[Apologetics] When compromise trumps apostolic tradition

[Dianne Dawson]

When compromise trumps apostolic tradition
By George Weigel
The Telegraph’s sense of what has "preserved the Church for more than 400 years" 
is misplaced, I fear. Elements of sanctity, intelligence, and beauty have been 
nurtured in the Anglican Communion for more than four centuries by the work of 
the Holy Spirit, who distributes gifts freely, and not only within the confines 
of the Catholic Church. Thus there have been great Anglican theologians and 
noble Anglican martyrs in the Anglican Communion, which has also given the world 
a splendid patrimony of liturgical music and a powerful example of the majesty 
of the English language as a vehicle of worship. None of this has had much, if 
anything, to with a "tradition of compromise."
Pope Benedict XVI’s pastoral visit to Great Britain next month will unfold along 
a pilgrim’s path metaphorically strewn with landmines. Headline-grabbing new 
atheists like Richard Dawkins, along with their allies in the international 
plaintiff’s bar, may try to have the pontiff arrested as an enabler of child 
abuse. More subtly, but just as falsely, homosexual activists and their allies 
will portray John Henry Newman, whom the Pope will beatify, as the patron saint 
of gay liberation. No challenge facing Benedict in Britain, however, will be 
greater than the challenge of re-framing the Anglican-Catholic ecumenical 
dialogue, which is on the verge of de facto extinction.
 
The death of that once-promising dialogue would have been unimaginable 40 years 
ago. Then, in the aftermath of Vatican II, it seemed possible that Canterbury 
and Rome might be reconciled, with full ecclesiastical communion restored. That 
great hope began to run aground in the mid-1980s, when the Church of England 
faced the question of whether it could call women to holy orders (a practice 
already under way in other member communities of the worldwide Anglican 
Communion). As I discovered when researching the biography of Pope John Paul II, 
a theological Rubicon seems to have been crossed in a 1984-86 exchange of 
letters among Dr. Robert Runcie, the Anglican primate, Cardinal Johannes 
Willebrands, the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian 
Unity, and the Pope. 

John Paul and Willebrands made quite clear to Runcie that the bright hope of 
ecclesial reconciliation would be severely damaged were the Church of England to 
engage in a practice that the Catholic Church (and the Orthodox churches) 
believed was unauthorized by apostolic tradition, and in fact contradicted that 
tradition. While admirably candid, Dr. Runcie’s attempt to explain why the 
Church of England believed it could proceed to the ordination of women 
demonstrated that Anglicanism and Catholicism were living in two distinct 
universes of discourse, one theological, the other sociological. For Runcie 
advanced no theological arguments as to why apostolic tradition could be 
understood to authorize the innovation he and many of his Anglican colleagues 
proposed; rather, he cited the expanding roles of women in society as the 
crucial issue. Sociological trends, Runcie’s letter implied, trumped apostolic 
tradition—which was not, of course, something the Catholic Church could accept.
 
The same issue recently re-emerged in the Church of England’s debate over the 
ordination of women as bishops. Dr. Rowan Williams, the current Anglican 
primate, and his colleague in York, Dr. John Sentamu , proposed a compromise in 
which the Church of England would ordain women to its episcopate, but parishes 
unable to accept this innovation would be allowed to invite a male bishop to 
preside over those rituals for which a bishop’s presence is required. This 
compromise was rejected by the General Synod of the Church of England, leading 
the London Telegraph to deplore editorially the loss of the Anglican " tradition 
of compromise that has preserved the church for more than 400 years." 

  
The sad truth of the matter is that the "tradition of compromise" is what is 
destroying the Anglican Communion. For that "tradition" has come to mean that 
the apostolic tradition of the Church—the essential constitution bequeathed to 
the Church by Christ, which can be discerned in the Scriptures and which was 
articulated in the creeds—has ceased to have any normative claim within 
Anglicanism. 

Thus an ecclesiological rule-of-thumb: when anything goes, the first thing to go 
is apostolic tradition.
 
 George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy 
Center in Washington, D.C. Weigel’s column is distributed by the Denver Catholic 
Register, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver. Phone: 
303-715-3215


      
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