The problems of 'trans-ecumenism' when Canterbury goes to Rome.
Pope's Leo's effusive hospitality does little to engage with and confront reality.
Is ecumenical respect a one-way street? There was a great deal of respect at the meeting between Pope Paul 6th and Archbishop Michael Ramsey in March 1966 marked a moment of proximity on the trajectory of the possible return of schismatic Anglicanism to the mother Church that may never have been closer.
Anglicanism had experienced a deep wave of nostalgia for the sacrament of the Mass which gave birth to the Anglo Catholic movement. Rome had begin the process of negotiation with the spirit of the age that was to move it closer to the novelties of the Reformation Churches in the Second Vatican Council.
Nearly sixty years later, the trajectory of Anglicanism has been torn out of orbit and moved not only beyond the reconciling reach of the most hospitable of ecumenical gestures from Rome, but in the judgement of many, beyond the boundaries of orthodox Christianity itself.
Sarah Mullally is not only the first woman to be ‘produced’ by the appointments system of the Anglican establishment, but she represents a rebuke to orthodox Christianity not only in her person, but also in her convictions.
She is the expression of a Church that has drunk deep from the rage of contempt and antipathy that is an aspect of feminism, and carries a full range of progressive views which she imposes on the tradition of the Church like a rebuke.
The right to kill children in the womb is one of those views. The right to promote sterility in adult romantic relations is another.
If she represents the full impetus of secular feminism in its assault on deeply embedded Christian belief and culture which the Catholic Church represents, the Catholic Church should temper the respect it owes to the head of a Protestant denomination with a degree of caution and wariness.
In fact, there was no caution or wariness in Pope Leo’s greeting of the feminist pro-abortion Anglican woman archbishop.
Should there have been? Should niceness and diplomatic politeness have been modified by fidelity to those values Sarah Mullally repudiated?
The Trans Project
To what extent was her welcome representative of the failure of the integrity of Vatican Ecumenism in the face of the challenge of what we might fairly label ‘the trans-Protestant schism?
There are clear parallels between the insistence of those who suffer from gender dysphoria that their new anti-biological identity MUST be acknowledged by those around them, and the insistence that the ecclesiastical titles lifted from the wreckage of the Catholic Church, destroyed and nationalised by a hostile state in England in the sixteenth century are in some ways valid nomenclature.
However compassionate the Church is towards those who suffer from the mental illness of gender dysphoria, we have recognised for a long time that we don’t do people any service if we reinforce them in the illusion, particularly if the illusion is about something that really matters.
In terms of our sex and our God-given identity, accepting what we have been given rather than overriding it because our internal disorder or disquiet finds that easier than coming to terms with the truth, the Church has recognised that the truth is the best route to sanity and a holy re-ordering.
If that is true in the area of sex and identity, should it not also be true in ecumenical matters and in ecclesiology?
Perhaps that is why so many people have felt a serious disquiet about the way in which the pope has welcomed Sarah Mullally.
Apostolicae Curae could not have been clearer as to why Anglican orders were null and void in Catholic ecclesiology, and how they always had been;,but this was not just a Catholic view. Anglicanism set out to construct a different theology of ministry as a way of repudiating the ‘sacrificing’ Catholic priesthood.
The fact that Anglicans have since changed their mind since, and now seek a degree of comfort, legitimacy and affirmation from the Mother Church they are in schism with, does not change history or their credentials.
It does an already confused Anglicanism no favours to pretend that the longings of their ecclesial imagination can change the nature of sacramental reality.
We will come back to that in a moment, but first of all it might be worth spending some time on the character of the first woman Archbishop herself.
Sarah’s Journey.
Sarah Mullally has been on a journey. It’s not just been a journey from being a nurse to being a clergywoman. It’s a journey from conservative evangelical clarity to progressive fashionable liberalism.
In theological terms, one could say that she’s travelled is from Protestant biblical orthodoxy to moral, therapeutic deism.
In a recent review of Andrew Atherstone’s biography of Sarah Mullally, George Conger, a prominent episcopalian commentator, draws attention to this journey from conservative fidelity to progressive political fashion in Sarah Mullally’s life and reflects on what caused it.
