It’s kind of sad to read Gerald McDermott’s[1] lament on the state of modern Anglicanism, striving to find a locus veritatis – a place wherein they may find the truth. The problem, of course, is that only the Catholic Church founded by Christ has the ‘fullness of truth’, of which she is the ‘pillar and bulwark’.
As any purveyor of history knows, the founder of Anglicanism – the tyrant Tudor Henry VIII – chucked off the Church, making himself ‘head of the Church in England’, and the ‘defensor Fidei[2]‘, defender of the Faith. Henry rejected the papacy, along with the Magisterium, and so set the Church in England adrift, into the wild and stormy seas of schism and heresy.
Hence, the ongoing fracturing of the Anglican church, and the attempts by conservatives, such as McDermott, to hold onto some sort of tradition. But the link has been broken, and no made-up human ‘magisteria’, such as the ANCA, can bring them back to sound teaching. They need to return to the true Magisterium, to the One, True, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church – the only Church Christ founded, with the only priesthood, the true Sacrifice of the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, the Sacraments, and, yes, all salvific Truth, moral and doctrinal (however obscured that may be in any given era – it’s still all there to be found, for those with eyes to see, and ears to hear).
That is why Pope Benedict founded the Anglican Ordinariate in 2009 with his Apostolic Letter Anglicanorum Coetibus, which allows them to keep their own beautiful high liturgy and traditions.
The door is open, and it’s time to come home. For the time is short, and who knows when the Bridegroom may return?
[1] Rev. McDermott is described as a priest in his by-line, which is an ecumenical gesture, and keeps the peace. But to be clear, Anglicans lost the priesthood somewhere along the way, as declared infallibly by Pope Leo XIII in 1896, in his Apostolic Constitution Apostolicae Curae. This was not yet defined when John Henry Newman converted in 1845, so he was ordained a Catholic priest conditionally.
[2] In his recent coronation, King Charles III modified this title, so that is now ‘Defender of Faiths’, and note the plural, for Britain is no longer a Christian nation, but a pluralistic, one may even say a pagan, one.