The West, the Faith, and Anglicanism

The fundamental religious and cultural question for those who would preserve the Western tradition today was raised by Hilaire Belloc in his 1922 book Europe and the Faith. It is whether the Western tradition can exist without the Catholic Church. Of course, Belloc answers it in the negative. While I think he paints with too broad a brush, I agree with his conclusion.

This question is not obvious to most of us.  True Catholicism (not the watered-down cafeteria Catholicism of the late Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden) is not a particularly visible force in American political discourse.  Our secular society is used to thinking about issues piecemeal.  To many mainstream Americans, whether mainline or evangelical Protestant, reform Jewish, non-traditional Catholic, or nonbeliever, the Western tradition has advanced "beyond" the Catholic Church's teachings on many seemingly practical points: abortion, euthanasia, and contraception being the three most obvious. The "solution" is for the Church to just put its less presentable teachings aside and focus on the more "appealing"--that is, fulfilling to modern sensibilities--doctrines regarding forgiveness and love, so we can all just get along as one big happy family.

The problem, as Catholics well-nourished by their faith not only know but exhibit, is that there's no cafeteria-style picking and choosing in Catholic Christianity--truth is fixed and eternal. This is not to say that there is no doctrinal development, or that every Catholic follows the Church's teachings perfectly. A Catholic's actions may not follow the Church's teaching, but all his evaluation of his acts is done with reference to that teaching.  Catholic doctrine is the closest thing there is to a fixed ethical and theological point.  It doesn't move with the times; the times move in relationship to it.

As a "recovering" Protestant, I can say that most Protestants don't understand this on a visceral level; to them, what the minister tells them on Sunday about morality may be open to debate, much as the meaning of a particular passage of Scripture is debatable.  (There's an obvious connection to the Lutheran concept that every man can interpret the Bible for himself.)  But most Protestants do understand viscerally that all persons calling themselves "Christians" must base their claim to that title on some standard.  Otherwise, religion is empty.

No Protestant denomination follows all of the Catholic Church's teachings (if it did, it would be Catholic), but all Protestant theology worthy of the name is, in fine, defined more by a dispute with some item of Catholic doctrine, or the problems (like predestination or fallible Scriptural interpretation) that such absence creates, than by the presence of some different concept. When populist Protestant "theology" tries to become a creative force, rather than simply a differentiating one, it quickly ceases to be reognizable as "theology" in a confessing Christian sense.  The result is statues of Buddha on altars in Episcopal churches and self-centered evangelical megachurches designed to give their members a spiritual high rather than to worship the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

For this is the key point one must understand about Catholic Christianity: it is not just any old system. It is the Western system--the product of two thousand years of continuous development (more, if we consider its debts to earlier Jewish, Greek and Roman thought, which are considerable). The various denominations of Protestantism are attempts to create a Christianity without some part of the edifice: perhaps without fixed liturgy, or veneration of saints, or the infallible moral pronouncements of a Magisterium. The result has inevitably been secularization and moral decline, and will be material and biological decline as well unless the West, through the Church, manages to regain its vigor.

Anglicanism is the key test, the experimentum crucis, because it has tried for five centuries to maintain a middle ground between Catholic and Protestant. I was raised an Anglican, and remained standing on the banks of the Tiber for several years before I decided to take the plunge. The theological history of Anglicanism, in its broad outlines, revolves around two questions: (1) whether Anglicanism is to be a part of what I will call the "church catholic" and (2) whether it is possible to be a part of the "church catholic" but not in communion with Rome. Until the early twentieth century, Anglican teachings regarding morals differed little from Rome's. Its teachings on matters of faith varied, with some high churchmen teaching a faith little different from Rome's, and some low churchmen who were clearly Protestant.

Things are completely different now. By any meaningful definition, The (so-called) Episcopal Church is no longer Christian. The teachings of its bishops and priests, its morals, and its views about sin, redemption, and salvation are all radical departures from two millenia of Christian teaching. It lacks the eternal standard of Catholic Christianity. There are surely individual Christians within TEC, but as a body it no longer proclaims the Christian faith.

Anglicanism, as is painfully apparent at present, lacks a Magisterium.  That lack has caused the whole edifice to fall. Anglican bishops are not co-opted by existing bishops but are selected by either the civil authority (the Church of England) or by some democratic process within the church (TEC). Such a system is poorly designed to preserve a fixed and eternal doctrine; rather, it will naturally tend to produce a church which is a reflection of the society in which it operates.

Thus, the vital test of the vitality of the Protestant idea--that of Anglicanism--has been a complete failure.  The future of Christanity qua Christianity, and thus of the Western spiritual and moral tradition, lies in one place, and that is the Catholic Church.  Only the Church can, amidst the ever-changing world, preserve a fixed Christian faith for which most Protestants, as noted above, viscerally understand a need.

Belloc once claimed that his goal in writing was to be as clear as "Mary has a little lamb."  From what I have read of him, his effort at clarity sacrifices a great deal of detail and makes sweeping generalizations.  Europe and the Faith suffers from this flaw.  But as a thesis it is sound, as modern experience only goes to show.

The Church is Europe, and Europe is the Church.  Or, more to the point for an American, the Church is Western Civilization, and Western Civilization is the Church.