A History of the Anglo-Catholics: Part 1

     It amazes me that so few Episcopalians know anything about their church’s history. They learn about Henry the 8^th’s break with the Roman Catholic Church in the 16^th century, but are told precious little about what happened after that and how it continues to impact the organizational and spiritual schizophrenia that has seriously divided the Episcopal Church in America, and will in all likelihood kill Anglican orthodoxy in North Texas.

     The trouble began with King Henry’s sequential polygamy in search of an heir. The Pope would not grant him a divorce from Katherine who had born him only a daughter (Mary), so Henry took over the Church in England. He didn’t just take it over organizationally; he installed himself as Head of the Church. Henry hated the Lutherans in Germany. There was little difference between the earliest Anglican Church and the Roman Church except who was in charge. Cranmer, a Protestant, helped Henry attain his divorce and marry Anne Boleyn. But she produced only a daughter, Elizabeth. Henry got his male heir from Jane Seymour, but after Henry's death, his son, sickly Edward, reigned only a short time and set in motion a struggle not only for political power but control of the Church in England. Mary Tudor was a staunch Roman Catholic. When she came to the throne she burned many Protestants at the stake and attempted to purge England of every Reformer. Upon Mary's death, Elizabeth became Queen, declared the English Church essentially Protestant, confirmed the Thirty Nine Articles as what Anglicans believed, and tried to put an end to the horrible religious pogroms. When Elizabeth died, the pendulum swung back to the Roman Catholic version of things until Cromwell and the Presbyterians took control, beheaded King Charles, and established a republic in England. This was the bloody English Civil War that raged for nine horrible years. Cromwell and the Parliamentarians lost to the royalists and the monarchy was re-instituted under Charles the Second. By this time, people were worn out with religious wars. There followed a period of time from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century when the Church in England just wanted to rest.

     But rest soon turned to lethargy and corruption. The Church of England under the Georges became less and less relevant to the times. The Church became the place for the nobility to send their second sons. Their first-born became lords and warriors while their second-born sons went to serve the church. Spirituality was replaced with dull, elitist cultural conservatism. Sermons were abstract and academic. Only the aristocracy was encouraged to attend church out of a sense of duty. The working people were looked down on, shunned and made very unwelcome. Out of this rigid class morass emerged a renewal movement in the 1740’s, a movement for ordinary folks centered on Bible study and dynamic preaching, and the very non-English emotional enthusiasm to reach people with the good news of Christ. They were called the evangelicals. The early leader of the movement was John Wesley, an Anglican priest, who ironically came from Oxford where he was a teacher. The evangelicals started Sunday Schools to help teach children from the slums and city how to read and write, a scandal among the high-brow Anglicans. But it was from Oxford that some of the traditional elitists decided to launch their own renewal movement in reaction to the rise of evangelicals and their success among the working class. Known as the Oxford movement, they wanted to reunify with the Roman Church. This would allow them to preserve the elite, medieval position of bishop and priest and at the same time demonstrate a vigorous piety. They called themselves Anglo-Catholics, teaching that the English Church was one third of the Holy Catholic Church along with the Roman and Eastern Orthodox branches.  The evangelicals called them Episcopalians, the name by which they officially identified themselves in the American colonies when the Revolutionary War forced their separation from the Church of England.

     The Anglo-Catholics began the work of undoing the growing Protestant identity of the Anglican Church.  John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey wrote and distributed pamphlets and books. They wrote 90 tracts in all and were also known as the Tractarians. But the last tract Newman penned in 1841 evoked the wrath of his bishop when he contended that the Thirty Nine Articles were completely compatible with the teaching of the Roman Church. Well, that was just a bit too much over the top. Newman ‘fessed up and left the Anglican Church and became a priest in the Roman Church. The Tractarian movement was strongly felt in the United States with the establishment of Nashota House Seminary near Milwaukee in 1842. Because Tractarians could not often get placements in churches, they began working in the slums of cities and began a critique of bourgeoisie values they associated with the mainline denomination.

     In 1855 a new group took over the propagation of Anglo-Catholicism. The Society of the Holy Cross (SCC) was begun by Charles Lowder and five other priests who needed a support group in a generally unfriendly Protestant denomination. They secretly practiced a hyper-ritualism that included wearing vestments, frequent celebration of the Mass with intentions, the veneration of Mary and saints, the use of bells, elevating the host, and confession to priests, all of which were anathema to the 39 Articles and had not been practiced in the Church of England for hundreds of years. These activities were severely criticized by the Archbishop of Canterbury and in 1874 were outlawed by Parliament under the leadership of Disraeli.  However, in 1906 that law was repealed, largely owing to the positive public relations of the humanitarian efforts of Anglo-Catholic priests in the cities and slums. This work was part and parcel of the Anglo-Catholic’s belief in the necessity of works to be counted righteous.

      But perhaps the most endearing legacy of the Anglo-Catholics to the modern Episcopal Church and that which accounts in large part for its decline and its upcoming demise is the elevation of tradition above Scripture as the authority for the Church. Roman teaching is that the Bible is the product of the Church, thereby making Church Councils pre-eminent to Scripture. Episcopalians in the 50’s and 60’s (today’s cradle Episcopalians) were told the myth of the three-legged stool (still found on the TEC website today). The Church, it was said, was governed by three authorities: reason, Scripture, and tradition. Methodists added the fourth leg: experience. Richard Hooker, who first used the three-legged stool analogy in the 15^th century, was referring to a milking stool, common in that time. A milking stool had one leg longer than the other two. In Harper’s illustration, the Scriptures were pre-eminent over all matters of church and faith. Where the Scriptures were silent, tradition could be consulted with the help of reason. But by the time of the cultural revolution of the 60’s and early 70’s, the stool analogy was misappropriated and misquoted by Anglo-Catholics who were gaining a majority position in a Church struggling to find relevancy in the Age of Aquarius.