Mending Catholic manners

...From those uncertain beginnings of tolerance in the seventeenth century a real via media has developed in which laity and clergy are comfortable with each other...

...1 confess there is a cause of passion between us: by his sentence I stand excommunicated...

...I could never hear the Ave-Mary bells without an elevation...

...Or consider the editorial in that same issue: To those lay people who have given time and energy and add special talents and expertise to various church bodies, only to find that "bishops and clergy still hold the real power and that many hoard it jealously...

...or think it sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to err in all, that is in silence and dumb contempt...

...Perhaps it takes centuries to develop the spirit of reasonableness and charity in the handling of religious differences...

...It is not so much the authority one questions in the Roman Catholic church as the lack of the qualities of good leadership, including respect for the persons involved, the efforts at persuasion, and the explanations to which associates and subordinates are entitled--in fact, the lack of ordinary good manners...

...After the bloody religious differences of the period from Henry VIII to James I, seventeenthcentury Anglicans were beginning to def'me themselves in just such terms...

...8: Commonweal...

...I wanted to see if the spirit of civility and charity was reflected in that prose as I remembered it...

...According to popular preacher Thomas Fuller, who was also a very anecdotal church historian, after his accession, James responded to the importunities of the Scottish Presbyterians or Nonconformists, who wanted to urge the adoption of their form of church government, by calling a conference instead of simply suppressing them...

...The troubles in our Roman Catholic church stem, it seems clear, in part from the fact that the apartness of the clergy creates a lack of civility and charity...

...Waugh spoke of the Anglican church contemptuously as a church whose mind "is not made up," and Newman said, "there are two alternatives, the way to Rome and the way to atheism...

...Fuller, who was known for his wry humor, adds, "henceforth...such who knew not their own till they knew the king's mind in this matter...quietly digested the ceremonies of the church...

...One cannot conceive of the clergy as a caste apart...

...At the sight of a cross or a crucifix I can dispense with my hat but scarce with the thought of memory of my Savior...

...I agree...

...One cannot conceive in that halfway house of a bullying insistence on abject loyalty and submission to the pronouncements (even unknown future pronouncements...

...I found the concept of the via media attractive then / and I find it attractive now...

...Whether incivility, immaturity, and arbitrariness stem from the way the individual is "programmed" by religious life and the priesthood, as Dennis Geaney, O.S.A., suggests in the correspondence section of the same issue of Commonweal, or whether it results from the "depressing rectory culture," as Richard Mazziotta, C.S.C., proposes, it is certain that the relationship to other members of the church is not a normal one...

...of the church's rulers...

...yet can no ear witness I ever returned him the name of Antichrist, Man of Sin, or Whore of Babylon...

...In studying the seventeenth century I first encountered the idea of the via media, the phrase then beginning to be used as a description of the Anglican (or Episcopal) church as the middle ground between the uncompromising absolutes of Rome and the narrowly rigorous tenets of Protestant fundamentalism...

...Ruland says he respects these "white-hot" convictions but asks "what is so contemptible about a spiritual halfway house...

...Thomas Browne also refused to attack the pope although he felt that the pope had attacked him: "It is as uncharitable a point in us to fall upon those popular scurrilities and approbrious scoffs of the bishop of Rome to whom...we owe the duty of good language...

...peaceable of these Anglican writers was Sir Thomas Browne, who refused to reject completely everything having to do with the "old religion": "We have reformed from them, not against them...

...The most persuasive and...

...Can we not find a way to a via media of our own...

...This reasonableness was shared to an extent by King James I when he was head of the Church of England...

...The distaste expressed,..for compromise and provisional religious insight goes too far...

...My field was seventeenth-century English literature and the book is an anthology of English prose from 1600 to 1660...

...My interest was triggered particularly by the quotations from John Cardinal Newman and Evelyn Waugh in Vernon Ruland's article, "Vouching for Fidelity," on the Vatican loyalty oath...

...It smacks of a neurotic hankering for absolutes...

...After the conference, says Fuller, "whereas it was hitherto disputable whether the North, where he had long lived, or the South, whether he lately came, should prevail most on the king's judgment in church govemment, this doubt was now clearly decided...

...Anglicanism is the half-way house on the one side, and liberalism is the halfway house on the other...

...In the years it has been on one or the other of my shelves--ever since my days i.n graduate school--its pages have yellowed and the binding has loosened...

...Nor is the relationship of those in power in Rome to their so-called subjects--witness the insulting prohibition of an honor to a loyal and brilliant churchman like Archbishop Rembert Weakland...

...I am not scrupulous to converse and live with them, to enter their churches in defect of ours, and either pray with them, or for them...

...I went looking for it after mulling over the letters, editorials, and articles in the December 7 Commonweal...

...The faith of wise believers, he added, "can sustain itself upon a temperate dispute...

...heretic is the best language he affords me...