Church and other Anglican provinces world-wide. Any parishes or even dioceses wishing to remain fully in the Covenanted Anglican Communion would have a legitimate reason to break away. It is another part of the muddle that has become Anglicanism.

The time has come to stop trying to save face. The Anglican Communion is already hopelessly fragmented, particularly if you include the "continuing churches" in the picture. All efforts to pretend it hasn't happened simply contributes to the muddle and misleads serious Christians who wish to get on with their lives. Why must we wait until the C of E gets its act together? The way it looks now, the C of E has created facts on the ground that will never be satisfactory to Anglo-Catholics, and are also repugnant to the Evangelicals' understanding of Scripture.

Back when the Church of England voted to ordain women to the priesthood, there was provision made for priests who wished to leave. Quite a lot of money was given to each priest leaving the ministry of the C of E because of a conscientious objection to the measure. No such settlement was made when the Episcopal Church began to ordain women; so the C of E by comparison should be commended for its magnanimity. It seems to me that we have come to another point in which it would be best to be magnanimous. If parts of the Anglican Communion are going to break up about this, let them do it as amicably as possible. After all, this is the gentlemanly English way.

The Catholic Church in England and in the United States is gaining converts as a direct result of the crisis in Anglicanism. Those of us who made our peace with Rome quite some time ago look at what is happening now with a philosophical attitude. Quite simply put, I thought I learned as an Anglican what it meant to be a Catholic, and now that I am one, I seen nothing attractive about the mess Anglicanism is in. The word "communion" means something entirely different to me now. In Anglicanism churches are in communion because of their historical connections and their ability to agree to disagree about doctrinal issues. In the Catholic Church being in communion means, at least in part, being in communion with the Pope. Belonging to The Church in its most visible and obvious form, in other words. In some sense we already belonged to this Church as Anglicans, but we were in a state of imperfect communion. Now imperfect communion is a fact of life even within the Anglican Communion.

As Anglicans we all knew where Anglicanism had come from. The interesting question was always where it was headed. As long as we thought that it was headed back into communion with the visible Catholic Church, it was possible to be Anglican and still be a believing Catholic, the Anglo-Catholic position. Now this is impossible. So it is time for Anglo-Catholics to become true Catholics.

The vote in the Church of England was made against the advice of Cardinal Kasper. Just as the Pope had pleaded with the Anglican Communion not to ordain women to the priesthood, so now, the Catholic Church has urged the Church of England not to proceed to ordain women to the episcopate. The reason is that the Catholic Church inexplicably still holds out some hope that it would be possible to undo some of the facts of Reformation history in England and restore the provinces of Canterbury and York to full communion with the Holy See. I would say that great figures like Archbishop Michael Ramsey and Pope Paul VI even dared to hope that this could happen in this generation. And we dared to hope that it could happen even during our lifetime. How things have changed!

I can not even begin to go into why I think there is such a fundamental difference in attitude between Rome and Canterbury that has led to this impasse, but I would urge you to think about all of the issues that have led up to this mess. Most of them have to do with morality. It really starts with Lambeth allowing divorce and re-marriage. I remember how shocked many of us were when suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts Ben Arnold got divorced and remained in his position. When I was in seminary Joseph Fletcher was my professor of Ethics, and his "Situation Ethics" has become the hallmark of the Episcopal approach to moral decisions. Anglicans seem to have the hubris to think that all of this is progress and that Catholics and others who do not agree are just not as well educated.

So do not be fooled by Anglican attempts to muddle through. The time to get out of Anglicanism and into the Catholic Church is now. Fortunately we do not have to give up all that we love about Anglicanism. We can join the Anglican Use in the Catholic Church. http://anglicanuse.org

By the way, the "Third Province" already exists. It consists of the five Roman Catholic provinces in England and Wales.

C. David Burt

2006-06-28T05:40:00.000-07:00

The Anglican Communion that once was.

Somewhere tucked away in my attic I have a complete set of Anglican World. This was a flashy magazine published in the 60's that presented the Anglican Communion in a way that made us all feel good about being Anglican. There were lots of pictures, it was very colorful, and stories of what Anglicans were doing all over the world drew us together with a great sense of solidarity. It was all non controversial. The issues which Anglicans are struggling with today did not exist. There were no women priests. There were no gays. It was all about evangelism and growth, especially in the third world. It was also about the remarkable ecumenical encounters of the era. Archbishops Geoffrey Fisher and Michael Ramsey brought the Anglican Communion to the attention of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church in a way which led to the remarkable theological encounters which caused many of us to dare to hope for a reconciliation between these three great communions of the Christian Church: Roman, Orthodox, and Anglican.

That was then; this is now. In the wake of the Episcopal Church's 2006 General Convention, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has issued a reflection entitled The Anglican Communion: a Church in Crisis? I would say that the answer to his posed question is clearly, "Yes!" In my previous blog I predicted that the Episcopal Church would not be expelled from the Anglican Communion. I still think this is true, but what may have to happen is for the Anglican Communion to change in order to be able to accommodate The Episcopal Church. We have seen the Anglican Communion change in order to accommodate women priests and bishops, why not expect it to change in order to accommodate things like lay presidency at the Eucharist and gay marriage?

Indeed, that is what the Archbishop seems to be anticipating in his reflection. He envisions a communion with two classes of member churches: covenant and associate. Churches that subscribe to the covenant would refrain from doing things that might upset other churches in the communion. Churches that do not subscribe would be associates, and they would have observer status in Anglican Communion meetings like the Lambeth Conference. Presumably there would exist a wide degree of sacramental communion and cooperation between all of the members.

Up until now, the Anglican Communion could be looked at as something like the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church, and this is the picture one might have gathered from reading Anglican World, but no more. The Archbishop points out that the Anglican Communion is nothing at all like the universal church that the Catholic Church is. Instead it is a very loose affair and it is only now struggling to define the basis of its own unity. As cultural and social changes in society evolve, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain unity in the traditional sense. What is most amazing to me is the Archbishop's own sense of inevitability in this process.

The history of the Church is entirely different from this picture. The Church has always believed that the Holy Spirit would confirm the Church in the truth. Those who dissented from the orthodox teaching of the Catholic church were termed heretics. When the Reformation occurred, those who felt they could not remain in the Catholic Church formed their own organizations. Even though Anglicanism could be classed with this latter group, they strongly affirmed that they held no faith of their own, but only the faith of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Only the Unitarian movement looks like the kind of picture of unity that the Archbishop of Canterbury is now painting for Anglicanism. Our two great partners in ecumenical dialogue, the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church must be wondering about who they have been talking with. An Anglican Communion as the Archbishop of Canterbury now envisions it could not by any stretch of the imagination be united with Rome or with Orthodoxy. What a sell out!

When I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, I was assured that the church was catholic, that it had bishops in apostolic succession, and that its doctrine was none other than the faith of the undivided Church. This was a great claim, and even if the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox didn't agree with it, there was still a great basis for making the claim. Now that all has changed.

While I still think the Anglican Communion will continue to hold together in some way, I am very clear about the fact that it is no longer what it once was, and it is rapidly becoming something very different. It may be fine for some, but for anyone concerned about orthodoxy it is unsatisfactory.

C. David Burt

2006-05-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

Seven Candidates for Presiding Bishop

There are seven candidates for Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and you can see and hear interviews by them at Episcopal News Service. Predictably, four voted for Robinson and three seemingly reluctantly voted against. Bishop Francisco Duque-Gómez of Colombia voted against because homosexuality is a cultural issue in Colombia. The only female candidate, Katharine Jefferts Schori of Nevada voted for Robinson. The other two who voted against confirmation clearly said that they wished they didn't have to do it.

All of the bishops expressed the opinion that the Episcopal Church is destracted from its main mission by this issue. One hears this theme over and over again as Episcopalians bemoan the fact that those who oppose the ordination of homosexuals are not simply willing to carry on business as usual. I don't know if they realize how disingenuous this seems to those of us who were unchurched earlier by the ordination of women. We got the same pleas aimed at making us feel guilty for having broken the fellowship and communion of the Episcopal Church over a matter which, if we had only been up to date with the times, we should have at least treated only as a matter of discipline, not of doctrine. Well, it is doctrine, not just discipline, and those who try to brush this fact under the carpet are either ignorant of the Apostolic tradition of the church or they wickedly choose to disregard it. Those who favor putting buggery on the same level as matrimony are the villains, not those who find themselves forced out of the Episcopal Church because of this radical change in the rules.

The Diocese of San Francisco recently elected a bishop who is strait, but pro gay. I would ask the question now whether it would be possible for a bishop who is not pro gay to be elected in San Francisco or anywhere else in the Episcopal Church. Things have slipped very badly since I was ordained in 1968. Much is being made of the fact that the next bishop of San Francisco is not gay, and that this may save the Episcopal Church from the brink of schism, but I see it differently, having left the Episcopal Church with the St. Louis crowd in 1978. The Episcopal Church is nothing but one of many different Protestant denominations in this country, and they are condemned to continue to divide and sub-divide because that is the lot of all denominations that are a law unto themselves. The only way forward, as I see it, is catholic unity.

Anglo-Catholics are, or were, a rare breed of Episcopalians who viewed themselves as part of the Catholic Church even though they were not in communion with either Rome or Orthodoxy. As long as there was hope that some day Anglicanism might be recognized as a legitimate sister church in the catholic communion, Anglo-Catholics could build beautiful gothic churches and fill them with incense. They could kneel at prayer, cross themselves, and make auricular confession to a priest. They could light candles and keep novenas. They could go on pilgrimage to holy places. They could recite the Divine Office, and they could pray the rosary, all the while blissfully thinking that they belonged to the Catholic Church, apart from which there was no salvation. But now it takes too much in the way of mental gymnastics to be able to maintain that claim, and most Anglo-Catholics are now out of the Episcopal Church. I wonder if we are missed.

As in the aftermath of the ordination of women there is today much talk of reconciliation, but it is one sided. Those who have been "unchurched" are made to feel like they are the culprits. Here is an example: An English superior of a religious order askes how we can maintain our sense of integrity as Christians when people think we have lost our integrity. The message is that those who are critical of the revisionist agenda are unchristian. Another example: A Dean of an Episcopal seminary mounts a special program calling people to "witness" to their faith to show we have not lost our vision. The subtle message behind this is that those who are not willing to witness with us are unchristian. After the St. Louis schism, Bishop Coburn was appointed to head up a committee for reconciliation. He was charged with the task of reconciling clergy and people back to the Episcopal Church. At the time I was the only priest in Massachuseetts who had joined the Continuing Church movement, and I never heard from Bishop Coburn on the matter of reconciliation, not that it would have done any good, but perhaps he knew me well enough from seminary to know that I would not be easily reconciled back to a heretical form of Protestantism. Words like "reconciliation", "witness", and "integrety" are face saving words used by the revisionists who know that the fellowship we once held in the Episcopal Church is utterly broken. I suppose they can not bring themselves to the point of saying that they are glad we are no longer present as an irritant in their church.

It will be interesting to see how things play out in the General Convention and in the Anglican Communion. My guess is that ECUSA will escape being expelled from the Anglican Communion, but that the gay agenda will continue to steer the ship onto the reefs.

C. David Burt

2006-04-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

Immigration Rally in Boston

Yesterday Sean Patrick Cardinal O'Mally spoke at the Immigration Rally in Boston. I was in attendance. As a bilingual teacher in the Boston Public Schools, I am painfully aware of how much the children of immigrant families are suffering as a result of their situation. There are no simple answers, and so we must be pragmatic. The conservative estimate is that there are eleven million undocumented hispanics in the United States and many other ethnic groups. Although I don't ask my students, I can assume that many of them are undocumented.

My experience has been that many or most of them have legitimate moral reasons for coming here. Who am I to judge the methods by which they landed here? Since I deal mainly with Latinos because I speak Spanish, I know that there is a perception of a double standard. Cubans can gain the right to stay simply by setting foot on American soil. That is because Cuba is Communist. Guatemalans will get sent back. That is because Guatemala is not Communist. Puertorricans are automatically citizens. Colombians who have money and are well educated can come easily, but Salvadorans and Dominicans are not wanted because they are poor and uneducated.

I must say that I bristle at the suggestion proposed in Congress that any American who lends aid to undocumented immigrants is committing a felony. What will this do to teachers, doctors, nurses, clergy, and lawyers? Am I a criminal if I help people in need of help? Surely such a law would be unconstitutional. It seems to me that this is driven by a very misguided fortress mentality. I am reminded of Rome. As school children we all learned that the fall of Rome was caused by a number of factors. One was the fact that many residents were denied citizenship, and the other was that the barbarians came in.

Europe first formed a common market and then opened up its borders between countries. Now there is a common currency. People from Spain can freely go and work in Germany, and the Germans are very happy to go to Spain on holiday. The only bad effect to this is that the standard of living in once poor Spain is now on a par with the rest of Europe and it is more expensive for tourists to go there. Couldn't we do the same in America? Couldn't we make a powerful common market here leading to a common currency and the opening of borders? It would be nice to be able to drive from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego without passing through a customs booth. Calling for no toll booths is probably too much to ask.

I call on Congress to enact a new immigration law because we must have a law; but please set politics asside and enact a law which is humane, helps reunite families, and protects the most vulnerable.

C. David Burt

2006-03-11T11:39:00.001-08:00

Wafa Sultan

Three cheers for her!

We have been waiting for a clear voice to point out what is wrong with Islam. She has done it. Listen to her interview on Al Jazeera.

Dr. Sultan, if you read this, please know that people are praying for you, especially for protection from the mindless threats that have been hurled at you.

C. David Burt

Owner, Islam to Christianity Yahoo Group

2006-02-21T08:05:00.000-08:00

Young Men Age 15 to 25

As is known, from birth to fifteen years of age people do not look after themselves, nor are they really aware of great events, and from the age of 25 and above people enter into family commitments, they go out and have working commitments. A man will have a wife and children, so his mind becomes more mature, but the ability to give becomes weaker. He tells you: 'Who can I leave the children to? If I leave, who will look after them?' and so on. And if wer're really honest we find that this section between the ages of 15 and 25, is when people are able to wage jihad. (Osama bin Laden: Messages to the World, p.93, ed. Bruce Lawrence, London 2005, Verso, ISBN 1-84467-045-7

I am continuing to read the words of Osama bin Laden. The above quote comes from a long interview with Al-Jazeera in December of 1998. Here bin Laden reveals the psychological reality that if you can get a boy at the age of 15 or so, you can mold him into a terrorist who will wage jihad. By brainwashing a kid and turning him into a fanatical fighting instrument, a weapon, a human bomb; and by distributing such terrorist throughout the world, a very potent military force is deployed. Bin Laden doesn't even need to direct the operation; all he needs to do is turn them loose on the world.

The Catholic Church also knows, but perhaps has forgotten, that this demographic group, young men from age 15 to 25, are the primary candidates for the priesthood and for religious orders. They are not intellectually mature enough to understand what is really going on in their lives and what their options could be, and they are still immature enough to be molded by careful spiritual guides into keenly convinced young men who are willing to make any sacrifice for what they believe. If you compare the madrasas of Pakistan and Afghanistan with Catholic highschools, minor seminaries, and novitiates, you will find some of the same psychological dynamics going on. This has obviously been one of the strengths of the Catholic Church, but has also been one of its pitfalls.

There was a period of time when the Church turned out dedicated young priests and religious who were prepared to go anywhere and to suffer anything for the sake of the Gospel. Protestant churches too produced missionaries, and still do to a certain extent, but the churches that produce the most seem to be the ones that have the tightest hold on the 15 to 25 year-old population.

Vocations to the priesthood and to the religious life have dropped tremendously in the Catholic Church in recent years, and part of the reason may be due to a change in the target population from the 15-25 year-olds to more mature candidates. It has been strongly argued that a young man really does not have a full concept of what a religious vocation will be like, and many who made commitments at a tender age later have fallen away. As Catholic families became smaller due to shifting economic realities, education, and birth control, fewer young men have been encouraged by their parents to consider a religious calling. Instead they have been encouraged to get as much secular education as they can. The church too has seen a value in the "delayed vocation", where a man becomes a priest after some years in "the world." It is argued that such a person is more in touch with what is really happening with people in their lives today. The problem is that by the time this "delayed vocation" comes along, many of the best candidates have married, and those who are left are often those who for one reason or another did not persue that option in their lives. This should be seen as a very strong argument for a married priesthood in the Catholic Church, but that alone will not solve the problem

The Catholic Church has deprived itself of young men, and what remains is a rather tired old lot of clergy, most of whom should be retired by now. There is no plan in place to solve the vocation crisis, and so the forces of disintegration become a viscious cycle of decline, and the result is clearly seen in places like Boston where the Archdiocese is forced to close nearly a third of all its churches in a small space of time. The evangelical Protestant churches, by contrast, are growing.

The key to Osama bin Laden's success is education. The madrasas and training camps provide the formation of fanatical suicide terrorists filled with hatred toward an enemy whom they only understand by faith to be evil. I am not advocating that the Catholic Church take fifteen year-olds and turn them into fanatics, but I would like to raise the issue that we are not even making an adequate effort in the religious formation of young men in this age group. In public school, where I teach, it is taboo to even mention religion. I dare say that Catholic schools are not much better, with a few exceptions. Often they are staffed by under-paid laity, and frequently these people have no real connection with their students on the level of spirituality. Holiness begets holiness, and it remains a fact that the best priest is one who was inspired by a good and holy priest sometime when he was young. The fear of abuse is now making this almost impossible today.

Prayer is the key to any vocation. If a young man does not begin to pray seriously by age 15, there is very little likelihood that a vocation will develop. How does a young man learn to pray? simply by doing it with the older man. I guess this is the principle of the madrases in the Islamic world, and it is certainly the principle of the novitiate in most religious orders. If you train a dog to lie down on command, he will do it and will learn to like doing it because it pleases his master. In the same way, if you place a boy on his knees before the altar and support him in his spiritual struggles, he will develop an interior life and he will learn to like it because it pleases the Master. The alternative is to let the boy run off into the secular world without a thought for God. So I think we need a renewed effort to promote religious vocations in boys from age fifteen on.

Of course, it could be argued that God will provide himself with vocations to the priesthood no matter what we do about it. I don't buy this argument at all because it is what we used to call a "cop out". God can raise up children to Abraham from the stones if he needs to, but why make Him do that when we can do what is obviously needed. Isn't that what Jesus meant by that famous saying? Vocations to the priesthood is everybody's business, and an effective strategy to promote the priesthood in the Catholic Church is obviously not in place at the present time. I would say that the place to start is with the education of young men.

C. David Burt

2006-01-15T12:41:00.000-08:00

The Nature of Jihad

I am reading a new book Messages to the World, The statements of Osama bin Laden, edited and introduced by Bruce Lawrence, 2005, Verso ISBN 1-84467-045-7.

First of all, Bruce Lawrence is an old friend of mine and classmate in seminary. Even when I first knew him back in the late 60's I was impressed by the fact that he was fluent in Arabic. Since then his knowledge has increased and there is probably no person who can better interpret to the Western mind what is going on in the Islamic mind today. The book bears this out. The Introduction is excellent, and clarified for me many things that I thought might be true about Islamic terrorism, but I was not sure. Most of the words in this book are bin Laden's own, but the footnotes are very helpful. For example when a verse is cited from the Qur'an, the footnotes often give the parts of the verse that have been conveniently left out.

When the attack of 9/11 occurred, most Americans were struck with incredulity. Why would anyone want to die attacking us in the name of religion? This quote from Osama bin Laden may help us understand:

A believer must rest assured that life is only in the hands of God, and sustenance is also in the hands of God, the Almighty. As for fearing for one's life, it is difficult to explain to you how we think of ourselves, unless you have full belief. We believe that no one could take out one breath of our written life as ordained by God. We see that getting killed in the cause of God is a great honor wished for by our Prophet. He said in his hadith: "I swear to God, I wish to fight for God's cause and be killed, I'll do it again and be killed, and I'll do it again and be killed." Being killed for God's cause is a great honor achieved by only those who are the elite of the nation. We love this kind of death for God's cause as much as you like to live. We have nothing to fear for. It is something we wish for. (p. 56)

It is easy to dismiss this simply as fanaticism, but my opinion is that it is truly reflective of the religion that is Islam. Bin Laden's quarrel with the Saudi regime is that it has allowed non-Muslims to live in the Arabian Peninsula, and he sees this as an invasion. Bin Laden speaks frequently of a "crusade" against Islam, and he views the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. led war against Iraq as part of this effort to undermine Islam. What he wants in Islamic countries is complete adherence to the Qur'an in all aspects of life, something like what the Taliban attempted to impose in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden has successfully rallied support for a jihad against the United States as expressed in the following fatwa:

To kill the American and their aliescivilians and militaryis an individual duty incumbent upon every Muslim in all countries, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Holy Mosque from their grip, so that their armies leave all the territory of Islam, defeated, broken, and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of God Almighty: "Fight the idolators at any time, if they first fight you;" "Fight them until there is no more persecution and until worship is devoted to God;" "Why should you not fight in God's cause and for those oppressed men, women, and children who cry out: 'Lord, rescue us from this town whose people are oppressors! By Your grace, give us a protector and a helper!'?"

With God's permission we call on everyone who believes in God and wants reward to comply with His will to kill the Americans and seize their money wherever and whenever they find them. We also call on the religious scholars, their leaders, their youth, and their soldiers, to launch the raid on the soldiers of Satan, the Americans, and whichever devil's supporters are allied with them, to rout those behind them so that they will not forget it. (p. 61)

These are chilling words, and they leave no doubt that bin Laden has declared war on the United States. Perhaps our military response is understandable, especially since part of the Muslim rhetoric is to destroy the state of Israel. Unfortunately for us, this kind of talk has won a very solid following among young Muslims who are willing to sacrifice their lives in a jihad to punish America.

As I said above, Osama bin Laden is acting out of the teaching of his religion. If it were not he, it would be some other Islamic fundamentalist who would rally people to this cause, because, you see, it is all in the Qur'an and in other Islamic texts. The problem is not with Osama bin Laden; the problem is with the Qur'an, perhaps the most hideous religious hoax, in my opinion, ever visited upon mankind.

They view this conflict as a Crusade. If only it were! If only we were over there to convert Muslims to Christianity, then perhaps we might be doing some good. But as it is, we are only reinforcing their opinions that we are a violently aggressiveve enemy intent upon subjugating them for the sake of oil and for the sake of the Holy Land. Our military efforts to get the terrorists have truly backfired. We have caused a huge amount of destruction which we will have to pay for one way or another, we have killed thousands of civilians (collateral damage), and this week we have violated the territory of Pakistan in a drone bombing attempt to get al-Zawahiri. Osama bin Laden appeals to the heroism in young people and they respond by being willing to die for their cause, yet we use drones! The fact is that Americans are not willing to die for this conflict, and they shouldn't be, because the whole thing is mis-directed, but the Muslims see us as cowards.

Islam is the problem, but you can't say that. That is a statement that shows disrespect for another religion. If we say it while at the same time we are bombing, it may lead to the great battle of civilizations. And so in the propaganda war that accompanies every war, we are losing because we are silenced. Islam is the problem because it is not really just a religion. It is a whole social system which presumably orders society in accordance with God's will.

The problem is that their source of knowledge about this is the Qur'an which purports to have been revealed to Mohammed by an angel and he, in turn, dictated verbatim to some of his friends. The voice of God speaks through the Qur'an in a way that it does not speak in any other holy book. The Qur'an takes it upon itself even to correct the Bible. For example, it was not Isaac whom Abraham took up the mountain, but Ishmael. More serious is the claim that Jesus in fact did not die on the cross but that a surrogate died in his place. If you read the Qur'an with an open mind, you find yourself asking, "What kind of god is saying these things?" My belief is that the Qur'an falls on its face by the fact that there is really no free will. The doctrine of predestination in the Qur'an is stronger even than that of Calvin.

Christians do not understand Islam, and they underestimate its danger. Most Christians have no clue about the fact that this cult is coercively imposed and stifles intellectual and religious freedom. I won't go into it now, but I would challenge all who are reading this to inform themselves about Islam.

Guns and bombs will not solve the problem; they will only make matters worse. What is needed is Christian evangelism to convert Muslims to the Christian religion. Muslims need to be freed from the tyrany of their religion. I have a Yahoo Group , the purpose of which is to encourage this very thing, but I am astonished by the very low activity on the group. Please visit if you are interested. I would suggest that it would be wise to sign anonymously.

So thank you, Bruce Lawrence for this very fine book. Bruce is a professor of Religion at Duke University. Read his book.

C. David Burt

2005-12-16T13:47:00.000-08:00

A Future for the Anglican Use

The Thoughtful Crab: Anglican-Use Roman Catholics

The Thoughtful Crab has made some very important observations about the possible short future for the Anglican Use. Some of what he says is correct, and some is not. To begin with, there have not been "a great number" of Anglican Use Parishes forcibly converted to Novus Ordo parishes. There have been some that have converted to Novus Ordo because they no longer had an Anglican Use Priest. The future of the Anglican Use is by no means certain.

The Pastoral Provision for Anglicans in the Catholic Church is an interim arrangement, and the permission for married men to become priests in the Catholic Church is not intended to be on-going. After this generation of former Anglican priests dies off, what then? Conceivably celibate priests could be granted faculties to celebrate the Anglican Use, but with the priest shortage in the Roman Catholic Church, this may seem unlikely except in the case of the most successful of Anglican Use congregations. Right now such booming parishes can be counted on one hand.

The Thoughtful Crab pointed out that this really is the time for an Anglican Rite in the Catholic Church, and I have said this too. An Anglican Rite would assure the future for the Anglican Use in accord with the goals of Vatican II to preserve the patrimony of ecclesial bodies reuniting with the Catholic Church, and allow a relaxation of celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church without altering the rule of celibacy in the Latin Rite. TC opines that the Anglican Use may have come too soon. He may be right. It was primarily a clerical thing, anyway, and most of the priests ordained under the Pastoral Provision have given no thought for the Anglican Use. They are just content to be serving as Catholic priests. At the time the Anglican Use started, there were some laity upset over the ordination of women, but most of the alienated laity of the Episcopal Church were more concerned with issues about the new BCP. Now the laity are hopping mad about V. Gene Robinson and all that he represents.

Unfortunately there is very little left of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Episcopal Church. And most of the people crying for realignment today are evangelical. They are perfectly content to be joined with the Reformed Episcopal Church which split off in 1873 over changes in the Prayer Book; they did not approve of the invocation of the saints and they rejected the doctrine of Baptismal regeneration. These new Evangelicals are putting a great deal of emphasis on Holy Scripture and on the Articles of Religion. They are not going to be interested in union with the Catholic Church any time soon. All of the people who met in Pittsburgh with Archbishop Akinola recently are interested in being Evangelical Anglicans, and the fact that women priests were prominently displayed at that meeting shows clearly that they are in fact no candidates for unity with Rome.

The only logical candidates for unity with the Catholic Church that I can see are the few lingering Anglo-Catholics and the Continuing Churches which owe their beginnings at the St. Louis Congress in 1977. In fact one might say that the Pastoral Provision was not offered soon enough for them.

It is no secret that Archbishop Hepworth of the Traditional Anglican Communion has requested unity with the Catholic Church, and his request has been endorsed by the other bishops and clergy in his jurisdiction. The Anglican Catholic Church has also requested serious conversations leading to union. So it may be that something will happen to provide an Anglican Rite or at least an Anglican Use Prelature. If this doesn't happen sometime soon, I would have to agree with Blogger Thoughtful Crab that the Anglican Use is simply headed for assimilation.

This would be very sad, it seems to me, if this is how it all ends up, because it would be viewed as an unfulfilled promise. I am not talking about the Pastoral Provision itself. I mean the promise of the Second Vatican Council. The Pastoral provision is really the first attempt to implement the teaching of the Council that separated communities could be reunited with the Holy See while retaining their heritage. Anglo-Catholics are the most likely candidates for such a reunion. If this fails, one can hardly hope that there would be much success with any other protestant groups.

C. David Burt

2005-12-11T14:39:00.000-08:00

Cult Come of Age?

When do we know if a cult has come of age and is no longer operating with some of the classic characteristics of a cult? This is a difficult question because it is hard for a group to overcome its history.

One of the defining characteristics of a cult is that it limits the intellectual or spiritual freedom of its members. This can be very subtle and hard to asses because in most cases it is not as blatant as in groups like the Branch Davidians. Another related characteristic is so-called "shepherding". This is where the leaders of the group control the lives of the members to such a degree that there is a lack of freedom. Most students of cults believe that this kind of activity actually stifles spiritual growth rather than promoting it.

Yesterday I paid a visit to the Community of Jesus in Orleans, Massachusetts. This group which came out of the Jesus Movement started off as a charismatic community under the leadership of two women, Kay and Judy. Very early it seemed to be showing the signs of being a cult. I had some people in my parish who were very strongly affected by them, and I once attended a meeting at which one of the leaders of the Community of Jesus spoke. She spoke of the necessity sometimes of putting people on a program of spiritual growth. A man attending the meeting raised his hand to ask a question. As it turned out, he only offered a supportive observation rather than asking a specific question. He was sharply rebuked for not asking a question and was told that he was attempting to teach. It was not his place to teach, it was the place of the person giving the teaching, and he was not being obedient. I came away from the meeting thinking that these Community of Jesus people are very bossy.

But yesterday I saw a community that more than thirty years later seems to have mellowed. Some of the original leaders are no longer in charge. The community has embarked on a Benedictine way of life, and although it is unusual in that it is a mixed community of men and women, some celibate and some not, and an ecumenical community, it seems to be thriving. They have built themselves a basilica style church which must have cost millions. It looks a bit incongruous next to the Cape Cod style buildings of the community. They have a humungus pipe organ, and it is clear that music is one of their primary foci. They have an orchestra, a band, a choir, a schola, and they have produced many very fine recordings. Gregorian chant is very much alive and well in this community, and I would say that their execution of chant is as good or better than anything you can hear in this country, certainly. The Divine Office is sung in Latin some days and in English on other days. I attended Vespers and Lessons and Carols. The former transported me in thought to the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, and the latter to King's College Cambridge.

While it certainly requires discipline to achieve such greatness in music, it does not seem to be stultifying or oppressive in the lives of the members of the community. In fact I came away feeling that in some respects they have the best of both worlds, the sacred and the secular. They get to sing with a world class choir in a liturgical space that is unrivaled in this country at least, and they get to live in a quaint village community on Cape Cod. They appeared to be very happy.

Another community I am acquainted with that started out with suspicions of being a cult is St. Benedict Abbey in Still River, Mass. This is now a Benedictine monastic community in the Catholic Church, but at one time their founder, Fr. Leonard Feeney, S.J., was under interdict and excommunicated for his activities. It seemed that he had been all too successful in converting some of the sons of prominent Boston Brahmins to the Catholic Church, and he was doing it by saying that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church. The fathers of these fine young college students at Harvard complained to Cardinal Cushing because some of their sons were dropping out of college to follow Father Feeney. In a move that is still controversial, Cardinal Cushing excommunicated Feeney.

After this the community moved out of Cambridge and set up a community in Still River, Massachusetts. They grew, they published, they preached, and they continued to be staunch defenders of the doctrine that salvation is not to be found anywhere except in the Catholic Church. The people in that community, then isolated from the Catholic Church in many ways, became very much a large family. They set up their own school and even had for a while accreditation as a college. Of course the community was accused of being a cult. Certainly Fr. Feeney himself, although brilliant, was intensely bigoted, particularly against the Jews, and his soapbox preaching on Boston Common was memorable for anyone lucky enough to hear him.

Toward the end of his life, however, he was reconciled with the Church and the community he founded began to move toward regularization. Since they had quite a number of men who had prepared for the priesthood, they needed to be a part of a legitimate Roman Catholic institution for it to be possible for these men to move forward in their vocation. The decision was to become Benedictine. Not all of the community members were in favor of it, and indeed there were a number of splits. Stemming from those splits are groups who favor the traditional Latin Mass. After Fr. Feeney died, Fr. Gabriel Gibbs became the Superior, and he led the community through the nearly twenty years to become a Benedictine Abbey. He is now the Abbot. Some of the sisters moved out to Petersham and founded St. Scholastica Priory, and some of the monks from Still River followed the sisters to form a supportive men's monastery, St. Mary's. All in all, the community settled down and overcame its turbulent past. Others from the original group are still bitter about what happened to them and never accepted reconciliation with the Church. I don't know much about them, but they are still holding out for the no salvation outside of the Catholic Church teaching. They believe that the Catholic Church since Vatican II has sold out on this central doctrine.

Saint Benedict Abbey and the Community of Jesus are two examples of groups which started off as cults, but which are now are on fairly firm ground. If you go to St. Benedict's you will still find books by Fr. Feeney for sale, and some of them are very good. The members will speak of the importance of being in the Catholic Church and they still have a strong ministry to people converting to Catholicism. They were a great help and encouragement to me when I converted, but their doctrine is more nuanced now. You may hear them insist that were it not for the Church and its prayers, there would be no salvation for anyone, but unless you are invincibly ignorant not being a Roman Catholic is a risky thing to do. At the Community of Jesus you will also hear about the importance of conversion, but it is not conversion to an institution that they are promoting, it is conversion to Jesus, and the converted soul needs nurturing and a supportive community to keep it on track.

C. David Burt

2005-12-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury and Islam

Dr. Williams has been going around lecturing on Christianity at Islamic Universities. He gave a lecture on the Trinity in Cairo and blogger Alvin Kimel gave a very good response.
http://catholica.pontifications.net/?page_id=1000

On the 25th of November he was in Islamabad, Pakistan where he had dinner with the President, General Musharraf, met with Christian leaders and gave a lecture on Christianity at the Islamic University:

http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/40/75/acns4083.cfm

So what was this all about? It seems clear that the Archbishop believes in dialogue. But he makes it clear that he doesn't think that the purpose of dialogue is to achieve agreement or conversion. I disagree.

Dr Williams returned to the university in the afternoon for a round-table discussion, Is inter faith dialogue possible? Dr Williams gave a brief informal presentation and then answered questions on dialogue from the delegates, who were academics and local Christian and Muslim leaders.

He told the delegates that religious representatives needed to be clear about the terms of engagement:

“Dialogue is not debate; dialogue is not proselytism; dialogue is not the attempt to persuade; dialogue is not negotiation. When I enter dialogue with someone of another religious tradition ... I am not out to secure agreement, but to secure understanding. An honest and constructive dialogue leads us to go away thinking ‘Now I begin to see a little better what it is like to hold those views, pray those prayers and to live those lives’.

“Dialogue is possible, dialogue is necessary and, happily, by the grace of God, dialogue is above all, actual. The very fact of our meeting this afternoon is, I hope and pray, a sign of how that dialogue can and will unfold in the years ahead.”

Dr Williams outlined some of the thinking behind proposals for a Christian-Muslim Forum in the United Kingdom and spoke of the potential for agreements that seek to protect minority communities:

“Part of that is connected with the suggestion that local religious communities adopt a covenant, a solemn agreement between each other to come to one another's defence if any one of the communities is attacked. It is the greatest possible sign of real and effective dialogue if ordinary people from the area will immediately come to support the community that has been attacked."

Here is The Archbishop's Lecture with questions or comments from me interspersed:

Lecture delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Islamic University, Islamabad

Imagine someone watching, over a period of about one year, the things that happen in a Christian church. They would be aware that one day of the week had special significance. Particularly if they were observing what happens in a historically Christian country, they would notice that Sunday is seen as important for meeting and praying. They would see that Christians met to sing and speak to a God whom they describe as the maker of all things and the judge of all things, and that they knelt or bowed in the presence of this God, thanking him and acknowledging their failures and wickedness. They would see that extracts from a holy book were read in public and that instruction was given by leaders of the congregation in how to understand this book. They would perhaps notice that most of the prayers ended with words referring to someone called Jesus Christ, and describing him as ‘Lord’. They would see that at different seasons Christians celebrated the birth of Jesus and also commemorated his death and his miraculous return from death. Sometimes they would hear prayers and blessings mentioning ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. And finally, they would see that new members were brought into the community by a ceremony of pouring water on them or immersing them in water, and that the most regular action performed by communities of different kinds was the blessing and sharing of bread and wine. They would notice, perhaps with bewilderment or even shock, that this sharing of bread and wine was described as sharing the body and blood of Jesus.

In what I wish to say, I am trying to think what questions might arise for someone looking at Christians from the outside in the way I have just imagined. These may or may not be the questions you have. But perhaps the attempt to answer these questions will help bring other questions more clearly into focus.

Let me begin with the most obvious features of Christian prayer. We pray ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’. And the best-known of all Christian prayers begins with the words ‘Our Father in heaven’. These belong together. Probably the most important Christian belief is that we are given the right to speak to God in exactly the same way that Jesus did, because the life, the power, the Spirit, that filled Jesus is given to us also.

We believe that Jesus, Son of Mary, is fully a human being. But we believe more than that. Because of the divine authority that he shows in his power to teach and to forgive, as our gospels describe it, we say also that the whole of his human life is the direct effect of God’s action working in him at every moment. Some of our teachers have said that his human life is like iron that has been heated in the fire until it has the same power to burn as the fire does.

We call him the Son of God. But we do not mean by this that God has physically begotten him, or that he is made to be another God alongside the one God. We say rather that the one God is first the source of everything, the life from which everything flows out. Then we say that the one God is also in that flowing-out. The life that comes from him is not something different from him. It reflects all that he is. It shows his glory and beauty and communicates them. Once again, our teachers say that God has a perfect and eternal ‘image’ of his glory, sometimes called his wisdom, sometimes called his ‘word’, sometimes called his ‘son’, though this is never to be understood in a physical and literal way. And we say that the one God, who is both source and outward-flowing life, who is both ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, is also active as the power that draws everything back to God, leading and guiding human beings towards the wisdom and goodness of God. This is the power we call ‘Holy Spirit’.

Does Dr. Williams come right out and say that Jesus is divine?

So when we speak of ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’, we do not at all mean to say that there are three gods – as if there were three divine people in heaven, like three human people in a room. Certainly we believe that the three ways in which God eternally exists and acts are distinct – but not in the way that things in the world or even persons in the world are distinct. This is why when Christians read in the Qur’an the strong condemnation of ‘associating’ with God other beings that are not God, they will agree wholeheartedly.

Not once does Dr. Williams mention the word "Trinity".

If we then return to what Christians believe about Jesus, Son of Mary, perhaps we can see why they say that he is ‘Son of God’. Because the eternal word and wisdom of God has completely occupied his human mind and body, we say that in him this word and wisdom has ‘become flesh’, has been ‘incarnated’. Because the word and wisdom of God is seen in the Jewish Scriptures of the Old Testament as like a ‘child’ of God – and also because these scriptures often call the kings of God’s people who rule according to wisdom the ‘sons of God’ – we are able to say that Jesus is God’s Son. And from the very first, Christian teachers have said that this language must not be thought of in any physical way.

Any mention of the virgin birth of Jesus?

When Jesus himself prays to God in his own human voice, he calls him ‘Father’. And what we must now add to what we have said so far is that this title expresses not only the acknowledgement on the part of Jesus that his whole being comes directly from God, but also the trust and complete confidence that he enjoys with God. As the Gospel of St John tells us over and over again, Jesus knows the very mind and heart of God and can reveal it completely and authoritatively to those he calls to be with him. When the Christian prays ‘in the name of Jesus’ and says ‘Our Father’, the Christian is saying to God: ‘you have promised that, when I pray, you, O God, will hear the voice of Jesus, and you will look upon me with the same love that Jesus knew.’ When we pray, we stand in the place of Jesus, we speak his words, and we hope in confidence that we shall receive the love he receives.

Many who are not Christian think that this means Christians rely upon Jesus instead of trying to obey God’s commands for themselves. Other faiths sometimes criticise Christians for treating human beings as if they were not fully responsible for their actions. But the Christian belief is this. When God created the world, he made all things according to his will. But the first human beings refused to obey God, although they knew what he asked of them. By rebelling against him in this way, they started a process of corruption in the world which spreads to everyone who is born into it. Even before a newborn child has learned to speak, it will have been touched and affected by a ‘climate’ of disobedience to God. We are all deeply affected by the actions of others, and sometimes we find that the results of other people’s actions make it hard or even impossible to do what is right. Christians say that this is something that to some extent limits the freedom of every human being. The law of God is there and it is plain, but we are held in prison by this history of sin and disobedience. Such is the teaching of St Paul. This is what we mean when we speak of ‘original sin’ – the sin that is there even before we have done anything.

Here original sin is characterized as a "climate of disobedience". How come Mary, who also grew up in a climate of disobedience failed to fall into sin. Original sin is something more basic to our nature.

Only God the creator can restore the freedom to obey his commandments. How does he do this? When he creates Jesus in the womb of Mary, he brings into being a human life that will be perfectly obedient to his will because it is a human life completely filled with divine power. Jesus thus shows us what a human life is like when it is lived as it should be. But he does more. Because of his perfect obedience and goodness, he is able to offer himself to rejection and death, so that by his death there may be a restored relationship of love between God and humanity. Christians say that Jesus, as he goes to the cross, accepts all the suffering that is the consequence for human beings of their rebellion and weakness. He ‘pays the price’ of human wickedness. Because he accepts this suffering as an act of love, he changes what is possible for human beings. They need no longer despair that they can never obey or love God.

He does not use the word Atonement.

When we come in trust to Jesus and identify with him, when we stand in his place and speak with his words, the Holy Spirit gives us once again the freedom to live a life according to God’s will. Once we were not free, because the only kind of human fellowship possible was fellowship in the legacy of sin that affects us all. But Jesus creates a new kind of fellowship, a relationship with himself that is going to be stronger than the deep currents pulling us towards sin and rebellion. St Paul says that this means there is a ‘new creation’. We are able to start over again.

Is he implying here that we do not have free will unless we trust Jesus and identify with him? This is a serious error. Even the unbaptized, still in their original sin, have free will and are accountable for their actions. Muslims have a very strong belief in predestination. They do not really feel that they are free. Allah's will is all powerful and this means that nothing happens that is not in accord with His will. Ergo, we don't really have free will. The good news of Christianity is that we do have free will, even to oppose God's will.

Christians have always found it hard to say exactly how this works. Some speak of Jesus taking the punishment for sin in our place; some speak of him offering himself as a sacrifice. Some speak of him winning a victory over Satan and setting all of us who are prisoners free. It seems that there is no one way of saying this correctly. But what matters is this. In the life of Jesus, the completeness of divine love breaks into a world in which human beings are not free and not in contact with that love. By approaching his death as an act of love for human beings, by speaking about it (as he does in the gospels) as a sort of payment to the powers of evil that will release people from the effects of the sin of the first human beings, he ‘opens the kingdom of heaven to all believers’, to use the words of very old Christian hymn.

And because God brings him back from death to meet again with his followers, we know that his life is not a thing of the past. He is still alive, eternally alive. He calls people to be with him just as he did in his life on earth. And so day by day he creates that community of fellowship with him which gives human beings the possibility of living differently, living in obedience to God. In the words of our Scriptures, he ‘breathes’ into his followers the power of the Holy Spirit, so that they are drawn back to God and God’s ways. Because he rose from death ‘on the first day of the week’, according to the gospels, Sunday has always been a special day for Christians. And the Easter season is the greatest of all Christian festivals.

Where is the teaching that Christ's resurrection gives us the promise of eternal life?

When we receive the Holy Spirit, we still have to use our freedom to choose the good. But in fellowship with Jesus, we know that we have the help of the Spirit, giving us strength to resist temptation and wisdom to see where it lies. We also know that when we fail or fall back, as sometimes we are bound to do, the forgiving love of God will give us another opportunity to serve him, to try and model our lives on the life of Jesus and to let the freedom and love which he has planted in our hearts change all that we do and say. When the Qur’an speaks in Sura 40 of the angels who bear the throne of God praying for forgiveness for those who truly believe and turn in trust to God, Christians would find this easy to agree with. To ask for mercy and to rely on God’s mercy do not let us off the obligation to use all our powers in God’s service. They only assure us that, so long as we trust God we shall be given fresh opportunities by his grace.

Where is the teaching about metanoia? When we fall into sin, we must repent, confess, and receive absolution. We do not just pray to God or rely on the prayers of angels.

When we read our holy book, the Bible, containing the Scriptures of the Jewish people and also the writings of the first generation of believers in Jesus, we do so in order to hear how God’s revealing power has been at work in history. God’s first actions to free human beings from the effects of Adam’s rebellion are to be found in his calling to Abraham to be the father of a people who will be close to God and know his purpose. Later God saves this nation from Egypt and gives them the law of Moses. The people of Israel experience a long history of both God’s favour and God’s judgement; and at last God sends Jesus as his word, his gift, his action and presence in the world, so as to gather a people who will this time be not just one nation, but a community of every nation – ‘every tribe, people and language’, as the New Testament says.

The books contained in the Bible are of very diverse character. Unlike the Qur’an, this is not a text delivered in a brief space of time to one person. The Bible is, we believe, a book that speaks with one voice about God and his will and nature; but it does so – to use a popular Christian image – like a symphony of different voices and instruments of music, miraculously held together in one story and one message about God, a story whose climax is Jesus. Sometimes parts of the Bible are hard to understand; sometimes different passages seem to contradict each other. This is not surprising, when you remember that the books of the Bible were written over a period of more than a thousand years. But every word has been discussed and thought about for another two thousand years, and Christian teachers have found that there is always a deep unity of thought, once it is agreed that the life of Jesus is the centre of the picture and that it makes sense of all the rest.

Traditionally, the first five books of the Bible, describing the creation, the flood, the history of Abraham and his family, the rescue of the people of Israel from Egypt and the giving of the law to Moses are called the Pentateuch, the ‘five books of Moses’. There are then books of historical chronicles, books of psalms and proverbs, the messages of the prophets who declared God’s judgement against the people’s sins and promised that god would restore them if they turned to him, and a few books about how the people of Israel came back from their exile in Babylon. In the New Testament, the four gospels (‘gospel’ means ‘good news’ tell the story of Jesus, the Acts of the Apostles tells of the spread of the faith, and the letters or ‘epistles’ of Paul, Peter, John, James and Jude are writings that give guidance on matters of belief and behaviour to different communities. The Revelation to John is a vision of the last days of the world and the coming of Jesus in glory to judge all people.

Christians believe that the Bible is inspired by God – that is, they believe that the texts that make up the Bible were composed by the help of the Holy Spirit and that they communicate God’s will perfectly when they are taken together and read in the context of prayer and worship. Some Christians believe that this means the Bible is never wrong about any statement of fact. Others, while agreeing that the Bible is the final authority, would say that it may at times be mistaken, in the way ordinary human writers may be mistaken, about certain not very significant matters of fact, about dates, about personal names or stories, about geography, and so on. We do not think that God dictates the Bible to its writers, but that he works with and in their human minds to communicate his purpose, to tell us what we need to know in order to be set free from our mistakes and sins. Christians have spent much energy on the study of the Bible’s texts and how they came to be composed. They have established the best evidence for the texts and have discovered and discussed very early examples of the manuscripts (we have a part of St John’s gospel on a piece of parchment dated less than 100 years after Jesus). Sometimes the results of this study have been seen to be disturbing by those who insist upon the accuracy of every detail. But a large number of Christians accept the results of scholarly study as confirming the idea that the Bible tells one story in several different voices.

He has in fact shown that Christians view the Bible very differently from the way Muslims view the Qur'an, but the problem is that Muslims expect Christians to view our Holy Book the way they view theirs. This is the problem, however. The Qur'an is not what it claims to be, and we should not encourage giving it any heed at all. The Qur'an attempts to correct the Bible on a number of significant points critical to our faith. For example, the Qur'an denies that Jesus was crucified.

As the pattern of the whole story suggests, the New Testament, written by Jesus’ first followers and friends, cannot be understood without the Old Testament. Jesus works to recreate the people of God, just as the ancient prophets of Israel did; but he extends the boundaries of the people of God to include all nations. The God who once made a ‘covenant’, an alliance, with the people of Israel, now makes a covenant with all who trust in God because of what Jesus says and does.

Often in Christian history, teachers and scholars have found that the words of the Bible may have a symbolic meaning beyond their surface meaning. If the Holy Spirit is involved in the writing of the Bible, this should not be surprising. But no Christian doctrine can be proved just by appealing to a symbolic meaning alone.

When the leaders of the congregation deliver sermons, their main purpose is, or should be, to help believers understand the unity and harmony of the texts that have been read at an act of worship; and then to encourage them to live lives worthy of the good news that they have received.

Totally lacking here is any reference to the Doctrine of the Church in interpreting Holy Scripture.

All Christian public worship expresses first of all our gratitude that God has given his Spirit so that we can live by the power and love of Jesus the ‘Anointed King’ (which is what ‘Christ’ means). Admission to a full share in this worship is by baptism – a word which originally meant being dipped in water. According to Christian teaching, when water is poured over someone in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, their old life comes to an end – the life of slavery to disobedience – and the new life of the Spirit begins. At first, those baptised would be adults who had accepted belief in Jesus. As the Christian community grew and spread, and families brought up their children to believe, it became more common for children to be baptised. In many churches, there is another ceremony performed by a bishop, ‘confirmation’, which is believed to complete the process of baptism.

What about the washing away of original sin?

Practically all Christian communities meet for the ritual meal of bread and wine called the Holy Communion and sometimes referred to as the ‘Eucharist’ (thanksgiving) or ‘Mass’ (sending out in mission). Many churches meet every day for this, most of them at least once a week. The ceremony has its origins in the action of Jesus the night before his crucifixion, when he said the blessing over the bread and wine at the table, saying that they were his ‘body and blood’.

This language has often seemed strange or shocking. But its meaning must be looked for in the context of the Bible as a whole. The prophets of ancient Israel performed symbolic actions to show that God was about to do certain things. So Jesus, as he breaks the bread and shares the wine at dinner says that the bread broken and eaten shows what will happen to his body in his suffering, and the wine poured out represents his blood shed. In this suffering, though, God acts to free human beings from their slavery. The suffering Jesus endures will therefore be like food and drink for his friends – it will give life and strength. When they bless bread and wine in his name, the sharing of this food and drink will be an occasion for God’s new life to enter into them afresh. Just as Jesus’ human flesh and blood is the place where God’s power and Spirit are at work, so in this bread and wine, blessed in his memory, the same power and Spirit are active.

The connection between the Mass and the Cross is not explicit.

But around this central idea many other images and concepts gather. The meal is a Christian version of the Passover meal of the Jews in which they remember how God led them out of slavery. It is like the meal after a sacrifice in which something has been offered to God so as to make peace. It is like the meals Jesus shared with sinners and outcasts to show them that God was ready to welcome and forgive them. And it is like the meals that Jesus shared with his disciples after he had been raised from death. It is also the place where prayers are offered for all who need prayer. Because the Christian at Holy Communion stands especially close to Jesus, it is a time to bring our prayers into his prayer. Many Christians say that being at Holy Communion is being present in heaven while we are still on earth – because we are close to Jesus, praying with his voice, receiving his life. Many of the prayers used all over the Christian world talk about how at the Communion service we praise God alongside the angels and all the holy people of the past. When the community meets for Communion, it is part of the whole assembly of God’s people, living and dead, on earth and in heaven.

The word ‘church’ translates a Greek word whose original meaning is ‘assembly’. In the Greek world, the assembly of all the citizens in a city was an important event: citizens made decisions together, and their share in these events showed their dignity and freedom. So when people come together at the call of Jesus, they are ‘citizens’ of God’s kingdom or God’s city, and they declare their freedom to obey his laws.

Over the centuries, sadly, quarrels about details of teaching have separated Christian communities from one another, as Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox. While relations between these bodies are better now than they have sometimes been, it is hard to bring a bout complete reconciliation. Yet there is still a great unity about these chief teachings and a willingness to pray together for deeper unity.

What about the sin of our divisions? What about the Apostolic authority of the Catholic Church?

Unity is of importance because Jesus declared at his last meal with the disciples that the love they had for each other should be a visible sign of the love between him and his heavenly Father – a love (as we saw earlier) that is something infinitely greater than any bond between two human individuals. In their behaviour, Christians are always meant to show love – not as a feeling for each other but as a habit of seeing each other as God sees human beings. So love means readiness to forgive injuries and not to be self-righteous; it means being ready to give all we have for each other’s welfare or healing; it means justice – treating everyone as equally God’s creature, equally entitled to respect and service. Some think that Christian love is a ‘soft’ and vague thing; but if it does not include justice, it is meaningless. Once again, every Christian would agree with what we find in the Qur’an, especially in the fourth Sura, where we are told to be mindful of the Lord ‘who has made us all from a single soul’ and not to be miserly, ‘hiding the bounty God has given’. Almsgiving, whether by individual gift or by corporate or social care, is essential to Christian life. It is sad that so many historically Christian countries are often slow to give in this way to their own poor or to the poor of the rest of the world.

Agape is not just philanthropy.

Our love must also be faithful love. We must be committed to each other and to service and justice in God’s world, not following the feelings of a passing moment. This applies very directly to our human relationships. For Christians, marriage is a sign of God’s promise and commitment to human beings and of Jesus’ love for his people. This is why Christians are on the whole very uneasy about divorce; and they also believe that sexual activity before or outside marriage is a betrayal of this idea of committed love and relationship. The principle of faithful love means also that the care of children is essential for a life of justice and goodness according to God’s will. Quarrels between husband and wife, unfaithfulness, neglect or cruelty all have an effect on children and are therefore doubly bad.

Marriage is a sacrament that expresses the mystical relationship between Christ and his Church. In Islam poligamy is allowed. Wives do not have the rights that wives have in Christian society.

Although Christians put such a high value on forgiveness, they do not therefore reject the idea of just punishment applied by a lawful authority, including a non-Christian authority that acts with fairness and wisdom. In the history of the Church there have been different attitudes to whether it is right to go to war. Most have said that it can be justified on certain carefully defined conditions – if you are defending your people, if there is no possible alternative way of settling a dispute, if you can guarantee that innocent people will not be harmed or killed. But even on such conditions, there is a good deal of reservation in Christian tradition. Jesus in the gospels opposes violence, even in self-defence, for any individual. But St Paul seems to allow that force can be used by rulers to restrain evildoers. There is always a sense that force is second-best for the Christian, though it may be necessary in a threatening or unjust situation. Most Christians would now say that the history of the Crusades, for example, or the religious wars in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were serious betrayals of many of the central beliefs of Christian faith. Any modern attempt to revive a crusading ideal is not likely to be supported by most Christian believers.

This is a sell-out on the Crusades. He would have been better not even to mention it, but since he did, we should not forget that if it had not been for the Crusades, Europe might have been overrun by Islam and the Church might have been totally stamped out.

Lastly, it may be helpful to say a word about other kinds of Christian prayer. We have seen something of the meaning of what is said in public services. But Christians pray in private also. And in addition to praying for those in need and praying for forgiveness for their sins and giving thanks for blessings received, many Christians, since at least the third Christian century, have practised silent contemplation. They have disciplined their minds and bodies to be still so that the life of God may come into them more freely. The tradition of monastic life has formed the background of much of this life of silence and adoration. Some are called, Christians believe, to live a life without marriage and property, under obedience to a common rule of life, so that in this austere and sacrificial environment they may more readily come into what many have called the ‘repose’ of silent prayer. Some too have written about how the journey into this silence may be a road of great suffering, a following of the suffering of Jesus. Christian mysticism often speaks of the ‘darkness’ in which God lives – not because he does not want to communicate but because our minds and hearts are too small for him to enter fully, so that we experience God as challenging and overwhelming. But it also speaks of light flooding the mind, like the light that flowed from the face of Jesus, according to the gospels, when he was praying in the presence of his friends.

Muslims never liked monks, and the monasteries were frequently plundered. He needs to be unapologetic about the religious life in the Christian Church and point to the great good that religious orders have done, even in Muslim countries.

This may be an appropriate place to end. What the Christian hopes and prays for is that at the end he or she will be brought by the grace of God’s Spirit to see the glory of God a sit is shown in the face of Jesus, and to be so united with his prayer to the Father that we never fall away. All that the observer might see in a Christian meeting for worship is directed towards this. We seek to let the life that was alive in Jesus Son of Mary be alive in each one of us through the gift of God’s Spirit. And we pray that this life will, through us, bring healing and peace to all the world. There are many beliefs that divide Christians from others, not least from their Muslim friends and neighbours, and this lecture will have made some of them clearly visible. But I hope we may listen patiently to each other, discovering something of God in our meeting; and that we may pray each in our own way for the same peace and healing in a world that seems today so full of injustice and fear and conflict.

The Muslim has a view of heaven that is very much different from the Christian view. There needs to be a frank recognition that the promise of fourteen virgins or whatever it is, is very far from the beatific vision that Christians yearn for.

© Rowan Williams 2005

In all, I would say that the Archbishop has tried to soften his picture of Christianity for the sake of dialogue. But I suspect there was no real dialogue at this encounter. If the Muslims were to portray Islam to Rowan Williams, leaving out some important hard points, I don't think he would be impressed, and I certainly do not think that his Muslim hearers would have been impressed with this performance, because many of them understand what the simple teachings of Christianity are.

If you think I am being too hard on the Archbishop of Canterbury, please let me know. I know that he means well, but I think dialogue should be aimed at conversion, not appeasment.

I have set up a Yahoo Group aimed at encouraging Muslims to convert to Christianity. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Islam_Christianity/

C. David Burt

2005-11-20T20:14:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-12T06:59:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-10T03:24:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-09T11:25:00.000-08:00

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