What is the difference between an Anglican Papalist and a Romaniser?
Fr. Brooke Lunn explains that a Romanizer is "a person esp. an Anglican, who favours or adopts the practices of the Roman Catholic church... Thus Anglican Papalism is not to be confused with Romanizers. The former belongs in the realm of ideas, the latter in the real of phenomena. The phenomena of Romanizers are relatively easy to perceive. The idea of Anglican Papalism requires much more application in order to begin to comprehend it."
He goes on to mention, "Anglican Papalists recognise both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in England as rightfully claiming descent from the undivided Church in England before the sixteenth century schism." (emphasis mine)
I don't pretend to be learned enough to understand all the fine theological wranglings of the 16th Century - to be honest I don't have all that much time. I believe strongly that there are some very strong orthodox threads which connect pre-Reformation and post-Reformation Anglicanism. However, that doesn't justify the split that occurred, nor keeping the split going. As I say, Anglican Papalism shouldn't exist; we are merely a means to an end.
Below I post the Tridentine Creed. Tridentine Anglican Papalism sees this as the document containing the essentials that need to be discussed and debated over before doctrinal agreements are made. Modern Anglican Papalism would take the key text to be the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It's a text that I intend to study at length and I hope in the future to post one or two of my musings on the teachings therein.
That's a useful distinction from Fr Lunn; thank you. It's a set with a subset. All Anglo-Papalists are logically romanisers but not all romanisers are APs.
ReplyDeleteAs Death Bredon has written, non-AP romanisers are more like old-school Old Catholics (which I define as Utrechtian like Anglican = Lambeth and Roman = actually under the Pope), the conciliarist version of Roman Catholicism that lost at Vatican I.
(Sidebar: As was brought up in my com-boxes recently if the Old Catholics were right and they were/are the REAL Roman Catholic Church wouldn't that be obvious today? IOW wouldn't they be a big, strong, orthodox presence in the Western world, a real rival to the Vatican, and not the divided, confused Northern-Middle European rump sect they now really are? They're tiny and breaking up over women's ordination and same-sex blessings just like the bigger Anglican Communion. Even though OCs have no Evangelical Protestant party. They turned Broad Church.)
You know my line: the Pope is England's lawful patriarch.
The only good that came of the split is accidental: services in English (and what English it was).
The dithery mixture of Protestantism that was imported into 1500s England was obviously opportunistic on the Protestants' part and on the king's/state's part simply grabbing the handiest excuses to justify the unjustifiable.
Interestingly there seemed not to be a whole lot of Luther in the mix. It was Calvinism...
...but with bishops (as essential?) and residual practice showing a belief in the Real Presence (the elements didn't revert to secular use and were to be completely consumed with nothing left over).
On top of common Christian orthodoxy (the creeds) on those two thin threads hang all of Catholic Anglicanism's claims, don't they?