The Principle of Unity

A sermon preached at High Mass at the Conference A Free Province? A Third Province?
called by the Southern Provincial Episcopal Visitors and Forward in Faith
by Fr William Davage, Priest Librarian and Custodian of the Library, Pusey House.

The Feast of S Pius of Pietrelcina

Today is the feast of Francesco Forgione, raised to the altars of the Church by Pope John Paul II as S. Pius of Pietrelcina, but better known as Padre Pio. To the devout, a simple Capuchin friar of profound spiritual insight and intense love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, who suffered atrociously through the imposition of the stigmata, the five open wounds, which bled continually for fifty years and which only death healed, and from which only death released him. To the more sceptical, however, not to say the more cynical, he was variously a fraud and a charlatan, whose only charism was to hoodwink the gullible by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions perhaps. He was an embarrassing throwback to an era mercifully dead and gone of medieval superstition and pre-reformation irrationality. Not my view.

If nothing else Padre Pio stands as a sign of contradiction to our sceptical and cynical age. It is little wonder that he evokes such a reaction; little wonder that those reactions are so intense and polarised. In his person, in his suffering, in his canonisation, he stands as a eloquent and scornful rebuke to a world embraced by the iron grip of liberal secularism, in thrall to the siren charms of the Enlightenment philosophes, little appreciating that they mapped a path which led to the godless revolutions and terror in France and Russia and around the world.

Although I would not wish to claim Padre Pio as a patron saint for the Oxford Movement - I may be extreme, but I am not that extreme: yet - there is something in his status as a sign of contradiction that speaks to our collective condition. As the Church should be a sign of contradiction in the world, assiduously resisting its values and social pressures, preaching a better way of human conduct and human relationships, so, for theological, temperamental, ecclesiastical and doctrinal imperatives we in the Catholic Movement stand in a similar relationship to the Church of England. The Oxford Movement began as an attempt to recall the Church of England to its true nature, to its catholic understanding of itself; and what our forefathers were doing then, we are doing now, resisting that which would drive us further away from the universal expression of God's will for his people.

During the Long Vacation I was able to catch up with some reading. As well as reading the stunningly good biography of Samuel Pepys by Claire Tomalin [1], and a marvellous account of inter-familial conflict in Renaissance Florence which exploded into gang warfare with an assassination at High Mass in the Duomo, followed in its bloody aftermath by, inter alia, the hanging of an Archbishop from the third floor of the Chancery in the Piazza della Signoria - O happy days [2] - I steeled myself to read God's Funeral by A. N. Wilson. Predictably, he was generally disobliging about the Tractarians, although rather less so than in his book The Victorians, but in this passage he touches on something of what we are about and why our cause endures and why it is that the fight goes on. He writes:

The battle-lines … must seem … esoteric and as incomprehensible as the disputes in contemporary Islam between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims. This is particularly the case since the issues about which they quarrelled - appointments to Irish bishoprics, or the Hampden controversy, when a man was appointed to the Regius Chair of Divinity at Oxford in 1836 and the Highs suspected him of being unsound - really have become old, forgotten, far-off things. Lilliputian as it all seems at times, however, the nature of the controversies turned out, as they emerged, to be quite penetrating … It was a question … of what the Church was, or who God was and whether he was knowable … As [John Henry Newman] and his friends understood the Church, it had to be a divinely founded society, or it was nothing. It had to have its origins in the Incarnate God, descending to earth and appointing Twelve Apostles to continue His word and His presence on earth. That meant that for Newman and his friend, the bishops and priests of the Church - even the bishops of the Church of England in the reign of William IV - had to be seen as possessed of this divinely given apostolic authority. And when it was discovered, little by little, that there were insuperable difficulties about seeing the Church of England in this light - the fact, for example, that most, perhaps all Anglican bishops of the period did not hold this view of themselves - then Newman and his friends left for the Church of Rome; yet some of them remained, as a puzzled and puzzling but rather beautiful presence in the Church of England, singing the Lord's song in a strange land. [3]

Mr Wilson is not wrong. The land becomes increasingly strange and disturbing. Our song increasingly echoes in empty corridors. Yet it remains true that as the founding fathers of the Oxford Movement were voices of contradiction in the church of the early nineteenth century, so we their successors, the inheritors of their tradition in our own generation remain as a sign and voice of contradiction to the prevailing ethos proclaiming the terrible candour of insistent orthodoxy. [4] We do so with the powerful realisation that the vision glorious has faded into the light of common day [5]: that

All our pomps of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre. [6]

While still in this strange land, where we have become strangers in our own country, where they speak a language that is not our language, we must look to new horizons. Not that the grass is necessarily greener over the hills, beyond the mountains, or over the river: our search for ecclesial perfection is unlikely to be realised this side of heaven. However, what we can strive towards is the furthering of a principle, the principle that must underpin all that we do and the clue to that principle is here in what we are doing now.

It seems to me that the real scandal in which we have been forced to be complicit is that this sacrament of unity in which we are now engaged is precisely not that in the Church of England. Of course, I recognise the imperative that the bishop is the focus of unity. I know the theology. I know the ecclesiology. I know that the Oxford Movement lives or dies on the bedrock of apostolic succession. But the bishop as the focus of unity only really makes sense in the context of the Mass when he is surrounded by his priests and deacons, surrounded by his people; when that unity is an expression of the wider unity of the whole Church, the whole Church, militant, expectant and triumphant; when earth and heaven meet on the altar, the axis mundi et coeli: and when we are united to Christ himself in the Sacrament of His Body and His Blood. That is the unity that matters. And that is the principle that should animate our future. It is not our present state. To move from this present state of sacramental disunity into smaller and smaller groups, however internally united, into smaller and smaller ghettoes however coherent is no answer and will result in the absurd claim of John Keble, exemplary in so much else, that if all fails the Catholic Faith will adhere in his parish of Hursley. It is not there now. We must aim at the widest possible unity because that is the ideal that Christ sets before us when he prayed that all should be one, and the expression of our unity in Christ must be one centred on the altar of his sacrifice where we are united with Christ, with the Church and with one another.

Perhaps that is the distant scene. Perhaps it is our historic role to take decisive steps towards that end. But if we do not have always before us the vision of the unity of all Catholic Christians we may find that in this fallen world the least worst is the best that we can expect.

Pusey House 2003

Footnotes:

[1] Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self London, Penguin Books [2003] Return

[2] Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici London, Jonathan Cape [2003] Return

[3] A. N. Wilson, God's Funeral London, Abacus [2000] pp 144-145 Return

[4] Jonathan Keats, Smile Please London, Chatto and Windus [2000] p 5. Return

[5] Cf. The youth … / … still is Nature's priest, / And by the vision splendid / Is on his way attended; / At length the man perceives it die away / And fade into the light of common day. William Wordsworth, Ode, Intimations of Immortality v. Return

[6] Rudyard Kipling, Recessional Return