The Journey Home - 2013-09-16- Fr. Peter Geldard - Former Anglican

welcome to the journey home my name is Marcus Grodi our host for this program and this is a special edition of the journey home from England where was he WT and second trip to England to film the stories of converts and reverts to the Catholic faith and we're in a unique place for this or in the Brompton Oratory we're in the library right above the little oratory which was the first part of this building and our guest is father Peter Geldart and he's a special guest because he not only is a convert to the church but very much involved with the issues of unity in the relationships very active in trying to establish the unity between the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church it's a part of your your journey and and your present work also father welcome to the journey home Thank You Monica thank you it's good to have you here and you've got a lot to say so let me first invite you to it's go way back and give us a glimpse of your early spiritual journey well my journey starts really right back in my school days I grew up on the south coast at a place called BEC Salaam see where my father was an engineer and I went to the local grammar school there which was a local state school and it was whilst I was studying actually 19th century history at the age of 17 that I first came across something called the Oxford movement or the tract Aryan movement I read a book it was lent to me actually by my history teacher called book by Karen O Lord called the short history of the Oxford movement and it inspired me because it described a movement within the Church of England which I in a sense could identify with which I felt was dynamic at vision and I think he had converting power I came from a a non-practicing household I mean my parents were kind and supportive and encouraging but we never went to church together but in no way did they stop me exploring and it just happened by chance that at the end of the street where my school was there was a slum parish as often these Oxford when parishes were created like that a slum parish a downtown parish called All Saints Italy which was of the tract Aryan tradition a poor part of town the nature of the Oxford movement was often they founded churches among the working class and there they did great work and I can actually remember the first Sunday I went there and I talking now about a 70 and a half year old adolescent and you know thought the stirring at a town would be a story which I be embarrassed to recount but I went there to high-mass and it was called that I hadn't experienced this before and we're talking about now 1962-63 so pre-vatican two days and in this mass we got to the Creed and there they started credo it you know they started to chant together the screed and then suddenly they all collapsed and I was left standing at the inn con-artists there they went down as they did in those days and there was this schoolboy left standing and even now I can recount not embarrassment but a sense of conviction these people know what they believe I want to explore it further and so I explored the tract area nor the Oxford movement within the Church of England and felt then that it had all that Catholicism could offer but very much in an English guys it was a celibate priesthood there was a nun on the staff the sacraments were celebrated there was commitment and there was a dynamic life to the parish but it was English and this therefore made me like TS Eliot before me think maybe this is the church for English people to join well to cut a long story short I did join it I became involved in it and then from that I felt a sense of vacation and I came up to London where we are now to King's College London which was in the 1960s a dynamic University then as it is now but it then had a very big theological faculty but already it had international scholars there and that again had an influence upon me my tutor was someone called dr. Eric Maskull who was a very high anglo-catholic but he was a toe mist he was a person very knowledgeable within wider Catholic circles I was taught philosophy by Father Kapil stone a farm stream writer of books so in a sense I was already getting this Catholic influence and it confirmed within me at that point the idea that at least a major part as I saw it of the Church of England was part of a wider catholicism call it a branch theory the idea that this bites fingertips had held on to the essentials and it was part of something wider and in a sense because of cobblestone and the other professor you mentioned here we see an Anglo Catholicism that was really open to Catholic thought that wood was not present here in England for a long period of time and it was blossoming Archbishop Michael Ramsay was a Archbishop of Canterbury and he had that very much he was of the Catholic spirituality he in the end was the person who ordained me into the Anglican Ministry and priesthood and it was one of his books actually which influenced me he wrote a book in 1936 called the gospel in the Catholic Church and that brought out that and I think it's a heidegger statement talking about the Catholic substance and the Protestant principle that in fact there is the heart of Catholicism which is the fundamental beliefs but constantly through history it needs to be challenged and clarified and a reminder that constant referenda is actually a Catholic phrase not a Protestant one in the sense that always there should be renewable going on in the church and it's from there to the Kings London that I then went down to Canterbury where I now AM it's interesting how the wheel turns to the seminary which was then there at centre gustin's in Canterbury it's Santa gustin's right by it right by the abbey there and what was exciting in those days and again this is a sign perhaps how the wheel also turns was that the Roman Catholic Franciscans also shared with us that Seminary because they were looking for a site in Canterbury to found their own training college and I got to know then many of those friars who are now still personal friends I got to know then friar John Dukes who became in the end the Catholic bishop of Kent which again was interesting and he'll come into my story a little later but also whilst I was there I did what perhaps only students cheeky students do we had a little newspaper and I did a review of called books of the past which people have forgotten and I did a review of the gospel and the Catholic Church by AM Ramsey and in it I challenged the writer to say but on page 64 he asks this fundamental question is the patron ministry fundamental to the life of the church and in my review very cheekily I said here we are in 1968 still waiting for the answer well the result of that and they can't be many people who perhaps can recount such a thing that quite literally through my bedroom window Archbishop Michael Ramsey came in one day to have tea with me to talk about my review and well he didn't answer it he said you may be right but I think what was interesting was that I think I was already sensing that within the Catholic life of the Church of England there was something important missing but I felt at that stage like many others that perhaps our role God was using us to reconcile the Church of England to in fact the Roman Catholic Church and just starting at that time too because of Michael Ramsey was an international discussion called ARCIC the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission and for my generation this caused great excitement because they together looked at those things which people thought would be impossible to solve and one by one they seemed to be solving them they looked at Authority they looked at ministry they to the Eucharist and although the statements are very thin in one sentence they call them substantial statements on the basis that nothing of importance had been left out and they came to a common mind and therefore the chance of corporate reunion was something which was always within my heart it seemed like a possibility at the time I'm curious given the history of England especially I'm thinking back during the time of the English Civil War when when this kind of an idea would have been a great fear for many people where there are also people within the Anglican Church hesitant to our IO I think yes I mean what would say appears I I admit that one of the problems was that one could live in this world from my All Saints Italy Day is right up until the time that I left the Church of England almost cocooned into believing that the rest of the Church of England was like oneself and agreed with oneself but when you consider that it contains within it obviously like the Church of Ireland or the Anglican Church in Sydney Australia which are very Protestant to talk about the whole of the Anglican Communion moving on block was I think very naive and still I think is an impossibility today even within evangelicals course you would yes but even Germans weren't initially involved and were in fact concurring but one always were suspicious that when it came to perhaps a a major decision they would hold back but one recognized because unity was so important because it was what I would call it I don't call it but I know it to be a Dominical command that they may be one I believe it should have priority and if the price comes then or even later in church history that ninety percent want to come but 10 percent can't painful as it is I don't believe the 90 percent should hold back because if something our Lord wants so I labored and became ordained in in the Church of England by Michael Ramsey and I worked again in very much a downtown parish on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent which was a Dockyard and Old Navy town and their unusually I did eight years as occurrence as an assistant priest mode most people do two or three it could be I had been forgotten or I was showing my colors and they couldn't fit me somewhere else but I laboured fair and I enjoyed it catechizing people and running running and being involved in the parish but out of there I was suddenly given the opportunity and a very tender age historically I was only 33 to become the national secretary of something called the English church Union now the English church union was founded right back in the 19th century by those tract Aryans key ball and Pusey and Newman in his early days to in fact be a body to represent anglo-catholic opinion in the Church of England it was led for a long time by someone called Lord Halifax who was a very influential layman and he led that movement for a long time and it was very influential in the life of the Church of England and when I took it over it was still a major player within the life of the Church of England but at that tender age I became involved in it I had many staff working for me but he gave me an opportunity then to travel round the whole Anglican Communion and that was a great eye opener and a great privilege partly because I'm sure you'd be aware of this Marcus I mean if you want to travel around the world it's always useful to join an international firm who'll pay for you so the answer is the result was that I went I went to your country the states I went to Australia went to Africa partly because I was encouraging the ARCIC discussions the Anglican Roman Catholic international discussions which although they were taking place internationally were also taking place bilaterally in all of these Anglican areas because although the Anglican Communion is numerically a lots lot smaller then of course the Catholic Church next to the Catholic Church it is the most universally dispersed because of our Empire because of our Commonwealth where the flag went so went anglicanism and so you end up of course with this bilateral conversation taking place in obscure places like Japan or Korea because there were Anglican foundations there but predominantly in places like South Africa Australia and the United States and that gave me a chance to experience the wider Anglican Communion and one started to see there that fundamental divide between those who to use a phrase I used later those who saw the Anglican Communion and the Church of England as part of the Catholic Church but it contained some Protestants or those who saw it as a Protestant church with some people pretending they were Catholic and that of course gradually increased my understanding more not only evangelism but also of the Church of England itself one of the problems I always saw the issue of dialogue which the Catholic Church is very committed to is that those that are involved with the dialogue actively involved like yourself can come to an understanding but what about the people in the pews who are far away from that dialogue you know that's we're countering as you were traveling this there was also another dilemma and that is that you might get say in somewhere obscure like Korea total unanimity but you wouldn't say in Northern Ireland or you wouldn't in Sydney Australia and Rome then and still as we speak today although I may if I'm allowed to develop where my hopes for the future still filled rightly that it must deal with the whole Communion as long as it is a unit it can't afford to be in any way seen to be dividing and ruling or dealing with little groups within it and that I think is one of the problems it's faced with the Anglican Roman Catholic dialogue as it has also with the Lutheran dialogue because Lutheranism also has its divisions within it but Rome rightly says we in no way wish to be involved or accused of any way like cherry-picking or creating division against each other if it happens that's a different situation then we can look at the new situation and respond from there but at that stage there was the chance of corporate reunion many times I I went to Rome many times I was very fortunate to meet John Paul the second who gave me encouragement and many times with the documents coming out there seemed to be the possibility that this dream which had been there right back in the track Tyrian movement might come to fruition because one of the things Michael Ramsey talked me often forgotten today if not denied by modern Anglicans was Michael and it was the first time I heard this phrase Michael Ramsey told me that Anka nism had a provisionality about it in other words it was a reform of the Reformation not to create a new church but simply to reform he used the phrase where was your face before you washed it in other words he said that the Anglo Catholic understanding of the Church of England and Anglicanism was that it was the Catholic Church but washed got rid of the verdigris but it was still in heart Catholic and that there will come a time when perhaps Roman Catholics themselves may actually take on board some of the things that Anglian ism has done or in fact we see historically that the days of protestation are over and I believe if you look at the documents of Vatican 2 that exactly what has happened that if actually Anglin ism retained what it was there is no longer any need to protest because in Vatican 2 so many if not all of the things that we were campaigning for within anglicanism a liturgy in the language of the people the cup given in the master to the people the pastoral life that Anglicanism enshrined all that was recovered or renewed by Vatican 2 and has become law part of the larger Catholic Church so the chances of unity were very strong and this culminated with that wonderful day when in 1982 john paul ii came to canterbury cathedral i remember it sometimes as a popular canterbury cathedral and off alone is the first time ever a pope had been leave and of course it's a long time since we had an Englishman who would be the Pope but there were two important things which of course you may understand warmed my heart one was it was only six months after the Pope had been shot and at the time when he had been shot in the church Union and that body of which I was the national secretary we thought we must try and demonstrate to him our concern and so someone said we must send him and get well present no markers I don't know what you'd do if you said what would you give the Pope as a get-well present it's like saying what you give the Queen for her birthday you know she has it all and we thought and we then decided what we do is we would give him a stole and we had a special stole made and in fact a place called Watson Co which was actually in the basement of the building I had in Westminster using needlework women of skills which are now almost disappeared and they made this stole which had on it the cross of Sint Agustin it had his own papal arms at the bottom and on the neck there was the bird the gift of the Holy Spirit and under the words at unum Sint may they be one and it was overall in red and I got that given to him via giving it to the papal they get at Lourdes Cardinal Ganton who took it to infect the Pope and gave it to him at his bedside but from that you think well you know at one of many it goes into a bottom drawer and he'll get forgotten but you can imagine my joy when on that day he came to Canterbury which just happened to be the feast of the eve of Pentecost as he came around the corner he was wearing that red stone this made me think we are at a historic moment and he stood there in Canterbury Cathedral and the second thing that warmed my heart was he said the successor of Saint Gregory greets the successor of Sint Agustin I thought perhaps our hour at there might be good for you to explain to the audience and significance of Pope Gregory right there is that wonderful sweet story that Pope Gregory who was Bishop of Rome who went into the marketplace and saw some slaves and was told that these were angley's English to which he said they're not in glaze they in glaze where they are not English they are angels and that from that he then sent sent Agustin to come to England to reconvert England in five nine six and five nine seven and of course sent Agustin came to England and because he landed in Kent that's why Canterbury is the headquarters the see of Canterbury is the center of the church in England and it was there that Pope John Paul the second and Archbishop Robert Runcie met together and those words came out which of course brought great joy and so there was smell strong speculation that possibly within our lifetime maybe within a decade the chance of corporate reunion might become a reality and then of course kept us enthusiastic but also kept us going so to speak because we knew more and more perhaps the point you've raised earlier that the Church of England and the Anglin Communion is not all monochrome but there was a sense that perhaps here is history in the making but I have to admit our enthusiasm for that made us take the eye off the ball of what was coming up the side street because coming up the side street was a campaign very much to alter the apostolic ministry that the Church of England claimed to possess the movement for the ordination of women was gaining force and although it meant that at times one was debating the theoretical question could women be ordained or not and at that time I always maintained it was an open issue because Rome had not spoken because in fact there was division of a theological opinion the point I kept on making was that if it was contrary to unity and it would confirm cause greater disunity then the minimum is it should be put on hold the point I kept on making was that of all the commands of our Lord that for unity should have priority in fact that is the one command he did give us whereas the question about the apostolic ministry was an open question and therefore if there appeared to be that conflict we should go for what was in Scripture and what was definite rather than what was tentative or speculative and for a long time we resisted that but there did come as the spirit of this period was basically join my latter time at in the church Union which is the latter part of the late 70s and early 80's but it came to a head on our on a memorable day which I can recall which is the wedding Steve the 11th of November 1982 I remember it because I was there in General Synod which is the parliament of the Church of England I was representing then still the Anglo Catholic movement and I was the main speaker for it that morning ma'am no it takes place in church house in Westminster and it was televised and the Archbishop of Canterbury Archbishop Carey as he was then spoke in favor and I was the speaker who then spoke on the other side and it was a very close run thing in fact so much so that at lunchtime the speculation was that he could go either way and at tea time at five o'clock by one vote in the house of Leia T because we vote in different houses bishops clergy and laity by one vote in the house of laity the issue was passed that to me was a de Neumann I went home to reflect that night I appeared actually on national television on the news programmes and the interview at one point asked me a very provocative question and I still now don't know how I gave the answer but it was prescient I think at one point he challenged me and said our Father Geldart your concern is that today the Church of England has moved the goal posts no I said it's worse than that it's put them on wheels because what it was saying was that if the Church of England Synod could change the apostolic ministry it could change whatever he wanted I stood and used in my arguments the kind of arguments that some Thomas morons used before how those arguments about how independently you may want to pass your own laws you may believe it right or wrong to say smoke cannabis in your town or not to smoke cannabis in your town but all those years ago and Thomas More very very astutely pointed out and these were the words just as the City of London cannot pass a law for itself which is binding on the whole kingdom so it requires the wider Kingdom to pass a law on fundamentals or a phrase that I often use that if we claim to have the apostolic ministry of bishops priests and deacons which we shared with orthodoxy and we shared with the Catholic Church if we shared to have this common ministry if we claim to have a common currency I said we can't mint our own coinage and yet we did and that then created a division a division that went against all the pleas and requests from Rome john paul ii had written a letter in which he begged the Church of England not to create further division within the body of Christ and these are his words to create an insurmountable obstacle to unity and so that night on reflection I felt that that was the end of the Oxford movement the Oxford movement when the very first tract that they wrote the tract Aryans they wrote letters which they circulated round like pamphlets that write back in the 1830s and the very first track which was ever written was about the Church of England's claim to have the apostolic ministry given by Christ and upheld by the Church of England and that night I believe it it turned its back on it this when we pause there has a good place to pause and we'll take a break and we'll come back in just a moment to hear the rest of your journey stay with me back in this moment you welcome back to the journey home our guest in this episode from England is father Peter geldart and thank you very much we've left you at a what you see not only as a crucial place in the relationship between the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church a pivotal place but in your own journey too is your realizing what that means for yourself right well the decision of the 11th of December 1992 I believe is historic because it said something about the Church of England he obviously implied that the General Synod could do what it wants in any area it said something about its attitude to in fact the priority of unity it said something about the nature of itself as a church to use a phrase which of course Newman used so many years before the scales fell off one's a high ISM one now saw that this Church of England was in fact a Protestant Church which contained some people believing they were Catholics because not it was no longer in anywhere but it could maintain but it claimed to be part of the wider Catholic Church because if you haven't got the apostolic ministry how can you have the Apostolic sacraments and therefore the idea of being reconciled on that basis was removed and in that sense it was a major shift a bit like a historical occasion right back in the 1860s called the gorram judgment which was about infant baptism which again where the Church of England made decisions which cause people like Cardinal Manning as he became eventually to in fact decide that they must be reconciled with the Roman Catholic Church so that night and that week afterwards in writing in local newspapers and in the national press there was a recognition that we'd reached an impasse so I wrote and this again is one of those historic occasions which looking back you can see perhaps the hand of God in in in a certain way I wrote a major article for a Catholic newspaper called the Catholic Herald in which I explained all this and said we've come to the end of the road and I use the phrase that we are now and we seek in fact a new mother simultaneously unknown to me the angle x anglican bishop of london bishop Graham Leonard who was still an Anglican who I think you've known and been to before and has been a great player within reconciliation in the last few years he wrote an article for the London Daily Times and they were both published on the same date and he ended up by saying we are supplicants we now ask Rome we come to them with no obligations no demands but come as supplicants well obviously in these ways both these articles had an effect because Cardinal Hume who was then archbishop of westminster then called together a little working party of people of six Anglicans and six major catholic leaders in england to discuss the possibility of ways to go forward and he was myself and graham leonard and one or two other priests from the Church of England on one side and then on the other side there was Cardinal Hume there was then Bishop Murphy O'Connor now Cardinal Murphy O'Connor there was Bishop Allen Clarke who was then Bishop of East Anglia and there was an assistant Bishop to Cardinal human called Bishop Vincent Nichols who's now Archbishop of Birmingham I suppose you would say in military terms we were very much outgunned but the answer was we met very gently and very quietly over a period of weeks to discuss the possibilities now of the future that didn't happen before the the vote when a gay need illustrates the rightly that Rome I think would have been accused of interfering well that's true it could be accused of trying to meddle in Anglican affairs whereas now there had been this situation and we in a sense were appealing and that I think is perhaps a comment about the future and obviously Cardinal Hume felt it was right to try and search out a future for us no longer was corporate reunion really now a reality although Rome keeps talking and goes on talking via the ARCIC process I think more and more people are realizing that there is no such thing as the Anglican Communion perhaps the best it could be called is an Anglican Federation of different groups and within that there is fragmentation but until that breaks up officially Rome will not of course in any way respond to different groups within it it must deal with the whole would you describe it that the church Anglican Church had gone so far as to basically say that no theology was democratic that the general synod showed that that in fact by majority voting it was possible to alter the very nature of the sacraments and once you are there that's where you get that situation that you could do anything simply by getting a majority and that of course in the end is the end of Catholic understanding of authority so we had these discussions and there were discussions which clearly were being watched on by Rome I remember one particular Saturday morning when we're having these discussions and Cardinal Hume apologized that he had to leave the room to make a phone call and he left the room and came back with a little note scribbled on a piece of paper and he said rather sweetly I've um just been talking to a very senior person in Rome and it was obvious by the way he was talking who actually had been talking to and this man says in your discussions I want you to always remember this verse from the ex of the Apostles now I described to you who was in the room that there were these very important Catholic Bishops there was a cardinal in a future Cardinal there was the Bishop of London there was myself and one or two others who are more scholarly than I am not one of us knew what this verse was and so we had to send a runner to get a Bible to bring it in and we opened it up and it was those words in the Acts of the Apostles only request essentials and in other things be generous and that brought tears to our eyes quite literally here was a discussion whereby everything was being done to reconcile ourselves because of my travels throughout the world in my previous job I was now in a parish Faversham in Kent because of my travels throughout the Anglican Communion I'd become aware of different ways in which people had been reconciled to the Catholic Church and I particularly become aware of a process in America called the past revisions whereby whole parishes had become reconciled and all that material I brought with me to these meetings and it was one of the possibilities that we discussed but what we quickly came to understand was that the situation England is different to what it is in the States with deepest respect to yourself the States is a little bigger geographically than England and what you can do in Texas which is a long way from Washington is slightly different to what you can actually do in Kent which is only thirty miles away from Westminster and so what works in one place doesn't necessarily work in another and it was quite clear that there was no point in creating for instance our own liturgical Rite partly because it would be artificial secondly it would perhaps be a rite which only a few people will be attracted to because the bulk of us who wanted reconciliation were already committed to the post vatican ii catholic church we were committed to modern liturgy and modern pastor practice many of us were using the equivalent if not actually the miss enormity fir and therefore there was no need to create our own right likewise in a small country there's no need to create another hierarchy because one of the things that we explored which is still the possibility in the longer term perhaps internationally was a personal prayer literature the idea you may recall or viewers may recall is that there is the possibility for groups of Christians in communion with the Holy See not to come under their local bishop but to be under a central bishop who normally would be based in Rome and the only case where this has happened so far has been the opposite a move on them to they have their personal predator champ and that is a possibility for the future which is still under discussion I believe if the wider Anglican Communion in some way should or shouldn't desire reconciliation but in England this again was a non-starter as Cardinal Hume pointed out not in any way in any sense a competitive way but there are already two or three other hierarchies in England there there was the Maronite hierarchy there was the bishop to the forces there was his in fact hierarchy you didn't want another hierarchy alongside it creating churches only 50 yards away from the current Catholic Church using almost exactly the same right this would cause confusion but what did come out was the possibility that groups of people could be reconciled and if need be these groups could retain their own pastors for as long as they required them and these groups could be reconciled with the Catholic Church or of course people could come as individuals and so some of us seized that opportunity as a possibility in the end it never became as popular as perhaps we thought it would and in the end the number of groups that came were quite small but mine was one of the large ones because when the time came some forty five of my parishioners decided to come with me into the Catholic Church which included all the church officers and all bar one of the parish council which you can see for a small community is a very dramatic step but it is a huge recycle and this is a medieval little Church I had a gem of a church and of course you can understand the attractiveness one of the things hurts itself didn't come with you physically we couldn't move the buildings there are two reasons for that one in the the lawyers told us that these belong these are property in a sense of England as a whole they're not even technically property just of the Church of England that if there was an individual in the parish who didn't worship but claimed he wanted a parish church he had a right to one the second thing was that that time and still the sweet little medieval church I had was in fact attached to the house of Bob Geldof I'm Peter Geldart and the pop star Bob Geldof was living at Davin ttan in in Faversham you can imagine the confusions of that sometimes caused geld out and Geldof but we obviously couldn't take that away from his house and so the result was we would have to leave that building and that was very painful for people because the decision to convert and I'm sure many people would sympathize with this it's not so much the saying yes it's the letting go of the past because what God has used in the past and this Cardinal Hume was a great emphasize er of must not be forgotten it must be built upon God has already been at work in people's lives not only in recognizing their baptism but in my case any many others recognizing their sacramental ministry and when the time came that we were in fact ordained into the Catholic ministry by special permission from Rome a special prayer was used which gave thanks for our previous sacramental ministry within the Church of England that was where God was working and Cardinal human with great foresight was able to persuade his other fellow bishops that it was possible to have a vacation to the Catholic Church even whilst one was not yet fully reconciled with the Catholic Church itself and that was a great advance in America like you mentioned we have the pass or provision which is specifically for Anglicans the rest of clergy who entered the church go through their bishops but often when people who don't understand the pastor provision in America when they hear that they put the emphasis on the provision in other words the side that kind of puts a crack in a rule but I think the more important emphasis is on the pastoral yes I mean it's the church recognizing in a pastoral way that God has been working in your life long before you ever considered coming home to the Catholic Church and affirms of that and that's exactly how these discussions went they were so pastoral and it recognized they became aware that Rome was prepared to think of a variety of methods of a of historic changes and respond to them and the outcome was that facility was created in England which allowed two or three major changes first of all it allowed all the paperwork to be done in England and not in Rome which eased things and sped them up secondly it allowed this ability if required for people to stay with groups and thirdly permission was given for married ex Anglican clergy to apply for ordination and in exceptional circumstances to in fact be received and be ordained and as they say in Hollywood in your country the rest is history in the sense that what happened from that was that many priests and many thousands of leyte became reconciled it's a big number when I went to the state's only a few days ago to give a lecture on this I made myself do some homework and I found out that something like 780 clergy have been reconciled to the Catholic Church in England that doesn't mean to say you've become Catholic priests we're talking in Catholic priests about 480 of which about 120 are married a lot of them near retirement simply became Catholic laymen but it was obviously a very substantial number far more substantial both in number and in percentage than what happened in the 1860s with that Gorem judgment which we were told was such a historic moment in the past therefore this is history we'll see this I think as a major shift in history maybe not as dramatic as some people thought if Cardinal Hume has to be criticized and I hate to do this because I love him and he loved me so dearly it was his enthusiasm he saw this as a turning point in English history he may be right but I think often turning points in church history take time they don't happen in instant it's not like politics they take time and he talked about it being the conversion of England let let us see what history says but it was his enthusiasm his encouragement that made myself and so many others become reconciled I was thinking in English history whenever that that hope was raised amongst Catholic leaning Anglicans that there would be this return that there is often this great rebellion or response from those others in England that didn't want to see it happen I'm thinking about Henrietta Maria the the the queen of Charles the first deeply committed Catholic very committed to establishing a new chapel in Somerset House and wanting to bring more Jesuit priests in well that was one of the sparks that led to the civil war you know in other words the fear that that brought I mean new have you seen any of that well can I think I think there was a recognition even by people have a totally different outlook to myself that they saw that decision in 11th of November 1992 as a historic change and because they actually wanted the Church of England to follow now a more Protestant line secretly may have rejoiced in it or at least it allowed them now to do the things they could never do before because when people like myself in substantial numbers left the governing body of the Church of England the General Synod although in the past we may not have had a majority to pass things I always maintained we had enough to stop things because sometimes things required a two-thirds majority that now had gone the brakes were off and so the Church of England could now as it has done has entered into for instance something like the Meissen agreement which is a recognition of non Episcopal ordained ministries in other words it's created more unity towards the Protestant churches as against the Catholic Church in some ways this is no bad thing Cardinal Hume always predicted that for the good of Christianity in England if you had in fact a renewed but identifiable Protestant church Church of England and a renewed and viable Catholic Church the clarity of the choices would be there and that may be what in fact is happening and playing out in England well I've heard it said that a higher percentage of Catholics go to Mass on Sunday than Anglicans that's correct yes but still the percentage is small yes so what the Cardinal is is that a renewal in both cents is good for England of course it is because obviously the Church of England has a nominal membership out and I think guessing something like 70 million people who live in the United Kingdom something like 50 million would identify with the Church of England they may have been baptized there may have been married there but in terms of attendance at church on Sunday as you said it's less than a million but on the other hand the Catholic Church which may have a lot smaller membership of something like 5 million has a mass attendance or something like two and a half million so if you ask the question which is the most vibrant and active Christian Church in England if you look at some of the attendance it's now the Catholic Church if you look at nominal attendance then you can still refer to the Church of England but the reality is that the Catholic Church has become renewed and one of the great things that Cardinal human gain was able to persuade the bishops was that when we come hopefully we'll bring some of our gifts with us and you are a better person to judge that among myself but some of the quality of the people who've been received into Anglicanism or into the Catholic Church from Anglicanism are we're in fact some of the best scholars the best pastoral leaders and the best people that sustained the faithful well there's a statement in Vatican 2 in the ecumenical document that says we must not forget that whatever the Holy Spirit has in grace in the hearts of our separated brethren is for our spiritual noodles so part of this coming into the church of a very deeply committed men women it's partially an aspect of the authentic renewal of the church well I mean we can see looking back at people like Newman and there was famous convert Ronnie Knox who brought with them their great gifts and grants to take on your pension Chesterton all these people brought with them their gifts and I believe we are we seeing perhaps in the next generation how many of these ex Anglicans will bring with them their gifts their understanding of the liturgy their understanding of pastoral care which will renew the church and take it forward so what are you doing now that your hide the side of the Tiber well one of the things and perhaps one never understands this is the way the Catholic Church works because when the time came for the possibility of ex Anglicans to be reconciled after two years of prayer and meditation I decided that I needed to be reconciled to myself with the Catholic Church and that's that point that in fact a large section of my parish decided to do so as well just still amazing because often what happens when the clergy goes through the journey they've read a lot they prayed a lot and often the people in the pew don't receive all of that information which is often their the divide but you had been sharing with your people well that's why I said we must take two years because you could it's a no-win situation if you react immediately you lose you're going on peak if you delay you'll be opportunist but the point I was making was that one needs to pray and to think and we explored all the options the options which have happened throughout the world creating a continuing Anglican Church which I believe goes up a sidetrack even looking at orthodoxy but in reality that's very much a cultural thing rather than that's your theological question staying as a little Congregationalist Anglican Church which will get smaller and smaller and feel more and more isolated all being reconciled to the wider Catholic Church and that is what we decided to do and so I put in my application and this is where I don't understand how road works there was silence and then suddenly out of the blue there came that permission that my application could be accepted although I married I could be in fact ordained and that I would be ordained and appointed as Catholic priest at the University of Kent in Canterbury back where I almost started dealing now with a community of nearly 18,000 students which with staff is unlike 22,000 many of them Catholics because it has large links with overseas in Germany France and Belgium and Spain and Italy and that is where I've happily worked for the last 11 years and not very far from work we came to this guy exactly in other words it's gone full circle but a lovely touch was when the time came for permission to be ordained then it was said that the local bishop of Kent is the person who can ordain you and he was Bishop John Jukes who was a Franciscan friar who was an ordinary friar right back at my seminary days at Center customs in Canterbury who would become in fact the local audit bishop of Kent who had actually been to my wedding as a guest many many years ago and it was him who ordained me in Canterbury in some thomas of canterbury church in canterbury to the diakonos and to the priesthood of the catholic church that bring that was very much a coming home let's assume that we have some viewers who are Anglicans or Episcopalians either in America or here in England what would you like to say to them to encourage them to make the same journey home you've made I would say don't be frightened God works differently in different ways God in fact has his own timetable for each and every one of us and there's nothing wrong to be hesitant or to say the moment is not now but you must recognize that simply to stay still is also to make a decision because in fact you are saying I wish to continue as I am and yet if you open yourself to God in prayer and to the spirit it is possible that God is saying to you the time has come for you to seriously consider whether or not you should in fact be reconciled because by definition as I saw it and historically the goal of Anglin ISM is to be reconciled with in fact the Catholic Church there's no point in division just for the sake of it the days of protestation are ever in other words almost the nunc dimittis is now seize the moment you'll have friends there you'll be given encouragement and there's nothing to fear if this issue of timing is so obviously obvious I think because what has been happening in the last 20 thirty years could not have happened at another time of history except underneath the wonderful pope john paul ii and now Pope Benedict yes I mean unique gifts in this time both understanding of this process Pope Benedict knows more about Anglicanism most of us put together he's read Newman he he's an English he's read all the scholarship works he knows about ARCIC he's been in discussions before in his previous role with all the different groups that have been exploring and the result is that of all popes he perhaps is the man who understands most in Reverse but in contrast john paul ii was the one who made the decisions to allow people like myself to be received to the surprise I think sometimes of some Catholic Bishops because in fact he saw that making decisions was important and he made them could we have your blessing by all means God blesses and keepers God make his shy light to shine upon us and guide us that we may walk in his ways and may the blessing of God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit be with you now and remain with you always amen thank you very much thank you for thank you for your witness and also for what you're doing and dedicating your life for the unity of the church thank you thank you very much thank you for joining us on this journey home from England god bless you look forward to being with you again stay you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 9,468

Rating: 4.8400002 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, EWTN, Christian, television, Anglicanism (Religion), Convert, JHT01172

Id: cEDg7dP-we0

Length: 53min 18sec (3198 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2013