Many Catholics and Protestants are confused when they encounter Anglicanism. Indeed, many Evangelicals troubled by the lack of historical continuity within their own faith communities have ended up in the Anglican church. Why suffer the stigma of becoming a Catholic when you can have bishops, a sense of continuity, and beautiful liturgy apart from Rome? After all, Anglicanism turns a blind eye to contraception, allows easy divorce, and has incorporated other “progressive” ideas.
Anglicanism presents its self as a reformed Catholicism striking a balance between the extremes of Rome and Geneva. However, the roots of Anglicanism are solidly Protestant, and the claim that Anglo-Catholicism is the genuine Anglican tradition does not stand up in the light of history.
Though the Church of England after the schism with Rome over Henry’s divorce still kept the Catholic sacramental system, radical Protestantism was introduced during the reign of Edward VI. Thomas Cranmer and Edward Seymour, appointed by Henry VIII to positions of power, upon Henry’s death worked openly to introduce the beliefs of the German Reformers. The holy sacrifice of the Mass was replaced by a vernacular communion service that denied transubstantiation and the eucharistic sacrifice. Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer was written in beautiful English but contained subtle heresy behind its lovely facade.
The renowned Anglican liturgist Dom Gregory Dix (1901–1953) commented on the Cranmeriam rite: “As a piece of liturgical craftsmanship it is in the first rank. . . . It is not a disordered attempt at a Catholic rite but the only effective attempt ever made to give liturgical expression to the doctrine of justification by faith alone” (The Shape of the Liturgy [1946], 11).
Indeed, shortly before his execution, Cranmer admitted, “Lord, I have sinned against heaven, before thy face. I have sinned against heaven, which through my fault is bereft of so many who should be dwelling there and because I most shamefully denied this heavenly gift presented to us. I have sinned also against earth, which so long has miserably lacked this sacrament, and against the men who I have debarred from this supersubstantial food, being the murderer of as many as have perished from the want of it. I have defrauded the souls of the departed of this perpetual and most august sacrifice” (translated from the Latin text in appendix to vol. IV of Jenkyns’ edition of Cramner’s Remains, 397).
The Cranmerian reform was militantly anti-sacerdotal. Altars were desecrated and replaced by wooden tables. The English Reformation was iconoclastic (in contrast to the Lutheran), and until the nineteenth century English Protestantism balked even at the image of the cross—never mind the crucifix. Cranmer formulated a rite of ordination that lost the apostolic succession for Anglicanism although it retained the titles of bishop, priest, and deacon.
From the beginning the Catholic Church rejected Anglican orders. (This rejection had nothing to do with the fable that a consecration of the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury had taken place in The Nag’s Head, a London pub.) The Catholic Church solemnly pronounced the invalidity of Anglican orders in 1896.
For three hundred years in the Anglican church there was no pretense at the Mass. There were no prayers for the dead, let alone requiem Masses, and the sacrament of unction of the sick was missing. Reservation of the sacrament was never practiced, and Anglicans were taught not to seek the intercession of the saints. The communion service was infrequently celebrated, and communicants were few. Confession was deemed not to be a sacrament of the gospel and was not encouraged (though the private confession of sins was allowed for), and it fell into general disuse.
The modern resemblance between Catholicism and some sections of Anglicanism derives from the fact that the churches of the Anglican communion were influenced by a ritualist movement in the nineteenth century. It grew out of the Oxford movement, which began in the middle years of that century. This movement considered the Catholic Church a visible body upon earth, bound together by a spiritual but absolute unity, though divided into national and other sections. This conception drew with it the sense of unbroken connection between the primitive Church and the Church of England.
Previous movements within Anglicanism to regulate liturgical practice had been purely practical. For instance, in the 1630s Anglican Archbishop William Laud ordered that communion tables be railed off—but to protect them from roaming dogs and people placing their hats on them. Despite the fact that extreme Puritans condemned Laud as a Romanist, he was firmly Protestant in his theology and in ecumenical discussions with a Catholic monk rejected transubstantiation, the apostolic succession, and the doctrine that the Eucharist was a propitiatory sacrifice.
Again, in the seventeenth century a movement in the Anglican church originated with a group of clergy who refused to take an oath to William of Orange when he usurped the Catholic King James II in 1688. They were expelled from the Church of England and tried to effect a union with the Greek Orthodox Church. In their appeals to the Patriarch of Constantinople, these High Church officials rejected the idea of a propitiatory sacrifice, invocation of saints, and images. Their overtures were turned down.
However, in the mid–nineteenth century a movement began within Anglicanism that valued the idea of continuity with the past and began to accept a view of the apostolic succession never accepted by reformed Anglicanism. This was the Oxford movement, which began in the university town of that name. After it lost much of its early leadership—most notably John Henry Newman—to the Catholic Church, a section of it began to transform its self into a ritualist movement.
Nigel Yates, an expert on nineteenth century ritualism, defines it as “those ceremonial developments in the Church of England that were considered at the time to be making its services approximate more closely to the services of the Roman Catholic Church, with the implication that those Anglicans who supported such moves had also adopted Roman Catholic theological beliefs which were inconsistent with the doctrines of the Church of England” (Anglican Ritualism in Vistorian Britain 1830–1910, xv).
As the nineteenth century continued, the ritualists appropriated.aspects of Catholic liturgical practice that for centuries had been unknown in the Church of England. The eucharistic vestments, most particularly the chasuble, were brought back, as were lighted candles and prayers for the dead. Some Anglican bishops wore miters for the first time. The fierce Protestant resistance within the church used the established status of English Anglicanism to have Parliamentary legislation passed so as to prosecute the ritualists in the law courts.
To a certain extent this slowed the movement. However, by the late nineteenth century the movement was so powerful that some.aspects of ritualism began to penetrate even other English-speaking Protestant churches. Soon Methodists and Baptists had robed choirs, elegant buildings mimicking medieval cathedrals, and the cross became acceptable to most if not all Evangelicals.
The ritualists made such rapid progress in the United States Anglican church (known as the Episcopal Church) that the Evangelical Anglicans seceded en masse in 1873 and founded the Reformed Episcopal Church. (In fact, the Reformed Episcopal Church is extant today with about ten thousand members. One of its parishes in Texas has a dedication to Thomas of Canterbury, the very saint who was martyred for his loyalty to the Holy See.) While the majority of Episcopal parishes adopted some ritual, only a minority of Episcopal churches and dioceses were wholeheartedly committed to the Anglo-Catholic interpretation of Anglicanism.
After the ordination of women priests was allowed in the Episcopal church in 1976, a few American Anglican parishes seceded to form the Anglican Church of North America. This new denomination soon fractured into a myriad of tiny Anglo-Catholic denominations (see Donald S. Armentrout’s Episcopal Splinter Groups [1985]).
Out of this chaos a small minority of disaffected Anglo-Catholics formed the nucleus of the Anglican Use. This was the result of the pastoral provision offered by the Catholic Church in 1980. Currently there are only eight Anglican Use parishes, most of which are in Texas. Their liturgy is an English translation of the Roman Canon of the Mass.
The nineteenth-century ritualists had attempted to change the face of Anglicanism. But the veneer was superficial, and the innate Protestantism of Anglicanism has emerged in its assimilation of rationalism, the women priesthood, and the blessing of homosexual unions. With the acceptance of women priests there is now a desire for lay people to be allowed to celebrate the eucharist in the more evangelical churches of the communion.
Indeed, many Anglo-Catholics have adopted this new, liberal theology and have grouped themselves in an organization called Affirming Catholicism. In the United States there are at least five hundred former Catholic priests serving in the Episcopal church (including the ex-Dominican Matthew Fox). Some Catholic nuns have joined so they can be “ordained.” The Episcopalians have a well-financed outreach to Hispanics, and into its fold every year the Episcopal church receives thousands of former Catholics who refuse to accept the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.
The small, hard-line remnant of Anglo-Catholics left in the Anglican Church since the ordination of women priests have grouped together in an organization called Forward in Faith. Some, like Catholic writer William Oddie, a former Anglican, believe that this group could be the basis of an Anglican rite within Catholicism. However, Forward in Faith accepts the ordination of women as deacons, and it would be impossible therefore for this group to transfer to the Catholic Church.
Genuine Catholicism does not involve adherence to types of ritual but acceptance of the successor of Peter as pope and head of the Church on earth. Only by being in communion with him can we be guaranteed the security of an indefectible faith and genuine sacraments. Anglo-Catholicism is essentially an aberration. It shows what could happen to the Catholic Church were it not protected by the divine plan of God.
For a few it has proved a bridge to Catholic Church. But for the majority of its members it is a sidetrack that has prevented them from finding the beauty and liberation of Catholic truth and the grace of the sacraments.