Dr. William Oddie: An Anglican Priest Who Became A Catholic - The Journey Home (6-16-2008)

good evening and welcome to the journey home my name is Marcus Grodi your host for this program every week I been given by EWTN this privilege of introducing to you men and women who because of their love for Christ brought home to the Catholic Church sometimes that journey didn't begin with a love for Christ began searching for what is true and then they find it in the Catholic Church and this is a little different program tonight I could call it an open line first Monday but it isn't the first Monday it's the middle of the month but we have a returning guest great privilege of having dr. William OD Adi honey I'm sorry dr. Lee Adi here we interviewed him when we were in England and that was a great is a great experience but it's great he's back in America for a particular reason he's going to share it with you in a moment but before I do that I want to remind you that you are an essential aspect of our program your questions especially tonight we'd like to start taking your phone calls and emails as soon as we can for dr. Adi he is a former Anglican clergyman converted to the church he'll tell his story in a little bit but we interviewed him when we were in England so you may remember his story he's an author journalist now a freelance writer if you have a question for him give us a call at one eight hundred to two one nine four six Oh outside North America England give us a call two oh five two seven one twenty nine eighty or you can send us an email at journey home at ewtn.com dr. Eide welcome to the journey home it's good to have you here it's good to see you again it was a pleasure being with you and in Newman's old haunts yeah he was library that was I mean what a unique place be there to tell your story yeah now you're here in a in America because you're involved with a chesterton conference I will save that a little bit okay it's all what the audience know that Chesterton you've written books you wrote a book about feminist theology you attack that issue half years ago also about Anglican converts to the church and you have a book that you've edited on John Paul the great which we can talk about in a minute I'm just kind of getting the interest of the audience here but before we get there let's remind them of your journey to the church he talked about it when we did our full interview most people when they think about an former Anglican clergy they would presume you're brought up Anglican well I was really not brought up with anything my parents sent me to a very Protestant boarding school which gave me a version of Christianity which is so door and so lacking in any kind of warmth that turned me into a teenage atheist and it really wasn't until after I was thirty that I began to think that there was something in Christianity at least and that was kind of almost by accident I mean and I've married my wife in church in England you you can't just marry in all these places you can marry in this country I mean you know you can't marry well you're hang gliding or and in that kind i either I think you have to be in a church or you have to be in a designated office called a registry office and you have to be married by the official registrar so those are the only places at least those are the only places then it's being widened out sicinius one of the various tinkering with English life that Tony Blair's carried out however let's not delve into that and we wondered basically we just started looking for the right kind of church architecture early the right size we wanted them not too big a wedding not too small so we we drove around country churches near my wife's childhood home and we found Church my wife had always been very fond of a beautiful church eight hundred years old and there's something about a building in which people have been praying for 800 years which simply gets under your skin somehow and we were married there a very happy experience so we began to go to church there whenever we will we were in the country we never went to church on us we were there that was the only church we went to the bit-by-bit there are more by the ambiance and the architecture and but also but but also the the clergyman there there was a former Army chaplain and who had a wonderful way with him you know it was somebody you could take seriously he was a kind of the best kind of Anglican clergyman somebody with his roots deep into the local community the thing about an established church like that is or the church the ancient Church of the country which is it is all the lost its roots its Catholic roots at the Reformation the the the person the the which is how he's known the person is an important man in the village and you know when whenever there was a fight in the little pub on a Saturday night because people were drunk and things got disorderly they didn't send for the police they sent for the person to sort them out he quietened the riot thanks guys on both sides yeah that's right but bit by bit bit by bit we began to see there was something in this and in the end we were we both became members of the Church of England and it became I haven't really been brought up as an atheist and suddenly becoming a practicing Christian you know after 30 at the age of 30 it's a bit like one of these childhood diseases if you okay catching a childhood it doesn't it's not too bad but you know as an adult you can't you get it big so I immediately conceived a vocation to the Anglican priesthood and three years later I began my training in Oxford which has been a place which has been very important to me ever since and two-three years later I became an Anglican priest and served there at Oxford not immediately I was cured in a parish and then again one of these extraordinary pieces of good fortune I became the Bishop of oxes chaplain to postgraduate students in Oxford University where I spent verse five very happy years became a fellow of one of the colleges then after that you couldn't imagine a bigger bigger contrast was very beautiful ancient town I went to one of the roughest working trust most working-class parishes in England probably in a place called Rumford in Essex which is a very rough place my car insurance immediately went right up how did you had you thought about the Catholic Church during that aspect your journey was that well it was I think I think it was always pretty clear to me that the Catholic Church was the real game in town I mean I believed in fact when I first became an Anglican I became an Anglican because I thought that I was joining the ancient Church of the of the country I very quickly came across Anglican priests who told me well that is true but something pretty fundamental happened to it and you have to keep an eye on Rome if you want to be pretty sure that you're not going to go go astray I mean for instance the the priest at that may act our Anglican parish in London to whom I went is that I think I have a vocation to the priesthood said okay started recommending some books he said there's a general rule he said in theology don't read anything unless it's got the impure motto okay now this is an Anglican priest angles matters yeah no no I want to make sure our audience understands the Catholic in Vermont I see I mean that's the that's right that's the slant there yes right you read Catholic theology otherwise you say otherwise you might go to hell now they just I mean and I suddenly really I came across for the first time in that priest I would kind of vaguely high-church vaguely sort of in that way inclined I hadn't come across anything quite so hardliners he arrived in fact when we'd been living in London for a couple of years and been going to this parish and we were told there was a new priestess we father were we very rarely went to went to church in London and all we didn't like the kind of religion we got there we like religion in the country and we thought it was a thing for the countryside he's ancient churches and so on so we thought will better support this man and on his first Sunday he said from tomorrow on there will be a daily Mass and I wanna I want somebody there don't let me go to the altar alone ever so we thought right we'll do that so we started getting go every day and we were very surprised when on the first day the the first day turned out to be the feast of some Maria Goretti who's not an Anglican saint in a hundred years so my wife and I looked at each other and said something's going on here and indeed it was it was a kind of classic operation classic anglo-catholic operation in that what has happened all over all over England is that an Anglican Catholic priest has arrived in a non Anglo Catholic parish and as Christ bit-by-bit preached and installed Catholic devotions of various kinds and after two or three years you would you would suppose that it was a Roman Catholic Church one of the effective in this particular church was that every so often one a member of his congregation said I'm sorry father I can't stay in the Church of England any longer I've got to become a Catholic so he said okay he would phone up the local Catholic priest said I'm sending another one to you and at their reception the parish would go round to wish them Godspeed I thought this is all amazing stuff anyway the other thing was that he insisted I go to a particular Anglican Seminary it's a Stephens house in Oxford which had very much a paper list that was the word we used the paper list anglo-catholic agenda and basically we thought we regarded ourselves as kind of shock troops of the Anglican counter-reformation we were going to hand back the stolen property you know maybe we wouldn't get there in our lifetime maybe we maybe we wouldn't order hey what was the final I mean so if you're working in that that gives the impression that that really you're gonna remain as a part of the team Anglican team and yeah a whole Anglican team unites and there are a lot of people that feel that we all go together and and and of course you see when Pope John Paul came to England and was such a huge I mean just a huge success everybody was wondering because this is a very anti-catholic country how this is gonna come off well he was the lamp stir he wired everybody and when we saw him going walking side by side with Robert Runcie was then Archbishop of Canterbury the head of the Anglican Communion throughout the world side-by-side in Canterbury Cathedral which is the first Cathedral in England within the most ancient Cathedral England the first place to be Christianized and they both note together at the shrine officer thomas a becket we all said to each other it could happen in our lifetime now we're getting close everything we've worked for could happen a lot sooner than we think then suddenly the movement of the ordination of women really got underway and gathered momentum startlingly fast and we suddenly realized that sooner or later is bound to happen it happened here in America there were even women bishops after a time in America we thought well you know how long will we hold out how long can we hold this thing off well the real thing was the decision had to be made by a body called the General Synod of the Church of England and what we were all fighting for was to stop this getting through in the General Synod but it suddenly occurred to me the we had all accepted a scenario in which the General Synod actually did have the decision but we didn't as we had suppose and the Church of England always claimed have the ministry the threefold ministry of bishop priest and deacon of the universal church inherited from the catholic past because we still had a Catholic present and this was the continuous ministry that we had we believe we had the apostolic succession going right back to the beginning that here was the Church of England taking to itself powers to decide this matter which the Pope had told us he didn't have we've been told by the Pope that he had no authority to ordain women we were saying we did I'd seem to me that that was the Church of England defining itself in a way that I hadn't heard before and the thing was that all US Anglican Catholics who were fighting it or a huge number of them had accepted that scenario now you know many of them didn't of course and when women were ordained they left in large numbers and many of them became Catholics and Catholic priests but I left before the decision was made because I think that all authority had I thought that all authority had now gone that any notion of the church English branch theory that the church has three branches the Roman the Greek and the and the English that was all nonsense that if you cut a branch off a tree it stops growing the leaves wither and that's what had happened now that really sounds very similar to Bishop Graham Leonard same reasoning yeah in many ways I mean so I'm not my thinking is that I mean there were many of you that were very cognizant of not just the issue of whether women should be ordained or not but who had authority yeah decided I mean that was really the in the end it was the question of authority yeah and we looked around and I mean another aspect of the whole thing was you know I remember Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Cantabria a good and holy man he very much of the Catholic tradition within Anglicanism that I think probably bit less bit less had a hard line than out there now that our bunch was but I remember him preaching after he's long history I think he was getting quite an old man I think he may even have been his last the last sermon he ever preached he died within a few months at house in Oxford where I was attached to which I was attached as a knight as a priest and I remember him saying he people come to me to say Oh Archbishop what are we going to do to save the Church of England and I answer I don't want a church I've got to save I want a church that'll save me and I thought that's of course he never did become a Catholic but I thought that's a very good reason for not staying in the Church of England a church I have to save as very interesting the I was reading when I was in England last time a history of the English Civil War yeah which we Americans don't know very much about at all I mean it's we were distracted because Plymouth had already happened over here so all of our tension came on this side of the pond but I remember during that you know the some of the main characters of course we're George's first and his Catholic wife and her influence but there was also that Archbishop of Canterbury at the time yeah but the Archbishop the time was very anglo-catholic Hospice at Lord yes yes isn't that true that that what that to me pointed out is that whenever this angle of catholic head started to rise often many now in the Church of England oh yeah yeah they they I mean they just thought the next thing we're gonna be back back back to Rome again you see there had been such a massive anti-catholic spin operation you know the culture had really been got to wear a ticket it took generations there were various big mistakes the Catholics made through over the years one big mistake was when the Pope excommunicated the Queen and said that and released Catholics from their obedience to her and said that any attempt to kill her would not be sinful now that was absolutely asking for Catholic persecution because immediately the Pope had announced the Catholics were a disloyal part of the population who could not be trusted who had been released from their obedience to the Queen and encouraged to kill her now what good was that going to do for any hope of reconciling and it did bring out a whole yeah slew of persecutions yeah guys going out like I think even we talked a little earlier about Shakespeare some of his family were caught up in those searching outs of people now oh yeah we're yeah applied in being in different plots - yeah the Queen I think one was involved even with the Gunpowder Plot to some extent was yeah no this is let's write I mean which of course chick Spears parents are both were records and Catholics which means that they refused to go to go to church and have to pay the fine for it however that's a whole other you see that today do you think what if the if if more and more Anglicans show their emphasis interest in the Catholic Church especially if any any of the Anglican bishops I mean you've got Graham Leonard you know Leon are you gonna is it a different world in England today in its response to the possibility of an increase of the Catholic Church oh yes yes I mean partly because for various reasons Catholics are now thought to be harmless which isn't necessarily such a good thing and I think Catherine got to be thought of as rather dangerous myself and where subversives indicate in a secular cult that a good conscience no I mean I think that you know under Cardinal basil Hume the Catholic Catholic religion became became respectable and it was generally thought to be a great achievement of his you know the Queen called cut the Cardinal human my Cardinal now a lot of us thought hey you know we love we love the Queen and indeed all Catholics today are absolutely a hundred percent loyal but but but well there's a lot of countries in the world that if the if the ruler of the country called the local Cardinal my Cardinal that would not be a good thing at all sure yeah you know that that sadly gives a I mean we and EWTN know great faithful Catholics that have been I need to be wtn and work slow with them but if you did there was always an idea about Catholics just be careful with Catholics they might want to try and convert you you know they're they're tricky they're tricky Devils they they they try and sneak you in especially Jesuits you know Jesuits had given up converting people in England now I don't know what they do here but it's thought to be under Cardinal Hume somehow it became bad manners to convert people you know the conversion conversion was a was a kind of tasteless word it implied that you were right they were wrong well that would be a misinterpretation of what the Second Vatican Council called us to do 100 percent wrong I mean the well the the the the all that all the nice all the documents say you know the the full truth who subsists only within the Catholic Church but others have part of it and we have to pay attention to their metal goes in all truth to tell them the fullness we have an email we've got a few riders let's try this comes from Sylvia from Louisiana dear Markuson dr. Adi I have been to England and read many accounts of Henry the eighth and how he defied the Holy Father thereby breaking with roman making himself head of the Church in England thus forming the Anglican Church Anglicans I assume know the same history of their church so how is it that they cannot see the historical truth of the Catholic Church founded by Christ mister remain Anglican knowing it began with Henry thank you because we didn't I as an Anglican Catholic did not accept that the Church of England began with Henry after a winner we'd we worshipped in the same churches our first bishops were the last Catholic Bishops in England in every every bishop put one became an Anglican the Church of England made a great deal of play about the continuity with the medieval church and we could see the continuity we worshiped in it we watch it from these glorious Catholic buildings and the spirituality of these buildings was still there we were it we were it's as if you like so quite simple if that was that was a version of history we didn't accept but you had a spin well basically he wasn't just so much a spin I mean those of us who wanted to return the Church of England to her Catholic obedience and I was one of those and there were many others we believed quite simply we believe that you know those whom God has joined no man can put asunder we did not recognize the wrath of the Reformation you know we we come we consider ourselves as being you know as I sort of the shock troops and I say of the kind of the Anglican Counter Reformation we we were that was what we were there for but the Pope was in your view at that point in your time as an Anglican you're considering yourself as a continuity of the ancient church yep but yet there was a break with the head of that church that was by the how did you understand it back in those that were that was by those in charge of the institution that didn't ultimate my view that I was a true priest and I believed myself to be a Catholic priest it may seem funny to you but we really believe that and I accepted the authority of the Pope and I brought my children up that way I mean I sent my children to Catholic schools and I remember I remember when I took my daughter my my eldest daughter to haven't been interviewed by the the the headmistress of the local Catholic school who was who was a nurseline Mother Superior of the convent and she said well of course I said I want them given exact answer her Ginny's vet for the same religious instruction as the Catholic children she said well of course you see I don't know I mean for instance my dear talking to me talking to Victoria might shut my my daughter of course there are one or two things different for instance now who's the head of the Church of England expecting she say the Queen so my daughter applied with the Pope of course so you said oh god bless the child we got a call from Robert from Arkansas hello Robert what's your question for us yes your evening Marcus and good evening doctor Odie I am interested in knowing what the angle can Church's position is on the Holy Eucharist especially in relation to our teaching according to the body and blood soul and divinity yeah and the transubstantiation thanks Robert well the trouble is you see there's very little different way that you can't find out what the official position of the Church of England is on anything you know the Church of England Anglicanism is like a kind of theme park you decide what which ride you want to go on there are many Anglicans who believe that the bread and wine at the Eucharist is bread and wine and nothing more the bread left over and usually it isn't the kind of wafer bread that wheat whether we use they just use an ordinary sliced loaf for the chunks and just cut it up in little chunks and anything left over at the end they throw on the lawn for the birds to eat at the other end of the spectrum a priest like like we I would I would believe absolutely fully in transubstantiation in the full Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist I believe that I was offering the sacrifice of the Eucharist a little sacrifice of the mass that was my firm belief in the middle there were lots of Anglicans who like to go to church on something didn't believe it really mattered very much what it was so how do you tell what the official angling composition is nobody knows and it's interesting maybe you told me when you were talking about your journey about that experience of yourself when you're holding the Eucharist stop and asking yourself that question I found myself one day at the altar and it is not an enviable position to be in believe me I'm you know I've told you what I believed I was standing there elevating the host and I looked at the host and I saw had a sudden chill to my heart what if the Pope is right about that I know he's right about everything else and that was the point at which I suddenly realized I cannot know and the only person I trust the Pope tells me that that is not the body of Christ that I am NOT a priest why should I trust him and everything else but not on that it's such an important point because you have all this within a denomination you have all these views but it isn't us as a me as a pastor yeah that decides what that is no the thing is in the nature in an Anglican Church the in in there in the Church of England or the Episcopal Church it's it's the parish clergyman who is the Pope and everybody knows very well that they you know they're free to disagree with with the vicar or the rector and if they don't like what he says they can just go to the next parish along and find somebody there like better you know wasn't there a clarity in the in the Articles yes but we there were different ways of explaining the are tellers John Henry Newman of all people wrote an article wrote a tract tract ninety that's why they were called tract Aryans after these traps which would which were designed to Rico solace eyes Anglicanism he wrote in he wrote tract ninety was to demonstrate that you could read the thirty-nine articles in a Catholic sense in trouble which got him in the tractor got him into huge trouble yeah and it was practiced with the only thing he ever wrote which is pretty silly and he cause he except that later but he did realize that if he was going to stay in the Church of England he had somehow to prove it he had somehow to demonstrate that otherwise all the rest of the tracks will simply had no had no kind of authority at all now walking in his footsteps there at Oxford that avid influence on you personally Newman's Newman I think Newman has probably had a big influence on nearly every anglican priest who becomes a Catholic because you know he is you know flesh of our flesh and after all his writings were part of our tradition you know his pre-classic right he's tracked Aryan writings were part of hold theological tradition so he was part of us and especially the apologia prophetess saw which was affected is is a text I have had the honor of editing for one of the big publisher paperback publishing companies in England paper bag is that a newer addition it's about ten ten years old I think I really over 15 years like now it's got lots of notes and things and everything I was and I spent a lot of my life on that book during wash i'd burned not a penny they would cost me a lot of money way to do it but you don't get us to do a thing like that and say no I know but anyway you know the the the apology providers so written from the point of view of an anglican priest who suddenly realizes that the church he's a member of is not part of the Catholic Church has had a big effect on a lot of English Anglicans much less on Episcopalian to become Catholic there are far fewer of those anyway it's always been you know becoming Catholic has always been far more on the agenda in the Anglet in the Church of England precisely because of all the tradition so I remember very well but before I became a Catholic I went to see a priesthood himself had converted who and who in the end received me into the church and he gave me some advice first of all he said you're a journalist you better go and get vetted by a good Jesuit to make sure you're okay so you found a good Jesuit that's easier said than done nobody found me one who had a good look at me and say yes that sounds like that sounds alright and the other thing he said you must do is tell all your friends go around one by one and explain what you're doing before you do it otherwise you'll cause huge offence to a lot of people who themselves believe their anglo-catholics and belief that you're telling them the verve all is are invalid and they're not priests and that all they're in ministry is is a mockery because of course that's not what i was exactly that's not what i meant to say it online i would never dream of saying such a thing or implying however it was good advice but i went to see my old principal of a pc house under whom I'd served when i was sure was chaplain to graduates in oxford university i told him what i was going to do so after sinuses well I could see it coming and then he said change the subject have you been reading any good books lately so I said well as a matter of fact I've just finished reading the apologia I said have you read it lately oh no he said you're not gonna get me that place I'm not gonna read that book until I'm well retired let me take a break we'll come back to sum up with your questions for dr. Adi welcome back to the journey home we're here tonight with dr. William Watty and we've got a couple calls and emails before we get to those I want to make sure that I mention your books you've just mentioned the editing of the pod yeah panocha pruvit SOA yes I want to make sure I mention that cuz I want a good copy of it yeah I mentioned during the break that when I read it I was of still a Protestant on the journey and I was excited about it but there was no translation in the book of the latin phrases yeah which often were the key point of the entire chapter because people expected that any educated man would have Latin back then back then yeah but you've you've corrected that for the new version and added the translations which is great well I simply got yeah the nuts of all do you have to do that yeah but there's two other books I want to make sure we mentioned one of which is available on a religious catalogue and that's a book about John Paul yeah that was a book that that was put together for the for the late Holy Fathers 25th anniversary as pre as as as as Pope and he originated with a conference they were held in Oxford to which I gave the keynote address on the Pope's ministry my address was called John Paul the great and which wasn't people weren't using on elements in those days you know that was some time ago that was you know sort of I think you know about 2000 2001 when I became editor of the Catholic Herald and we should see probably the most influential Catholic newspaper in England weekly newspaper I thought I'm gonna have one or two little campaigns here and one of those was to make that phrase that that expression description of the Pope John Paul the great more commonly used now so I sneaked that into editorials whenever I could and when I came to to to write this Willis address I thought well you know it would be an awfully good thing to get some of the other contributors to this conference here together with other people talking about various aspects of the Pope's ministry but I first all wanted to argue the parallel with the other two popes who are called the great and there's some quite close parallels I think in many ways I think this is a serious thing and I think when he is canonized I think that will happen and I hope it will be officially declared but if you compare them and say with Pope Gregory the Great it was Pope Gregory the Great won't didn't simply re-establish the authority of the Bishop of Rome over the church in doctrinal matters which this which the late Pope did he also had they both all three of them had had a great geopolitical influence and in the case of Pope Gregory Attila the Hun was coming south in Italy and he Pope Gregory went north to meet him and he persuaded him that he wouldn't be worth his while coming in here for the south and not to come any further now all kinds of argument that but it is absolutely certain that after their meeting Attila went north now I think the parallel there is in a letter the late holy father wrote to Brezhnev who had the Red Army drawn up to the Polish border and you remember those extraordinary days when the Pope went to Poland and galvanized the country and completely riah walk for Catholic culture of that country and made it basically uncover noble and Brezhnev thought that's Khrushchev before him that it was time now to sort out Poland as Hungary had been sorted out and and Czechoslovakia had been sorted out by the Red Army and the Pope wrote him a letter pointing out the Poland was not like Czechoslovakia is very and we have the text of this letter now it's been released you know since the fall of the Soviet Union we have we had the text very diplomatic but he makes it clear that you know you're not gonna have an easy time like you did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia Poland is Poland and it's gone too far you'll be unwise to go any further and about two weeks after that letter was sent the Red Army is drew from the border now I think that's very like Pope Gregory and that hill of the Hun what was the name of this book again the book is simply called John Paul the great alright and then we'll say that the other authors also are well known to EWTN in equals in car in Nicholas John say would and various others all talking about one particular aspect made Nicholls on the encyclicals in Karim of hopes in encouragement for the new movements and so on all right the fine book then the other book got some let's take another call and then we'll get to that book this is Joe from New York and I'll Joe what's your question hello Joe are you there did I surprise you okay we'll get them in a second yeah you the other reason you here in America right now is because you're at this chat chesterton conference because you've got a book on Chesterton coming out yeah I have young titled for that the title is Chesterton and the romance of orthodoxy which is the one of the chapter headings in his book orthodoxy which he published in 1980 so it's it's the centenary of the publication of that very important book and this conference this entire conference was about this one book all right let's see we've got an email from Matt from Indiana dear dr. Adi do you see more Anglicans turning to the cath Church thank you I think it's inevitable yes I mean certainly in the Church of England what you have now is the kind of church within a church it's even defined itself the students of a name it's those who are opposed to women's ordination they call themselves forward in faith and they've they've quite simply declare themselves out of communion with any Anglican bishop ordains women with all the women they ordain and with any and with any other priest who's ordained by those bishops and they have been granted their own their own bishops that was a way of stopping them leaving entirely who ordained all their priests so they're kind of already almost a ready-made breakaway group there now I think that the minute women are ordained as bishops in the Church of England you're going to get a big breakthrough and that what they want to do is break away as a block and I know they're talking to Rome and I think I know some of what they're saying but I better not say about this what they're saying but I mean I do know for instance their general plan is to regularize their orders to make sure to have themselves reordain by their in conversation with the Polish Catholic Church in this country which is a church a breakaway Church itself but is in we I think the official term is in a path of convergence with run so they will they'll become they'll get Catholic orders they will then declare of their faith is that of the Catechism of the Catholic Church then they will go to Rome and say here we are what are you going to do is all right in you mentioned women's ordination but there are all those other issues which all of us are familiar with from one immediately really it's just an escalation it's gonna lock never left and I was going and how it isn't just you've got homosexual priests I mean you actually got homosexual bishops ordained as such in other words these are not priests who are incline towards homosexuality but who believes in the authority of of Scripture and that and then whatever church they belong to these are people who believe absolutely there's nothing inconsistent between homosexuality homosexual practice and the Christian religion and I think that you know once a church includes to become so comprehensive that it includes that view as well as including people who believe it is a sin against God then it's lost so much definition that you wonder if you've actually even got a church left anymore what kind of organization is this it's hard to you know Anglicanism of course has always been undefined as I said earlier you know you've got at least three different kinds of Anglicans but now with the total collapse of any kind of moral theology you're in real trouble and basically the underlying thing or is that really God says anything I want God to say yeah that's right yeah that's really a God says yeah that's right I want him to say and so you've made yourself God yeah so you have a religion when really you're the God but I mean this is one of the fundamental see this is one of the fundamental theological principles of liberal Protestantism that God is a projection that we have made from ourselves you know and once God becomes that we are God's we have made ourselves gods I think Joe's back hello Joe New York Marcus I got cut off before I was wondering of the guest did the Blessed Virgin Mother or any of the Saints influencing to be converted oh sorry the Blessed Virgin Mother oh thank you though well yes I mean I think that Anglican Catholics have a very great reverence for the rest of virgin remember our parish in London which is a very working-class cockney parish I remember who always referred to the best version as mum and they would Nev I remember very devoutly in front of the tabernacle which they called sir and wishes these were not these were not meant to be irreverent titles at all but I mean on mother's day you should have seen the pile of flowers in front of the layer of the statue of Our Lady and though they had a very very touching and very beautiful reverence for Our Lady all right email from Michael in st. Augustine Florida do dr. Adi I am wondering at what point did you discover the early church fathers and what role did they play in your journey well the early church fathers of course have always been accepted by by the Church of England you know that was always part of the of the angle of the Anglican tradition even my Anglicans who dumped the regard themselves as particularly Catholic I mean we basically believe that we believe the what was the undivided church believed what we didn't accept was anything that had happened after the Reformation so it though that having been said that was one of the things that Newman himself achieved the fathers were rather lost from sight of in the you know in the 16th 17th and 18th centuries and it was Newman's writings on the father on the fathers which brought Anglicanism back into as it were the the patristic the patristic orbit and and I think that to this day there are very fine patristic scholars in the mainstream Church of England I think it was Newman that in his writing maybe it was when he did the book on the Arian heresy that he came to the personal conclusion that when he studied every time he studied the heresies he had to admit that he would always have to end up on the side of the heretic yeah it wasn't he talked advice as an Anglican yeah as an Anglican Anglican yes that was the struggle yes yes trying to find the middle road but yet he would be on the side aren t they I think the way he put he was I looked at myself in the mirror and I saw a man off a sight all right we've got a call from an from California hello Ann what's your question CS Lewis greatly admired and was influenced by Jessica yeah and I was wondering you know if the other consider becoming a Catholic convert as just attended thank you thank you I believe that he didn't but I think he believes so many Catholic things I mean he were a very good essay about well women would never be ordained as priests in the Church of England for instance and he went to confession every week which a lot of Catholics don't so it's not an angle can habit well I mean that we'd we did I mean anglo-catholics did right but he didn't really consider himself to be an Anglo Catholic I mean actually I have a I have a story about about CS Lewis's Catholicism or whether all he would have been which is that his his former secretary was a Hooper who was a friend of mine told me that that he considered that CS Lewis had become a Catholic posthumously I said how do you make that out what he said well because when I was an Anglican I always arranged for a requiem mass to be said on on the anniversary of his death but when I became a Catholic I took the Requiem Mass over to the Catholic Church that we both go to in fact so man I reckoned that was the point of which team he became a Catholic and I was and I was his sponsor but I think that it's a good question my view is that had he lived and he died young to see when his ordination I think he would have become a Catholic and all the other things that I mean only things that you and Bishop Leonard saw were the issue of authority I mean to see an ad and he yeah I think so too I think I think that's reject er you have because he wasn't just throwing out his opinions when he wrote his books he was throwing out what he believed was authentic truth yes and the interesting thing is about him is that that the the the book of Chester since that most influenced him wasn't orthodoxy was Chesterton wrote as an Anglican of course they was the everlasting man which was one of the early books he wrote as a Catholic let's take our next caller Louis from Texas hello Louis what's your question for example we were with you in Fort Worth in 1989 with Graham Leonard and you all went back to England and became Roman Catholic and my husband and I wandered in the desert for about ten years and found our lady of wealth and ham so blessed we have the Anglican use Roman Catholic Church where's that thank you well thank you very much I was wondering which which parish that was of the Anglican use our lady bolding Oh where's that Houston ah okay right well I remember that conference very well and Fort Worth it took place in a huge great Baptist Church because it was any place big enough and that was one of the sort of that was when you know the the whole fight was that back was still going on against all this stuff you restore anger at the time I was still an Anglican at the time but I came over for that conference because it was we thought that was very important and I was one of the speakers at it and that's right Bishop Lennon was there and lots of other people were there too and that was a great time of hope we thought maybe we're getting somewhere now but you know it all collapsed the Anglican you should that she mentioned to what extent has that taken place in England itself that hasn't happened at all reading really I had very much hoped that they that it would be established because in England it had a chance of really getting off the ground he's never really got off the ground in the states I mean there I think there are 20 parishes maybe it had a handful anyway compared with how many there could be but in England they was I think always had more possibility because you know becoming a Catholic has always been more on the agenda for Anglicans in England than it ever has here among Episcopalians and I think that a lot of parishes could have come over lock to did only to and I wrote about both these parishes in a book I wrote called the Roman option about this whole thing and the book came out on Tuesday I described everything that had happened it was condemned by the Catholic Bishops on the Thursday and those two parishes are closed down on Saturday they're kidding that's so the the the what you discussed in that book was the frustration that you had all these as you mentioned earlier the Algrim all these Anglican priest as many as 900 right wasn't that right left left the church and left to Church of England and not all became priests but 300 but three four hundred of them Dana okay but the part that you saw is the biggest disappointment was that there had been very little encouragement for those Anglican priest to encourage their congregation wanted to come up with that people yeah you know and you he would have been a fantastic way of kind of floating them off on a kind of rescue barge now you know those parishes wouldn't have you know people move they move around the country that would have been a way of getting them over you know it would have been him we'd been a pastoral thing to have done but a lot of the Catholic Bishops thought we don't want too many of these old-fashioned pre-vatican to Anglicans they thought of them that way and basically I think a lot of them thought they were just a bit too keen on the Pope you don't want to make too big of waves when you live on an island right no now what about ten years later now you think is that given that how much has changed in the Anglican Church that you're going to see groups and will the hierarchy be a little more open well no the higher up you won't but I think these people this trying to excuse me yeah these people this type won't talk to the hierarchy they'll talk to Rome and we'll hope that some kind of kind of parallel jurisdiction will be allowed them and really you're seeing this not as a possibility but this is probably going to happen sometime because the trajectory of what's going then we had at Lambeth soon is there will be women bishops after all you know once once the church accepted that women can be priests what kind of sense does it make that to allow them to be bishops which is what they decided that's kind of theological II crazy but of course it's all politics they hope that if they did that they could keep these people on board and for the time being they did with all kinds of concessions like giving them their own bishops and so on but once a woman is bishop especially once she's a diocese and Bishop you're in a hole you've got a whole new ballgame and I think many will come and that decision is facing us here soon when they when they gather is this year next dr. Oddie thank you very much for joining us again on the journey home and it's a pleasure being with his thank you for Wisby and your writing I really appreciate that very much and thank you for joining us on this edition of the journey home god bless you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 15,543

Rating: 4.7635469 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, EWTN, Christian, television, Anglican Communion (Religious Organization), Priest (Profession), Pastor

Id: c9k-PuMQ7WU

Length: 56min 27sec (3387 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 15 2015