Making Up

Just before I go to bed I usually have a look to see if I have any new emails. This is generally fatal for the 'just before' bit, since an hour or more often passes before I can drag myself away from other people's blogs. And what a fascinating collection they are. My favourite is 'Reid and Write' which belongs to Canon Gordon Reid, the Rector of St Clement's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

Canon Reid is a man after my own heart, a true Gallican Anglican. He presides over the most splendidly Anglo-Catholic Church you can imagine, in which the traditional Roman Rite (in English, with the Gloria et cetera in Latin) holds pride of place. The sacred ministers face east (i.e. God), the music is wonderful, the preaching (to judge by the video I have seen) properly pastoral, and the vestments excessive. But it is the details which count. These include such delights as the gremial veil and the scotula, things which I have never seen outside the pages of a book, not even when I was on the staff of All Saints Margaret Street. And the churchwardens (to judge by their processional clobber) would appear to be Knights of the Garter, or Daughters of the Revolution, or something equally splendid and startling. Looking at it all, you realise that it was for this that Cranmer died - even if he was not entirely aware of the fact at the time.

But Canon Reid has had to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous papalists. Some of the comments on his blog take him firmly to task for a perceived lack of devotion to the Roman Pontiff even although he prays for him (somewhat inaudibly, it is true) in the (silent) canon of the mass. This is obviously felt to be inconsistent, although it doesn't seem to me to be half as inconsistent as being a full-blown papalist in the Anglican Church. Canon Reid is merely doing what I believe any good Anglican, Gallican or otherwise, should do. Just because the the papacy needs to be saved from itself it doesn't mean that other parts of the western Church should abandon the liturgical tradition and culture which is the common heritage of us all.

But it does hurt. I love the Book of Common Prayer (as does the Rector of St Clement's) but I also feel at home at mass in a RC Church - hardly surprising since they seem to have become rather Anglican in recent years! I would love to see an agreement between our Churches which would at least allow intercommunion (as with the Old Catholics and the Church of Sweden) and I suppose I get rather impatient because, so far at least, it's not even on the horizon. And that is all their fault, of course.

But perhaps as well as being Anglo-Catholic I should also try to be rather more Anglo-Christian about these matters. After all, Christianity and Catholicism go together, don't they?