Thursday, November 11, 2010

Oxford professor throws hissy fit over Ordinariate (Contribution)

From behind the Times paywall, the muffled sound of a High Table explosion. 

Quick, someone send for help! 

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, has suffered a devastating failure of scholarly objectivity. 

His face is getting redder and redder as he struggles to come to terms with… eeeek! … the Ordinariate!

Now you might say I’m a fine one to talk about objectivity. But, then again, I don’t hold a chair in church history at Oxford.

Prof MacCulloch, author of the definitive biography of Thomas Cranmer and a bestselling history of Christianity, is known to identify more closely with 16th-century Protestants than with the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. 

That’s fair enough: the judgments in his books are elegant and nuanced. Not so his axe-grinding oped for the Times.

MacCulloch tells us that the concept of “flying bishops” is “absurd”. 

I agree – but he then pours scorn on those flying bishops who are resigning precisely because they have lost faith in the concept and now recognise that they do belong in the Roman Catholic Church.

The professor accuses Anglican “papalist Catholics” of spending 150 years performing “intellectual gymnastics about what the Church of England actually is”. 

Again, he has a point: but, in fact, the entire Anglo-Catholic movement performs these gymnastics and continues to do so. When I interviewed MacCulloch last year he told me that he attended an Anglo-Catholic church in Oxford. 

This parish is not in the “Anglo-Papalist” tradition, but it does use Roman rituals and celebrate the sacraments in a manner that would have been regarded as abhorrent popery by everyone in the established Church until the mid 19th century. 

Its Catholic claims are the product of intellectual contortions just as strange as those of Forward in Faith.

When MacCulloch describes the Ordinariate, his bias verges on misrepresentation. Its members, he claims, “can still be Anglicans in some mysterious sense, with their own formerly Anglican bishops”. 

But Rome has made it clear that the Ordinariate will not remain Anglicans in any sense, mysterious or otherwise: they will be ex-Anglicans, just as in previous centuries Orthodox congregations that joined Byzantine-rite Catholic Churches (the so-called Uniates, though they dislike that label) were ex-Orthodox. 

Also, there is very little chance that the former Anglican bishops will become Catholic bishops: most of them are married, which rules out episcopal ordination.

The professor is on firmer ground when he asks what elements of Anglican heritage the Ordinariate members will bring with them. It’s a good question. 

There will be local and international variations, and I’m not alone in suspecting that Pope Benedict wants the Ordinariate to restore some of England’s Catholic, not Anglican, traditions. 

But then MacCulloch asks:
Perhaps they’ll bring Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer? Not a book for which the flying bishops and their clerical mates [sic] have shown much enthusiasm in the past.
I’m sure the departing bishops and most English Ordinariate supporters prefer the Roman Rite or its modern Anglican equivalent to the Prayer Book. 

But substantial numbers of traditionalists are “Prayer Book Catholics” who use a version of Cranmer that plays down its Protestant elements. Flying bishops have ministered – enthusiastically – to those parishes in this tradition that reject women priests.

(St Mary’s, Bourne Street, firmly in the Anglo-Papalist mould, uses the BCP.) 

Some Prayer Book Catholics will be joining the Ordinariate. 

A Coverdale- and Cranmer-influenced liturgy for ex-Anglicans has already been sanctioned by the Catholic Church in America.

Another misleading statement: “When there was a fuss about the priesting of women, some priests and laity went over to Rome, then some came back to Canterbury.” That’s true. But only a small minority of those who converted came back to the Church of England. Anglicans never point out this inconvenient detail, in my experience.

Prof MacCulloch is not the first Oxford don to write articles for the newspapers that aren’t as even-handed as his scholarship. But it doesn’t reflect well on the university that such a senior academic chooses to write polemical hackwork relating to the very field in which he holds a chair. 

“Those eccentrics heading for Rome will be no loss,” his article proclaims. Well, there is no shortage of eccentrics in Anglo-Catholicism; but to apply this label to (for example) a pastor as wise and scholarly as Andrew Burnham is an insult, as is the statement that he  “will be no loss”.

MacCulloch is one of those liberals who think that the whole notion of political correctness is a conspiracy to allow Right-wingers to be rude about minority groups. 

For some reason, however, he seems to think it’s fine to trash the reputation of this particular minority. 

It’s a mindset I associate with the Tablet crowd, who incidentally adore him. 

What are the chances that Ma Pepinster will invite him to write another article caricaturing the Ordinariate scheme? 

Very high indeed, I reckon.

SIC: TC/UK