Thirty Years an Anglo-Catholic
Delany, Selden P.
THIRTY YEARS AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC By SELDEN P. DELANY WHY should I at this late date decide that my conscience will not permit me to be content with Anglicanism any longer? Thus...
...Did Our Lord create His Church, not only with an apostolic ministry, but with one apostle, Saint Peter, as the prince and leader of the apostolic college...
...Otherwise they would have to assume that the Holy Ghost misguided the Church for the first thousand years of her history...
...That can be determined only by a study of the origins of the eastern schism...
...I have now come to feel that, in spite of such possibilities, a spiritual leader or pastor owes it to his followers that he preserve his moral integrity and obey his conscience...
...by the Dial Press...
...but they are unable to respond to most of these calls because their numbers are so small...
...He urged them to unite in advertising "the Church...
...This will be published soon as Why Rome...
...If any fact stands out strikingly in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, it is that Saint Peter was the chief of the apostles, and was so regarded by Our Lord Himself...
...Another paragraph from the letter quoted above sums up the difficulty very well: I can see that it is all much harder from the priest's point of view...
...In the American Episcopal Church the authorities are suspicious of the Catholic movement...
...Delany's conversion to the Catholic faith has been one of the interesting religious events of the year...
...As one grows older the need of coming to a decision becomes more pressing...
...If we believed in the Pope, we should become Roman Catholics...
...Even in the lowest Protestant Episcopal church—if we should be stuck in such a parish—we could live the Catholic life if we could make our communions...
...For many years I have proceeded on the assumption that God had placed me in the Anglican ministry and was counting on me to help develop the Catholic movement, so that some day the whole membership of the Anglican Church might be Catholic in convictions and practices, and then reunion with the rest of Catholic Christendom could soon become a reality...
...In every life there are all sorts of emotional considerations which make it difficult to formulate an intellectual decision...
...The religious orders are distrusted by the majority of the clergy and laity, and in consequence are gaining few recruits...
...Robert Norwood, Dr...
...Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dr...
...That was the view of the Prayer Book which I held for many years, as is evident in the chapters which I wrote in The Religion of the Prayer Book, in collaboration with Dr...
...A normally matured adult tries rather to adapt himself to reality...
...Perhaps they might agree on such features as free admission, services in English, eloquent and sensational sermons, extempore prayer by the minister, the absence of ceremonial, cushioned pews instead of hard kneelingbenches, dispensation from confession, freedom to believe as you like, beautiful anthems by the choir, the congregational singing of popular hymns, and so on...
...I did not want to unsettle them...
...G. K. Chesterton says somewhere that it has been the experience of many who have joined the Roman Catholic Church that they have first gone through many moments of disturbance, from which they emerged, satisfied to remain where they were...
...They cannot blame him for doing what he believes to be right, especially when there are so many emotional obstacles standing in the way...
...The position therefore that I have maintained for many years, that it is God's will that I should do my small part in trying to Catholicize the Anglican communion and thus bring her finally to reunite with the apostolic see of the West, seems to me now one that is tainted with pride and rendered futile by its childishness...
...He might better have advised them to try to come to some agreement as to what there is in Protestantism that is worth advertising...
...If so, we must be in communion with the see of Peter...
...Karl Reiland, Dr...
...If our Saviour was building His Church for all time, and not throwing together simply a temporary expedient, the assumption is strong that the successors of Saint Peter in the Roman see are by divine ordering the administrative heads of the Church...
...It is not making any headway...
...I have never forgotten those words of Dr...
...The Commonweal is fortunately able to print two advance instalments, of which this is the first...
...Walter Russell Bowie, Dr...
...Some of us are fond enough of Anglicanism to bear with it...
...But they are part of life, and all life is messy in this day and generation...
...Although I have no illusion as to my own importance, I know that if any man who is rector of a large city parish of the Episcopal Church should submit to Rome, it might quite conceivably hurt the cause with which he has been associated...
...Howard Chandler Robbins, Dr...
...The case for Rome keeps coming back at us like a medicine ball...
...To me the one question of importance is, what kind of Church did Our Lord establish...
...My sympathies are with Catholicism rather than with Protestantism...
...Many things have happened during recent years to make me doubt the wisdom and truth of that assumption...
...through the revision of the Book of Common Prayer...
...The Reverend Charles Stelze, speaking recently before ioo ministers at the New York Advertising Club, declared that only 6 percent of the population of New York City are members of the Protestant Church—whatever that is...
...It is alarmingly easy to deceive ourselves, and thus to remain convinced that our aims are irreproachable...
...There can be no doubt about the validity of the orders of the eastern Orthodox Churches...
...In my own parochial and editorial work I have felt increasingly that I was walking back and forth in a blind alley, out of touch with the main flow of life in the Episcopal Church...
...There may come a time when it bowls us over...
...The more advanced of the younger clergy of the Catholic movement now act on the quite probable assumption that the Prayer Book is inadequately Catholic and marred by Protestant blemishes...
...It cannot but engender in the Anglo-Catholic clergy an unwholesome pride for them to think that they alone are walking in the right path, and that the mass of the clergy and laity of their Church are groping blindly in the dark forest of Protestantism...
...As to the validity of Anglican orders and the people to whom I have ministered, I have never doubted that the sacraments they have received in good faith, and their other acts of devotion, have been effectual means of grace to them...
...Barry...
...Henry Sloane Coffin, Dr...
...It can do no permanent harm to any Christians if they are driven seriously to reconsider their religious beliefs and ecclesiastical position, and to make sure that they are neither blinding themselves nor following blind leaders...
...and many of the younger clergy, who have been trained in the seminaries to carry on their ministry along Catholic lines, find it difficult to obtain positions...
...George, professor of ecclesiastical history at Nashotah House in Wisconsin, said in my hearing many years ago that it all hinged on the Papacy...
...It might throw them back into bleak Protestantism or sheer unbelief...
...In the earlier part of my life as a priest, I thought there were many parishes and dioceses in the American Episcopal Church where the Catholic movement was carrying all before it...
...The Roman Catholic Church is likewise a reality—always teaching dogmatically the old faith, but adapting herself slowly through the centuries to the changing needs of men...
...Fundamentalist Protestantism appeals to me even less than Liberal Protestantism...
...It is seriously divided into the two camps of the proRomans and the Liberal Catholics...
...if we did not, we should remain Anglicans...
...Perhaps my change of heart may be explained in the terms of adaptation...
...It discusses the Anglo-Catholic position and concludes that since "the Roman Catholic Church is the most vigorous and flourishing presentation of the religion of the Gospel" submission to it is therefore logically necessary.—The Editors...
...but one day the conviction of the truth of the Roman position became so overwhelming that they could not avoid making their submission...
...That strikes the note of real Christian humility...
...They are commonly regarded as an eccentric, stubborn and amusing group that does not carry much weight in the ecclesiastical world...
...The Protestant Episcopal Church is a reality —quite wooden, stiff and conservative...
...One of my friends tried to persuade me to remain content with Anglicanism by the following argument: Everyone knows that Anglican ecclesiastical conditions are something of a mess...
...Another reason why I have been reluctant to make a change is that I have felt that I had assumed responsibilities to the Catholic movement in the Episcopal Church which I could not without great deliberation cast aside...
...Because I have been born in it, I want—at present—to go on in it...
...or we are so involved in it through our responsibilities that we cannot leave it...
...Then too there have always been many people who relied upon me and looked to me for guidance...
...Except for a few large parishes in the cities, the clergy of Catholic convictions are everywhere hampered and restricted by their vestries or bishops, though perhaps to a lesser degree than their brethren in England...
...I have no doubt that it was a Church in which the apostles were the chief ministers, and that the bishops of the primitive Church were the successors of the apostles...
...Anglo-Catholics represent but a tiny and almost negligible fraction of the forces of American Protestantism...
...or we feel it is a better, because a more accustomed, natural way for us to express ourselves spiritually...
...We may handle it successfully many times and hurl it away from us with determination...
...I could not believe that God would not give His grace to all who diligently seek Him, and conscientiously make use of the best means they know for coming into union with Him...
...Would you be prepared to say that you had never celebrated a real Mass or given a real absolution...
...For some time previous he had been writing what is virtually a diary of his experience...
...In answer to this plausible presentation of the Anglican position, I should say that it is quite possible that Anglicans have valid orders and that their sacraments are real...
...The proposed new Prayer Book brought to light the cleavage that had long existed among Anglo-Catholics...
...Kinsman in his Salve Mater: "It is certainly a great relief to exchange the task of trying to reform the Church— the necessary effort for all who hold my former point of view—for the simpler one of letting the Church try to reform me...
...AngloCatholics often act like childish adults who are making a fuss over their environment...
...Now my eyes are open to the facts...
...In England the movement has slumped badly since the failure to put Dr...
...Now it is different...
...But of course that is just what priests have to do—convert people and keep the Church going...
...They are all at various stages on the road to Rome...
...If Anglo-Catholics used only the services prescribed in the Prayer Book, and regarded them as sufficiently suitable forms for Catholic worship, they might be tolerated...
...Let Protestant ministers advertise whatever it is that Protestantism has to offer the public that Rome cannot offer...
...If one wants a refined, liturgical and socially irreproachable Protestantism, one can find it in the Protestant Episcopal Church...
...I am certainly out of sympathy with Liberal Protestantism, which is the dominant religious force outside the Church of Rome in that part of America in which my lot has been cast...
...The Roman Catholic Church does not have to advertise, as its churches are filled to overflowing six or seven times every Sunday morning...
...Why did I not see this before...
...When one presumably has many years of life in this world before one, it is easy to postpone decisions to a more convenient occasion...
...Subsequently, under the insistent pressure of our pro-Roman brethren, and impelled by the fear of being called old-fashioned, amiably desirous also of pleasing our constituents, many of us have shifted our position...
...Thus have queried some of my friends...
...The "yardstick" by which their ecclesiastical status is to be measured is the degree of their approximation to the religion of Rome...
...S. Parkes Cadman, Dr...
...Many of them welcomed the new book as a distinct improvement in a Catholic direction...
...I knew them only from the outside...
...I suppose the simplest explanation is that I have become disillusioned and discouraged with AngloCatholicism...
...They are all Liberal Protestants...
...There are many calls for them to take charge of brokendown parishes, or to engage in slum work or missionary enterprises that the married clergy dare not touch...
...I have never been impressed with the Anglican argument that the primacy and supremacy of the Pope are merely de jure ecclesiastico, and not de jure divino, because the papal claims rest on Our Lord's commission to Saint Peter...
...Howard Mellish, Bishop Lawrence, Bishop Slattery, Bishop Stires—to say nothing of the rich and influential laymen who stand behind them—undoubtedly represent the popular cast of religious thought and feeling in the social milieu with which I am familiar...
...That has been largely my experience...
...To me however the crux of the matter is the Papacy...
...Clergymen like Dr...
...This is no passing fancy...
...Moreover I have come to feel differently about its being my vocation to reform the Anglican Church, or even that small section of it known as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America...
...Sooner or later everyone becomes dissatisfied with bare Episcopalianism and borrows—by whatever intermediary— some belief or practice from Roman Catholicism: lights, vestments, incense, reservation of the Sacrament, the sign of the cross, the bowing of the head at the Holy Name, genuflections, the invocation of saints, the rosary, the Hail Mary, the Angelus, the Stations of the Cross, retreats, adoration, confession, communion in one kind, the Breviary offices, the Immaculate Conception, transubstantiation, the primacy of the Pope, papal infallibility...
...If one wants a developed and practical Catholicism, one can find it anywhere in the world in that vast ecclesiastical organization whose centre is at Rome in the see of Peter...
...The successful passage from infancy into maturity depends, so the psychiatrists tell us, on the breaking up and reconstruction of those habits which were appropriate only to our earliest experience...
...Therefore they splint it and bandage it with interpolations from the Roman Mass, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the Litany of the Saints, the rosary, the Mass of the Presanctified, the veneration of the cross, and so on to an ever-increasing degree...
...They do not like the Episcopal Church as it is, so they employ all their energies in making it something that it is not...
...Precisely...
...In that case, we have no more right to eliminate the Papacy from the constitution of the Catholic Church, than Protestants have had to discard the episcopate...
...An Anglo-Catholic clergyman must try to convert people to Anglo-Catholicism...
...Many a time in my ministry I have felt the attraction of Rome, but I got over it...
...The question at issue is whether they are justified in their separation from the apostolic see...
...If he begins to feel that Anglo-Catholicism is losing ground in the Anglican Church, and is a negligible factor in the religious forces of the modern world, and there is increasing evidence in contemporary history that the Roman Catholic Church is the most vigorous and flourishing presentation of the religion of the Gospel, he is inevitably driven to the conclusion that he must make his submission to Rome...
...Given valid sacraments, we can live the Catholic life, no matter whether we are in communion with Rome and the Pope or not, and no matter how shaky our ecclesiastical discipline, or how weak our authority...
...I do not know, unless it was because I did not want to run the risk of disturbing my emotionally comfortable state of life...
...The same facts force me to the conclusion that Protestantism is decadent and in process of dissolution...
...The conviction has been growing in me every year that I am in conflict with the prevailing trends of religion and thought in my environment...
...The fact of contemporary religious life in America compel me to identify Catholicism with the Roman Catholic Church...
...Some Anglicans accept all of them, others only a few of them...
...Do you or do you not think our orders are valid, and our sacraments real sacraments...
...The Protestant Episcopal Church, as I see it now, is a heterogenous conglomeration of clergy and laity, each of whom is individualistic in his religious beliefs and practices...
...while many others regarded it as a calamity because of its changes in the Communion Office and its restrictions on the devotional use of the Reserved Sacrament...
...I should never want to convert anyone to Anglo-Catholicism...
...I should advise Roman Catholicism if they were attracted to Catholicism in some form...
...That to my mind is the real question, and not the Papacy...
...My religious convictions have very little in common with theirs, although I have always found them delightful companions and courteously tolerant of my theological views...
...I have lost my heart...
...but I should not want to drag anyone else into an unsatisfactory religious situation...
...But that is not all...
...But even if the powers of the Pope had been given him by the Church, rather than by Our Lord, those who believe that the development of the Church is guided by the Holy Ghost would still have to accept the Papacy...
...That is why there have been godly and heroic souls in every religion...
Vol. 12 • September 1930 • No. 21
