Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin

And now a not-so-succinct presentation on the legitimacy of the doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity of the Mother of Jesus Christ. I apologise in advance for the terribly lengthy collection of thoughts and ideas herein contained. I pray these thoughts will be useful to you and helpful as you form your own mind on this important subject.

For Anglicans, the theologumenon, or theological opinion, that the Blessed Virgin Mary was a Virgin 'before, during and after' (to quote Saint Augustine) the conception and birth of Our Lord, is not held to be an absolutely necessary dogma of the Catholic Faith, to be held definitely, de fide tenenda, that is, for salvation as pertaining to the essence of the Faith of the Scriptures and Creeds. Anglicans who do not believe in the Perpetual Virginity of Our Lady are still considered to be practising Catholic Christians in good standing and in full communion with the Church. Never fear! Having said that, however, it must be asserted quite honestly that the onus of responsibility and burden of proof lie with those who reject the doctrine to demonstrate that the belief should not be held as an edifying and congruous article of Faith and that it is not actually part of the Apostolic Tradition inherited from the earliest Church and, additionally, an ancient and universally-accepted belief related directly to the Creeds themselves. The doctrine was so important for earlier generations of Christians that even Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli and John Wesley all continued to believe in the Perpetual Virginity of the Holy Virgin, even as they began and promoted their various reformations. Historically, classical magisterial proetstantism professed the Perpetual Virginity. The doctrine was never seriously questioned, even by protestants, until the advent of modern biblical scholarship and criticism, the so-called 'historical-critical' method of biblical interpretation. Anglicans who adhere to belief in Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin keep very good company indeed. In short, I should say that although Anglicans don't strictly have to believe it, they should.

Here are a few splendid examples of the early protestant orthodoxy on this question:

Martin Luther

'Christ, our Saviour, was the real and natural fruit of Mary's virginal womb. This was without the cooperation of a man, and she remained a virgin after that.' Sermons on John, chaps. 1-4 (1539)

'Christ was the only Son of Mary, and the Virgin Mary bore no children besides Him. I am inclined to agree with those who declare that 'brothers' really mean 'cousins' here, for Holy Writ and the Jews always call cousins brothers.' Sermons on John, chaps. 1-4 (1539)

'A new lie about me is being circulated. I am supposed to have preached and written that Mary, the mother of God, was not a virgin either before or after the birth of Christ.' That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew (1523)

'Scripture does not say or indicate that she later lost her virginity. When Matthew says that Joseph did not know Mary carnally until she had brought forth her son, it does not follow that he knew her subsequently; on the contrary, it means that he never did know her. This babble is without justification; he has neither noticed nor paid any attention to either Scripture or the common idiom.' That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew (1523)

John Calvin

'Helvidius displayed excessive ignorance in concluding that Mary must have had many sons, because Christ's 'brothers' are sometimes mentioned.' Harmony of Matthew, Mark & Luke, sec. 39 (Geneva, 1562)

'The inference he [Helvidius] drew from it was, that Mary remained a virgin no longer than till her first birth, and that afterwards she had other children by her husband. No just and well-grounded inference can be drawn from these words; as to what took place after the birth of Christ. He is called 'first-born'; but it is for the sole purpose of informing us that he was born of a virgin. What took place afterwards the historian does not inform us. No man will obstinately keep up the argument, except from an extreme fondness for disputation.'
(ibid.)

'Under the word 'brethren' the Hebrews include all cousins and other relations, whatever may be the degree of affinity.' Commentary on John (7:3)

Huldrych Zwingli

'To deny that Mary remained inviolata before, during and after the birth of her Son, is to doubt the omnipotence of God, and it is right and profitable to repeat the angelic greeting - not prayer - 'Hail Mary.' God esteemed Mary above all creatures, including the saints and angels - it is her purity, innocence and invincible faith that mankind must follow.' This is from the Fidei expositio, the last pamphlet from his pen. There is a special insistence upon the perpetual virginity of Mary. The Perpetual Virginity of Mary, September 17, 1522

Zwingli printed in 1524 a sermon on 'Mary, ever virgin, mother of God': 'I have never thought, still less taught, or declared publicly, anything concerning the subject of the ever Virgin Mary, Mother of our salvation, which could be considered dishonourable, impious, unworthy or evil. I believe with all my heart according to the word of holy gospel that this pure virgin bore for us the Son of God and that she remained, in the birth and after it, a pure and unsullied virgin, for eternity.'


John Wesley

I believe Jesus Christ was born of the blessed Virgin, who, as well after as she brought him forth, continued a pure and unspotted virgin.' 'Letter to a Roman Catholic'

The vast majority of Christians living and dead have held and do hold that the Blessed Mother was preserved in her physical dignity, integrity and chastity the unique and singular human agent of the Incarnation. The doctrine is unquestionably part of what we call the consensus fidelium, the whole faith of the whole People of God, the universal, ancient and consentient belief of the whole Church in every time, place and age. The consensus of the Church's greatest Saints, Doctors, Confessors, theologians, teachers and witnesses has always been that the Perpetual Virginity is a genuine teaching of the Gospel. That puts Anglicans who might dissent in a tight spot!

The theological reason why the Church understood from the beginning the history of salvation and the content of Holy Scripture as teaching that the Blessed Mother is Ever-Virgin is the recognition that authentic belief in the Divinity of Our Blessed Lord is intimately connected to, and quite inseparable from, a right belief about the role and ministry of His Mother. The Creeds canonise the title 'Virgin' for the Theotokos, clearly implying as a dogmatic statement of fact that Mary remained a Virgin after Our Lord's miraculous conception and birth. If Mary had had natural marital relations with Saint Joseph and had conceived and birthed other children, the permanent title 'the Virgin Mary' would make little historical or theological sense. The Helvidian doctrine would have necessitated such language as 'Mary who was the Virgin.' Why would Mary remain a Virgin? To remain forever a living testimony in her bodily chastity to the unique Deity of Jesus Christ as the only-begotten Son of God. In the Incarnation, Mary became not only an instrument or channel for God the Son, in which and through which He became Man: in the miracle of the Incarnation Mary became God's Mother, the Temple and Throne of God. Her sacred body, and her life, would remain the utterly unique means by which God became Man - Christ having consecrated and sanctified Our Lady's body by His presence in her womb. Out of reverence for her, for the mystery of the Incarnation, and for the received interpretation of the Gospel narratives, the Church has always called Mary aeiparthenos, Ever-Virgin. As Father Alexander Schemmann, the famous twentieth-century Orthodox theologian once quipped when a student challenged the Perpetual Virginity, 'What? Do you think the Blessed Virgin was bored with God?' His point was well taken, and it still is today! Mary gave her life, body and soul, totally to Jesus – and that is the heart meaning of the Ever-Virginity.

The biblical data tells us, if read within the Tradition of the Church, that Mary was the unique Mother of the unique Son, and so the Church ever held until modern times. The strongest evidence in the New Testament regarding the ongoing virginal state of Our Lady is Saint John 19, where we read that the beloved disciple, Saint John, took the Blessed Mother into his home to care for her upon the death of the Lord. The Lord commended Mary to the care and guardianship of John. If Our Lord had had other natural brothers and sisters born of the Blessed Mother, Jewish Law and custom, the goel tradition, would have required Him to commend His Mother to the care and safekeeping of His own blood siblings. The fact that Our Lord did not commend the Virgin to one or more of His brothers or sisters illustrates the fact that He did not have any to whom He could give His Mother, and so the Church has ever held. The references to the 'brothers and sisters' of Jesus in the New Testament have been understood in basically three different ways, only one of which has been deemed heretical by the Fathers of the Church.

1. The teaching of Helvidius and Jovinian: This doctrine is the modern protestant view, condemned as heretical by Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Jerome, which understands the references to the 'brothers and sisters' of Jesus Christ in the literal sense as biological children of Blessed Mary and Saint Joseph, and hence biological brothers and sisters of Jesus. This interpretation of Scripture was held to be entirely novel, and erroneous, by the Church of the fourth century.

2. The teaching of Saint Jerome: Saint Jerome, the biblical expert thoroughly familiar with Jewish tradition and history, as well as Hebrew literary styles and forms, instructs that the references to Our Lord's sisters and brothers are in truth references to blood relations of Our Lord, members of His extended family who are not biological children of Mary and Joseph. Hebrew terminology lacks a specific word for a cousin or more distant relation, and so the New Testament utilises the Greek word adelphos, 'brother', to describe a biological brother or a cousin, a relative in the family unit. Saint Jerome's biblical exegesis takes into account the Hebraicism of the New Testament. Saint Jerome's version is the view usually maintained in the Roman Catholic Church.

3. The teaching of Saint Epiphanius of Salamis: This venerated fourth-century monk and theologian of the Eastern Church asserts that the ancient tradition reveals the brothers and sisters of Jesus to be children of Saint Joseph sired by him in a previous marriage. Ancient Christian traditions describe Saint Joseph, the guardian and foster father of Our Lord, as a much older person than the Blessed Virgin, which explains his rather brief appearance in the Gospel narratives and his quick disappearance from the story of Our Lord and His Mother. Saint Epiphanius teaches that Saint Joseph married earlier in life and had children by his first wife, who later died. Saint Joseph was then called to marry the Blessed Virgin in order to protect her and her Divine Son. The brothers and sisters of Jesus are therefore held to be the step-brothers and step-sisters of Jesus, children of Saint Joseph but not of the Blessed Virgin. Saint Epiphanius' doctrine is today generally held in the Eastern Orthodox Churches.

Whatever the specific historical situation may have been, the Undivided Catholic Church, without elaborating the precise relationships in the Lord's extended family, proclaimed the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin a dogmatic truth at the Fifth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople II in AD 553. Before that time the doctrine was proclaimed a truth of the Gospel by a multiplicity of local and regional synods and councils of the Church Catholic, such as the Synod of Rome in AD 340. All of the ancient apostolic Churches descending from the Undivided Church of the first millennium, with the possible exception of the Anglican Church, dogmatically profess that the Blessed Virgin was the only Mother of her only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord: the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian and Old Catholic Churches all maintain the doctrine as part of the deposit of faith.

As I am sure you can tell by now, I am one of those driven Anglo-Catholics who indeed believe, with the rest of the historic Church, that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the Virgin, before, during and after the birth of Our Saviour. Thank you so very much for your extraordinary patience in persisting with me to the end of this meandering letter. You are most gracious and kind to read all of this. I only hope the perspective exhibited in this dossier will assist you in your Christian pilgrimage of faith. I always certainly welcome your reflections and feedback.

Oprah-ism

My dear friends,

Thank you for your letter and the provocative news article on Oprah Winfrey and her disturbing involvement in the New Age movement. She seems to have succeeded Shirley MacLaine as the popular effervescent spokeswoman for an ever-changing and up-to-date version of that most ancient error of gnosticism! I do not think it is too strong a description to characterise her as a modern pagan. The New Age movement is a carefully and suavely repacked form of the religion of Genesis 3, the primordial, primeval disobedience of man to the life-giving Commandments of God. Called by many names, at heart it is the heresy of gnosticism, an esoteric religious system which offers to its followers the promise of spiritual enlightenment and escape from suffering and evil through a secret knowledge provided only to the initiated. The popular book and motion picture she promoted last year, The Secret, is a perfectly self-described manifestation of the gnostic error, which teaches that man is in fact divine, or a 'spark of the divine,' a being of pure spirit trapped in human flesh and the material world, to be released and liberated from the prison of matter only through the acceptance of secret spiritual truths which only the enlightened and initiated can possess.

The serpent lied to Eve in the Garden of Eden with the same proposition now proffered by limousine-riding multi-millionaires to unwary and naive modern Westerners: 'you will not die, but will be as gods, knowing good and evil.' The religion of the New Age movement is in truth the idolatry and deception of Eastern religious philosophy, Hindu paganism, redressed in western garb and expressed with very Christian-sounding western terminology. Faithful Christians should utterly abhor and reject this false religious system. Many religions and religious movements embraced elements of this variety of the occult long before the advent or domination of Christianity: one thinks immediately of Platonism in ancient Hellenic culture and its related Persian and Middle Eastern cousin, Manichaeism, founded by Mani, the rigourist puritan prophet of the early Christian era. (Even Saint Augustine fell into the gnostic Manichaean sect before his conversion to the Christian Faith). Occultic gnosticism was rampant in the ancient world during the early years of the Christian Church, and for this reason Saint John and the other Apostles forcefully address this error in the New Testament. Many quasi-Christian and pseudo-Christian cults, now mercifully long gone, practised gnosticism to a dizzying degree of different levels of complex mythologies, and their challenge prompted the Fathers of the Church, such as Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, to combat this heresy - from the second all the way to the seventh or eighth centuries... and even today. The Nag Hammadi library of early Christian Coptic Egypt displays the widespread influence of gnosticism in the ancient world - Elaine Pagels mistakenly claims in her popular New Agey books that the earliest, most authentic Christianity was gnostic, but she is dreadfully wrong. Most gnostics held that 'god' was male and female, an androgynous god-force incorporating aspects of human sexuality into the divine. For this reason most pre- and post-Christian gnostic sects ordained women; some of them, either purportedly Christian or explicitly pagan, even employed sexual ritual and temple prostitution - so that men and women could contact the divine male-female force through sexual union (you should recognise this aspect of gnosticism from Dan Brown and his
DaVinci Code).

Eventually gnosticism emerged as two types: puritan and libertine. The puritan form was strictly ascetic and practiced violent self-mortification and self-discipline, in order that the spirit may be forced to eschew and hate the physical world, including the human body. The Manichaeans were strict rigourists, as were the mediaeval Albigensian-Cathari, who in the High Middle Ages, forbade marriage, sexual union of husband and wife, and the procreation of children. The Cathari even sacralised suicide as the maximum level of spiritual advancement! The opposite extreme, the libertines, allowed their followers to do whatever they pleased, since the body and the material world are of no consequence to the soul which is not meant for the physical world but spiritual freedom and enlightenment. The sex cult version of gnosticism is obviously found in the latter category. I would place Oprah's religion clearly in the second category, for it emphasises the freedom of the individual from all religious creeds and dogma and encourages people to 'find their own path to God,' their own self-deification, a classic gnostic tenet.

This occultic form of religious egoism, the worship and service of self, the desire to become God on one's own terms, takes many forms, but is styled in the Oprah Winfrey fashion of modern, wealthy, comfortable America to appeal directly to the most innate desires of modern people, some of whom are looking for a form of religion without obligation, accountability, or sacrifice - the hallmarks of true religion. The New Age religion is a false Gospel, which offers man earthly happiness and prosperity and the hope of eternal bliss, without making any demands on or requiring moral responsibilities for would-be followers. The fancy shined-up new model of the satanic counterfeit religion particularly appeals to the avarice, self-centredness and narcissism of our current rather debased and materialistic age. A religion of ease, comfort and self for a comparatively easy, comfortable and selfish culture...

The actual character of spiritualism or the occult is most directly revealed by its attitude to our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. His claims to be the unique Saviour and King of the universe and sole Redeemer of mankind though Whom alone we approach unto the Father are immediately spurned and even ridiculed by the gnostic New Age elite. In the pagan system promoted by Oprah's friend's books, Our Lord, although He is not so explicitly described, is held to be an avatar, a guru, a spiritual master, a manifestation of the divine force who comes to bring peace, love and enlightenment. He is kept at a safe distance and transmogrified into a harmless agent of tranquillity and self-understanding, and the way in which that is done is categorically to refuse His true nature and His claims about Himself. In this neo-paganism, you see, there is no God but the individual human being, for the New Age has no god but the personal self.

There is no personal God in a westernised Hinduism, only a divine force, and impersonal 'force-field' which holds together all things - may the Force be with you! - a classic form of pantheism and panentheism, the idea that Creation, the world, is 'god' or a 'world-soul.' The New Age system sees all religious leaders of history, including Our Lord, as manifestations or emanations of this god-world, come to show us the way to true enlightenment, the realisation that we are divine and that our human bodies and human lives, that the physical material world itself, do not in the end count for anything. All of this philosophy is taken directly from the ancient gnostic religion. True enlightenment consists, they say, in loving and serving oneself and finding personal satisfaction, happiness and fulfilment through one's own meditative state, not in being united to One True God, the Father, through the Holy Cross of Jesus Christ His only-begotten and unique Son in the Holy Ghost, the Life-Giver and Comforter.

In Oprah's religion, man is God, a projection of the 'god-self,' and the key to his earthly harmony is to get in touch with, to contact through methods of yogic meditation and mind play, the true inner 'deity' inside. What is most frightening about the religious phenomenon outlined above is that, although its language differs and the presentation is certainly far more palatable, its core belief-system and moral and spiritual priorities are exactly the same as that of Satanism. For example, if one reads The Satanic Bible, an unpleasant task to say the least, one will find in its pages in more brutal and confrontational terms the same religion of self-worship and self-promotion so attractively advertised by the Oprah cult. The goal in both is the same: personal accomplishment through magic, the intentional manipulation of the one's environment through the use of occult means and powers to gain what is favourable to and for oneself apart from God. For both, it all boils down (forgive the pun) to witchcraft.

I guess you can tell I do not hold the Oprah movement in the highest estimation!

May the Most High God, the Holy Trinity, One and Undivided, bless and keep you all in this holy Paschaltide!

Orthodox Renunciation of Errors

Another liturgical tradition from the Orthodox Church for one's contemplation, a section of THE OFFICE FOR THE RECEPTION OF CONVERTS: What is most remarkable and thought-provoking about the following interrogations for converts to the Orthodox Church is that no provision is made for the renunciation of errors perceived in the Anglican Church. There is no special section in which converts from Anglicanism are obliged to renounce formerly held doctrines or beliefs. The absence of such a requirement is most telling as concerns that actual state of affairs historically maintained between the Anglican and Orthodox Churches. Former Roman Catholics, Oriental Orthodox and classical protestants, in particular, Lutherans and Calvinists, are all required to disavow specific errors condemned by Orthodoxy and held to be professed by the religious traditions identified. Anglicanism is exempted from the list of those ecclesial bodies which are said to be in error. Again, how close indeed traditional Anglicanism is to Orthodoxy.

Bishop. Wilt thou renounce the errors and false doctrines of the Roman-Latin (or Armenian, or Lutheran, or Reformed) Confession?

And he shall reply: I will.

After the Prayer, the Bishop (or Priest) shall say to the convert:
Wherefore renounce now, with all thy heart, thine errors, and false doc­trines, and mistakes of judgment, and confess the Orthodox Catholic Faith.

And the Bishop questioneth the convert from the Roman-Latin Confession.

Dost thou renounce the false doctrine that, for the expression of the dogma touching the Procession of the Holy Spirit, the declara­tion of our Saviour Christ himself: "who proceedeth from the Father": doth not suffice; and that the addition, of man's inven­tion: "and from the Son": is required?

Answer. I do.


Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief that it doth not suffice to confess our Lord Jesus Christ as the head of the Universal Church; and that a man, to wit, the Bishop of Rome, can be the head of Christ's Body, that is to say, of the whole Church?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief that the holy Apostles did not receive from our Lord equal spiritual power, but that the holy Apostle Peter was their Prince: And that the Bishop of Rome alone is his successor: And that the Bishops of Alexandria, Antioch and others are not, equally with the Bishop of Rome, successors of the Apostles?


Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief of those who think that the Pope of Rome is superior to the Ecumenical Councils, and infallible in faith, notwithstanding the fact that several of the Popes have been heretics, and condemned as such by the Councils?


Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce all the other doctrines of the West­ern Confession, both old and new, which are contrary to the Word of God, and to the true tradition of the Church, and to the decrees of the Seven Ecumenical Councils?


Answer. I do.

The convert from the Armenian Confession is questioned as follows by the Bishop:

Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief that in our Lord Jesus Christ there are not two natures, Divine and human, but one only; the human nature being swallowed up by the Divine?

Answer. I do.

The Bishop questioneth the convert from the Lutheran Confession thus:

Dost thou renounce the false doctrine that, for the expression of the dogma touching the Procession of the Holy Ghost the declaration of our Saviour Christ himself: "who proceedeth from the Father": doth not suffice; and that the addition, of man's invention: "and from the Son": is required?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief that in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist the bread is not transmuted into the Body of Christ, and doth not become the Body of Christ; and that the wine is not transmuted into the Blood of Christ, and doth not become the Blood of Christ; but that the presence of Christ's Body only for a short time doth touch the bread, which remaineth simple bread ?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief of the teachers who do not accept as Sacraments Chrismation, Marriage, Anoint­ing with Oil, and the Priesthood itself, which administereth the other Sacraments, and presume to administer Baptism and the Euchar­ist, never having received, through the laying-on of hands by a Bishop, that Ordination which hath been transmitted from one to another, even from the holy Apostles?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief of the teachers who receive not the traditions of the Holy Church, reverence not the Saints, and deprive the dead of spiritual aid and the living of spiritual consolation, in that they reject prayers for the dead?

Answer. I do.

The Bishop questioneth the convert from the Reformed Confession after this wise:

Dost thou renounce the false doctrine that, for the expression of the dogma touching the Procession of the Holy Spirit, the declara­tion of our Saviour Christ himself: "who proceedeth from the Father": doth not suffice; and that the addition, of man's invention: "and from the Son": is required?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce the false doctrine, that the predesti­nation of men to their salvation, or their rejection, is not in accord­ance with the Divine foreknowledge of the faith and good works of the former, or of the unbelief and evil deeds of the latter; but in accordance with some arbitrary destiny, by reason of which faith and virtue are robbed of their merit, and God is held accountable for the perdition of sinners?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief that in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist the bread and wine are not trans­muted into the Body and Blood of Christ, and are merely emblems of the Body and Blood of Christ?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief of the Reformed teachers, who reject five Sacraments: Chrismation, Confession, Mar­riage, Anointing with Oil, and the Priesthood itself, which admin­istereth the other Sacraments, and presume to administer Baptism and the Eucharist, never having received, through the laying-on of hands by a Bishop, that Ordination which hath been transmitted from one to another, even from the holy Apostles?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou renounce the erroneous belief of the Reformed teachers who receive not the traditions of the Holy Church, rever­ence not the Saints, and deprive the dead of spiritual aid, and the living of consolation, in that they reject prayers for the dead?

Answer. I do.

And after these special questions, appointed for the converts from different Confes­sions, the Bishop shall proceed with the catechizing which is common to all, and shall ask:


Bishop. Hast thou renounced all ancient and modern heresies and false doctrines which are contrary to the teachings of the Holy Orthodox Catholic Eastern Church?

Answer. I have.

Orthodox Profession of Faith

Herein presented is an intriguing item of liturgical tradition from the canonical Eastern Orthodox Churches. It shows just how Orthodox (with a capital 'O') our constituency of continuing Anglican Catholics truly is. For a useful comparison please refer to the Affirmation of Saint Louis: http://www.acahome.org/submenu/docs/affirm.htm

From THE OFFICE FOR RECEIVING INTO THE ORTHODOX FAITH SUCH PERSONS AS HAVE NOT PREVIOUSLY BEEN ORTHODOX.

And again the Bishop saith:

Dost thou accept the Apostolical and Ecclesiastical Canons framed and established at the Seven Holy Universal and Provincial Councils, and the other traditions and ordi­nances of the Orthodox Church?


Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou acknowledge that the Holy Scriptures must be accepted and interpreted in accord­ance with the belief which hath been handed down by the Holy Fathers, and which the Holy Ortho­dox Church, our Mother, hath al­ways held and still doth hold?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou believe and confess that there are seven Sacra­ments of the New Testament, to wit: Baptism, Chrismation, the Eucharist, Confession, the Priest­hood, Marriage, and Anointing with Oil, instituted by the Lord Christ and his Church, to the end that, through their operation and reception, we may obtain blessings from on high?

Answer. I believe and confess it.

Bishop. Dost thou believe and confess that in the Divine Liturgy, under the mystical forms of the holy bread and wine, the faithful partake of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, unto the remission of sins, and unto life eternal?

Answer. I believe and confess it.

Bishop. Dost thou believe and confess that it is proper to rever­ence and invoke the Saints who reign on high with Christ, accord­ing to the interpretation of the Holy Orthodox Church; and that their prayers and intercessions be­fore God avail with the beneficent God unto our salvation: and that it is well-pleasing in the sight of God that we should do homage to their relics, glorified through incorruption, as precious memorials of their virtue?

Answer. I believe and confess it.

Bishop. Dost thou confess that the images of our Saviour Christ; and of the Ever-Virgin Mother of God, and of the other Saints are worthy of being possessed and honoured; not unto idolatry, but that, through contemplation there­of, we may be incited unto piety, and unto emulation of the deeds of the holy persons represented by these images?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou confess that the prayers of the faithful which are offered up to God, and more especially when accompanied by the oblation of the unbloody sac­rifice, for the salvation of those who have departed this life in the faith, are favourably received, through the mercy of God?

Answer. I do.

Bishop. Dost thou believe and confess that power hath been given by our Saviour Christ unto the Orthodox Catholic Church to bind and to loose: and that whatsoever, by virtue of that power, is bound or loosed on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven?

Answer. I believe and confess it.

Bishop. Dost thou believe and confess that the Foundation, Head, and Great High Priest and Chief Shepherd of the Holy Orthodox Catholic Church is our Lord Jesus Christ; and that Bishops, Pastors and Teachers are appointed by him to rule the Church; and that the Guide and Pilot of this Church is the Holy Spirit?

Answer. I believe and confess that this Church is the Bride of Christ, and that therein is true salvation, which was in the Ark of Noah at the Flood.

Bishop. Dost thou promise true obedience, unto thy life's end, in guidance which is salutary unto the soul, to the Most Holy Synod; to the Most Holy Patriarch, the Equal-of-the-Apostles (or to the Ecclesias­tical Authorities of the Autocephalous Provincial Church); and to the Bishop of this Diocese, as the true Pastors appointed by the Holy Spirit; and to the Priests ordained by them?

Answer. I promise it, with heart unfeigned.

CANA Purports to Ordain Women Deacons

http://www.anglicantv.org/blog/enclosures/20080318Minns.mov

In a radio interview given today and linked online, Bishop Martyn Minns of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America acknowledges that CANA has now proceeded to purport to ordain women to the Sacred Order of Deacons. A study group on priestesses has come to no formal decision and is still working through the question, we are told. From the tone and tenor of the comments made, it seems clear that Bishop Minns endorses the 'ordination' of women...

Reception of communion in non-Catholic bodies

Dear N.,

Thank you so very much for your brilliant questions: they are sensitive and delicate questions you raise and our answers to them must be guided by pastoral charity, a love for souls and a desire for the salvation of all men.

Ecclesial communities derived from the reformation and separated from Apostolic Churches have not preserved the proper reality of the Eucharistic mystery in its fullness, especially because of the absence of the sacrament of Holy Orders - they lack valid Apostolic Orders necessary for the valid celebration of the Eucharist. It is for this reason that, for Catholic Churches, such as the Anglican Church, Eucharistic intercommunion with these communities is not possible. However these ecclesial communities, when they commemorate the Lord's death and resurrection in the Holy Supper, profess that it signifies life in communion with Christ and await his coming in glory. Catholic Churches do not recognise the offering of communion in protestant communities as valid; it is not the Body and Body of Christ under the form of bread and wine.

Celebrations of the sacraments in ecclesial bodies which do not possess Apostolic Succession lack the sacramental assurance and guarantee of the communication of grace in the sacraments for which the sacraments were instituted and given to the Church by the Lord. Surely the Holy Ghost can own, bless and use the ordinances and rites of non-Apostolic ecclesial communities as extraordinary means of grace, means of grace outside the Church's recognised sacramental order, but such rites are not endowed with that certitude of grace which the sacraments are intended to insure.

'Let only that Eucharist be regarded as legitimate, which is celebrated under the bishop or him to whom he has entrusted it' (Saint Ignatius of Antioch, To The Symrnaeans 8, AD 107). Only validly ordained bishops and priests in Apostolic Succession validly celebrate the Holy Eucharist and consecrate the bread and the wine so that they become the True Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Only validly ordained bishops and priests have the power, authority and commission of Christ conveyed through sacramental ordination to act in the Name and Person of Christ in His Church (in persona Christi capitis) 'in the person of Christ Head of the Church' and thus validly to confect the sacraments according to Christ's institution. No genuine bishop, no genuine priest, no genuine priest, no genuine Eucharist. The essence of the Church and her sacramental life rest in that which guarantees the ongoing ministry and work of Christ in His Church, the Apostolic Succession. This is a hard saying for many, but it is true, and we must speak the truth and act upon the truth in love for our Christian brethren. The lack of valid Orders in protestant communities means we should not approach the sacraments in these ecclesial bodies.

Although receiving an invalid sacrament may not directly harm our souls and render us in a state of sin, such an act can nevertheless make a wrong statement about our faith and that of the community in which we worship, and it can bear witness to something that is not true, in this case, the purported validity of the sacramental act in question. We should always bear witness to the truth and act accordingly. This delicate situation affords us an opportunity to exercise Christian virtues and lovingly to profess of our faith by our actions.

Here is how I try to answer the question.Why can we not receive communion together with those in different ecclesial bodies?, we may ask. Even if we do agree with other Christians, say for example, Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox, on sacramental doctrine, why can we still not receive Holy Communion in those Churches? We should long for the day when all Christians can receive Holy Communion together. It should cause us deep sorrow that we cannot receive communion from non-Catholics, or the Blessed Sacrament even from other Catholic Churches at this time, but our discipline rests on important theological principles. When we come to the Eucharist, this is not simply an isolated act in which one individually approaches and receives Our Lord. We come to Holy Communion as members of the Church, members of a corporate society, a family of believers. We are never alone in our Communions, but are with all others who profess the same Faith and Tradition. Making our Communions expresses the totality of one's whole Christian faith and one's full life of church membership. Lack of intercommunion is a painful reality, but the effect of Christian division is very real indeed. Christians are divided and belong to separate bodies. We seek for unity with all Christians, but we have a long way to go. So long as we are separated, it is not realistic for Christians to celebrate or receive Holy Communion together. This is because the Eucharist expresses the total unity in faith and dogma of the Church and our solidarity as members of one family.

If our faith is different and we belong to separated bodies, it is therefore untruthful for us to engage in intercommunion. The reception of Holy Communion is not a means to an end, not a means to create unity, even as many well-intentioned Anglicans mistakenly believe. The Holy Eucharist is the expression of that unity we now possess in faith and doctrine, a gift of catholicity and apostolicity from God Himself. Until our God-given unity is fully expressed, we have to accept the truth that we should not practice intercommunion with those who not have the Faith and Tradition of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. To practice intercommunion before its time would not be truthful nor realistic to facts of our separation.

'Communion' literally communio, union with, communion with the Catholic Church in her Apostolic doctrine, Apostolic fellowship, Apostolic sacramental practice, and Apostolic worship (Acts 2.42). The Eucharist is not an act of hospitality, nor is it a free-for-all, but rather, it is the supreme sign and manifestation of that unity of faith, doctrine, moral teaching, and ecclesiastical fellowship which already exists. The Eucharist does not create unity; rather, it reveals and demonstrates that unity which is already given to the Church by her Head and Lord.

Each Catholic Church possesses her own discipline of the Sacraments, and each member of each jurisdiction is bound to one's particular discipline. Only Christians in communion with the Bishop of Rome may receive the Eucharist in the Papal Churches. Only chrismated Orthodox may receive in the Eastern Orthodox Churches. In Anglican discipline, only those baptised into Christ, sealed with the gift of the Holy Ghost in Confirmation received from an Apostolic Bishop, and properly disposed, that is, in a state of grace, can properly and fruitfully receive Holy Communion in our jurisdiction. No Catholic Churches permit their own members to receive communion in protestant bodies. As children of the English Church, we are called by the Lord to obedience to our own discipline.

May the Lord Jesus Christ, King of Saints and Martyrs, bless you in this Holy Week!

An Astonishing Admission

http://www.pgh.anglican.org/news/local/filesforposting/schoriresponse.pdf

On 14 March 2008, Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh published a formal response to the efforts of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and the Title IV Review Committee of TEC to depose him from the ministry of the said jurisdiction. In the letter, Bishop Duncan makes an astonishing admission...

3. I have preached and taught nothing but what faithful Anglicans and mainstream Christians have always preached and taught, with the exception only that I have supported and encouraged the ministry of women in Holy Orders.

Bishop Duncan seems to be stating very clearly that the support and encouragement of the ministry of women in Holy Orders is not what faithful Anglicans and mainstream Christians have always believed and taught!

In his striking admission he is absolutely correct. But his statement begs another question: if the support and encouragement of the 'ordination' of women is not what the Church has always preached and taught, then what is it?

Saint Vincent of Lerins provides the answer in his Commonitorium, chapter 2:

'I HAVE often then inquired earnestly and attentively of very many men eminent for sanctity and learning, how and by what sure and so to speak universal rule I may be able to distinguish the truth of Catholic Faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity; and I have always, and in almost every instance, received an answer to this effect: That whether I or any one else should wish to detect the frauds and avoid the snares of heretics as they rise, and to continue sound and complete in the Catholic Faith, we must, the Lord helping, fortify our own belief in two ways; first, by the authority of the Divine Law, and then, by the Tradition of the Catholic Church.
But here some one perhaps will ask, Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, what need is there to join with it the authority of the Church's interpretation?

For this reason, - because, owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters. For Novatian expounds it one way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, another, Photinus, Apollinaris, Priscillian, another, Iovinian, Pelagius, Celestius, another, lastly, Nestorius another. Therefore, it is very necessary, on account of so great intricacies of such various error, that the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation.

Now in the Catholic Church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. That is truly and properly 'Catholic,' (magnopere curandum est ut id teneatur quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est) as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consent. We shall follow universality if we acknowledge that one Faith to be true which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is clear that our ancestors and fathers proclaimed; consent, if in antiquity itself we keep following the definitions and opinions of all, or certainly nearly all, bishops and doctors alike.'

Bishop Duncan concurs with the judgement of history - the purported ordination of women fails the test of Saint Vincent of Lerins, Catholic Tradition, and thus fails the test of orthodoxy. His admission puts him in a very serious situation indeed.

Let us consider by comparison the inexhaustibly rich and helpful instruction offered to the whole Church, East and West, by two Bishops of Rome in the twentieth century. Every orthodox Catholic, Anglican, Latin and Eastern, should purpose to learn, process and synthesise in one's own understanding of the Faith these excellent words:

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Inter Insigniores, Pope Paul VI, 15 October 1976

'1. The Catholic Church has never felt that priestly or episcopal ordination can be validly conferred on women. A few heretical sects in the first centuries, especially Gnostic ones, entrusted the exercise of the priestly ministry to women: this innovation was immediately noted and condemned by the Fathers, who considered it as unacceptable in the Church. It is true that in the writings of the Fathers one will find the undeniable influence of prejudices unfavourable to women, but nevertheless, it should be noted that these prejudices had hardly any influence on their pastoral activity, and still less on their spiritual direction. But over and above considerations inspired by the spirit of the times, one finds expressed—especially in the canonical documents of the Antiochian and Egyptian traditions—this essential reason, namely, that by calling only men to the priestly Order and ministry in its true sense, the Church intends to remain faithful to the type of ordained ministry willed by the Lord Jesus Christ and carefully maintained by the Apostles.

The same conviction animates mediaeval theology, even if the Scholastic doctors, in their desire to clarify by reason the data of faith, often present arguments on this point that modern thought would have difficulty in admitting or would even rightly reject. Since that period and up to our own time, it can be said that the question has not been raised again, for the practice has enjoyed peaceful and universal acceptance.

The Church's tradition in the matter has thus been so firm in the course of the centuries that the Magisterium has not felt the need to intervene in order to formulate a principle which was not attacked, or to defend a law which was not challenged. But each time that this tradition had the occasion to manifest itself, it witnessed to the Church's desire to conform to the model left to her by the Lord.


The same tradition has been faithfully safeguarded by the Churches of the East. Their unanimity on this point is all the more remarkable since in many other questions their discipline admits of a great diversity. At the present time these same Churches refuse to associate themselves with requests directed towards securing the accession of women to priestly ordination.

4. This practice of the Church therefore has a normative character: in the fact of conferring priestly ordination only on men, it is a question of an unbroken tradition throughout the history of the Church, universal in the East and in the West, and alert to repress abuses immediately. This norm, based on Christ's example, has been and is still observed because it is considered to conform to God's plan for his Church.

Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II, 22 May 1994

1. Priestly ordination, which hands on the office entrusted by Christ to his Apostles of teaching, sanctifying and governing the faithful, has in the Catholic Church from the beginning always been reserved to men alone. This tradition has also been faithfully maintained by the Oriental Churches.


When the question of the ordination of women arose in the Anglican Communion, Pope Paul VI, out of fidelity to his office of safeguarding the Apostolic Tradition, and also with a view to removing a new obstacle placed in the way of Christian unity, reminded Anglicans of the position of the Catholic Church: "She holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God's plan for his Church."

4. Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church's judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force.

Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (Saint Luke 22.32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.'
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In fine, the Church simply does not have the authority to alter the substance of the Holy Sacraments as received from the institution of Our Lord and the Apostles - this truth is transmitted to us dogmatically through Holy Tradition. Let us pray that Bishop Duncan may one day embrace the fullness of the Faith on this vitally important matter.

Arianism and the Only-Begotten

1. Arianism. The heresy of Arianism asserts that the Son of God, the pre-existent Logos or Word of God, Who became incarnate in the flesh as Jesus Christ, is the holiest, greatest and chiefest of all created beings, but is Himself a creature, made, created, by God the Father before all other created things or beings. The Arian Christ is the beginning of the created order, created before all angels or the supernatural world, but is still a creature. The creed of Arian theology is indeed: 'there was when He was not,' a clear statement that Arians believe there was a point of existence before which the Son of God existed. Because of this doctrine, Arians hold that the term homoousios, 'of one substance' with the Father, is incorrect - they also fought against the dogmatic decree of the Council of Nicea because they correctly observed (but with wrong conclusions) that the term homoousios is not found in Holy Scripture. The Holy Catholic Church employed a non-biblical word in the Nicene Creed in order to make absolutely certain and clear, using the most precise language possible, that the Arian heresy was false doctrine. The soteriological implications of Arianism for the Church, for our doctrine of how man is saved, are explicit and profound. If Jesus Christ is not God, is not of one essence or substance with the Father, and is not a true divine Person sharing the divine life and communion of the Father by nature, then God Himself did not assume human nature in the Incarnation and thus man has not been redeemed or saved. The Fathers of the Church teach that 'only that which is assumed can be redeemed.' The Arian Christ is, therefore, incapable of bringing about atonement and the salvation of mankind, for He is not God Who assumes all that pertains to human nature, body, mind and soul, but is only a created being who partakes of divine nature by grace. The Arian Christ is, in fact, what the Church calls an orthodox Saint, a created being who becomes God by grace and adoption, and who becomes by grace what God is by nature. In Arianism, Our Lord is a creature made perfect by grace, united to God by grace, and made to share God's life, energy, power, characteristics and attributes by grace only. That definition of Christ actually applies to us, to redeemed human beings who are united to Christ and 'made partakers of the divine nature' (II St Peter 1.4). So Arianism is the heresy that denies that Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Godhead and 'One of the Holy Trinity.' It is a direct assault on the revealed dogma of the Trinitarian nature and communion of God, Three Persons (hypostases) in One Essence (ousia), one and undivided. Each of the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity is distinguished from the others by the eternal relationship (relatio) of the One to the other Two, but They are never separated from each other and all Three are perfectly and totally God. The Three Persons of the Trinity are distinguished by Their relationships to the Father: the Father is unbegotten, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father alone and the Holy Ghost eternally proceeds from the Father alone, and is sent through the Son and rests in the Son. Arianism refuses to allow the Lord Jesus His proper identity and mission, in that it denies that the Word of God, the Logos, Who became Man in the Incarnation is, in truth, the Most High God. The Arian heretics believe in the incarnation of a pre-existent Logos who was merely a creature embraced by the Father as His Son in grace and power - but Who is not held to be God in His very nature or being.

2. Monogennes. This leads to the next point, which is that the New Testament describes Our Lord as monogennes in Greek, 'only-begotten.' This term designates the mysterious and eternal relationship of the Son to the Father within the communion of the Trinity. It does not mean that Our Lord was created by the Father, but rather, that the Son has for all eternity come out from the Father and derives His eternal existence, His generation, from the Father, the sole Origin, Source, Beginning, and Fountain of the Trinitarian life. The words of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed purposely utilise the language of the New Testament regarding the Person of Our Lord and declare that the Lord Jesus Christ is 'one Lord, the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by Whom all things were made...' All of this language, with the exception of the term homoousios, is either explicit or implicit in the theological expressions of the New Testament. A tour of the New Testament reveals immediately that Our Lord's Deity and His communion with His Father are expressed directly by Jesus Himself, Who uses the term 'only-begotten' of Himself. The inspired writers of the New Testament follow His lead...

Saint John 1.14,18: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

Saint John 3.16,18: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

I St John 4.9: In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.

1 St John 5.1: Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him.

The term genneo, 'begotten,' is also used in the New Testament, in the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Acts of the Apostles, as they apply Psalm 2 to the relationship of the Father to the Son...

Hebrews 1.5: For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son?

Hebrews 5.5: So also Christ glorified not himself to be made an high priest; but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son, to day have I begotten thee.

Acts 13.33: God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again; as it is also written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.

In short, the whole potential confusion lies with the definition, the meaning, of the term 'begotten.' The Arians indeed wanted to say that the term monogennes meant 'created' or 'made' - in manifest opposition to the mystical meaning of the word used in the New Testament. The Arians prove overwhelmingly the falsehood of the doctrine of sola Scriptura, the 'Bible alone.' They were really the first protestants, proto-protestants if you will, for they claimed they were only being faithful to the literal words and text of Scripture when they denied the Lord's Divinity. But they employed a twisted and perverse interpretation of the text and imposed their own false interpretation on the language of the Bible. They commited eisegesis, reading into the Bible doctrines they wanted to see there, rather than engaging in exegesis, which the reading out of Scripture what the text actually says and means. Holy Tradition must always interpret Scripture, for it fulfils and clarifies Scripture. The Arians show us the danger of an extra-ecclesiastical or non-Traditional hermeneutic of the Bible. The Constantinopolitan Creed forever and finally clarifies the meaning of the term monogennes: 'Begotten, not made.'

Begotten does not mean 'made' but means 'eternally coming out from the Father', eternal derivation from the Father's nature or essence. From all eternity the Son derives His eternal existence, being, glory and majesty from the Father. He is eternally born of the Father, co-equal, co-eternal. Hence, the Church formulated her precise and careful terminology concerning the Trinity to elucidate and explain the mystery as far as human language and concepts will allow. Begotten means 'from God forever,' eternal generation from the Father, not a created status.

Self-Examination and Confession

One should always endeavour, when one prepares to make a Sacramental Confession, to recollect carefully before coming to that Sacrament and to examine one's conscience very carefully so as not to exclude from a Confession any grave or serious sin. When we then come to Confession, we should freely confess all those sins of which we are aware, being careful not to exclude purposely or deliberately any sins of which we are conscious. If we approach the Sacrament of Penance with the intention of not confessing sins of which we are certainly aware, we then thwart the very purpose for which we go to Confession, and we thus only magnify the guilt of our sins by our refusal to place them at the Foot of the Cross and receive the Lord's abundant mercy and love. So we should always make a good self-examination and we should always confess those sins which trouble or burden our consciences. But if we have in previous Confessions made a good self-examination and have duly confessed those particular sins of which we are aware, we should be confident and fully assured that those sins are completely forgiven and have no need to be confessed again, unless in future we commit them again. A mortal sin is a sin in which we break a Commandment knowingly, fully aware that we are violating God's will, and in which we exercise full freedom, knowledge and consent when committing the said sin. If we do commit mortal sin, we should always confess it, as many times as needed in as many Confessions as we may require in order to overcome it.

The Sacrament provides a preventative and strengthening grace to avoid and resist future temptations and sins, and so we should have recourse to it every time we are conscious, especially, of a mortal sin, so that we may learn to avoid such sins in the 'school of sanctity' which is Confession. If we commit a serious sin after making a good Confession, we should then return to Penance at the appropriate time and confess the sin once more... and keep doing so as often as needed until the sin is overcome by grace and our cooperation with the power of God's wonderful provision.

But my earlier point is that, simply, if we have confessed a previous sin and it has been absolved, it is forgiven and lost in the ocean of God's forgetful mercy. We may certainly revisit such past sins and discuss them with the priest in the internal forum of the Sacrament of Penance if it is helpful and edifying to the penitent, but it is not necessary to 're-confess' past sins which have already been forgiven by sacramental Absolution. There is no need to dwell on past sins which have been absolved unless they continue to be an impediment to one's spiritual life and a spiritual advancement towards holiness. This area is where scrupulosity can become a particular danger: if we dwell too much on past sins which have been forgiven and absolved, we may fall into the trap of being unable truly to forgive ourselves or to accept God's forgiveness, which is always insured by sacramental grace. The best advice I can offer is to confess one's sins, release them to God, allow Him to heal and purify oneself by His grace, and then progress to the next Confession. Habitual and besetting sins can be a very serious problem in the spiritual life and a great hindrance in our spiritual progression, so it is important to continue to confess them afresh in the Sacrament, although it is not necessary to dwell too intensely on past sins lest they paralyse us or hold us in bondage. Once forgiven, we can move on to the next Confession and re-examine the root causes of the besetting sin anew with the perspective of what is happening in our lives as we proceed from Confession to Confession. The Lord calls us to look forward to how we shall use His grace to become holier and better from one Confession to the next, and not to preoccupy ourselves with our past transgressions of His love. While we heartily desire to deal with each and every sin as seriously as we can, we do not want to become stagnant or moribund in the spiritual life - the evil one can use the remembrance of past sins to hold us captive and enslave us to past memories, which can in turn hinder or stop altogether our progression towards God. It is said of Father Martin Luther, whose theology left much to be desired, that in satanic assault the devil reminded him of his past; Father Luther responded by reminding the devil of his future! We should do the same, and not allow past failures to hold us back from embracing the victorious love of Our Lord offers us in the present.

The Mixed Chalice

The water in the cruet at Mass is, as in the blessing of water in any liturgical service, blessed to signify the grace that God bestows through the chiefest of the Sacraments, Holy Baptism, but it is blessed in the context of the Mass specifically to signify the union of the human and divine natures in the One Person of God the Son: because the Mass mystically exhibits the wondrous mystery of the Lord's entire life, including His Incarnation, and because the wine and water actually become the Incarnate Lord under the form of bread and wine in the Blessed Sacrament, the priest blesses the water, cleansing and purifying it and making it ready for its union with the Blood of Christ. The best answer to the brilliant question you pose is found in the prayer the priest recites over the water as he blesses it: 'O God, who in great wonder and honour didst create human nature and in greater wonder and honour didst renew the same, grant by the mystery of this water and wine, we make partake of the Godhead of Him Who deigned to share our humanity, even thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.' In the Holy Eucharist we receive the total Person of Our Lord, God and Man, Body and Blood, under every particle of the Blessed Sacrament, and thus we signify in the blessing and commingling of the water and wine the Hypostatic Union, the perfect union of the divine nature of the Son of God with the human nature He assumed from the Blessed Virgin by the Holy Ghost. Fascinatingly, those ancient churches called Oriental Orthodox or Monophysite, which reject the doctrine of two natures in Our Lord, do not bless water and mix it with the wine in the preparation of the gifts at the celebration of the Mass. This is because they do not adhere to the dogmatic definition of the Council of Chalcedon, which upholds the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union. In Anglicanism, the 'mixed chalice' as it is commonly called was condemned by protestant opponents during the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century, for Anglo-Catholics restored this ancient practice of the undivided Church during the time of the Catholic Revival. The mixed chalice is one of the 'Six Points' of proper Eucharistic liturgical restoration and practice insisted upon by the English Church Union during the hottest controversial period of the Tractarian renewal. The other five are: incense, lighted candles, unleavened bread, Mass vestments and the Eastward position of the Altar - all six emphasise that the Mass is a true propitiatory Sacrifice in which the one Oblation of Christ once-offered is objectively made-present and pleaded to the Father in the consecrated Elements of the Eucharist.

And so there are profound Christological and sacramentological reasons for mixing the chalice of wine with blessed water at the offering of the Mass, more than perhaps most average Churchmen realise. The mixed chalice affirms the Real Sacrificial Presence of the God-Man in the Blessed Sacrament and establishes the truth of the Incarnation.

Confession and Scrupulosity

1. The grace of the Sacrament entails the forgiveness of all sins, known and unknown, voluntary and involuntary, sins of omission and commission, so that as long as you approach Our Lord with a penitent heart, with faith, love and repentance and a desire to be forgiven of all of your sins and to amend your life according to God's grace and power, determined not to sin again, you receive the absolute and comprehensive forgiveness of all sins. The Sacrament is given to us and the grace of Absolution cleanses us from all sin even if we approach the Sacrament with imperfect contrition, for man's contrition, no matter how perfectly sought or formed, can never match the severity of sin or the unconditional love and mercy of God. The Sacrament exists for the very reason that we cannot on own power and merit approach unto God: we come to the Mystery of Penance as sinners, spiritually weak and diseased, in need of God's wholesome remedy and healing power granted to us freely by the Sacrament. So we should never despair because of the horror or ignominy of our sinfulness, for God is more willing to forgive than we are to repent and amend. Because we can never come to Confession with absolutely perfect contrition, being sinners inundated with concupiscence, the inclination and attraction to evil, God supplies His grace in the Sacrament of Penance to strengthen our weakness, to heal our infirmity, to cleanse our guilty stain and taint, and to perfect that which is lacking or insufficient in our souls. Confession is sola gratia, grace alone, and the Sacrament is thus God's free gift of forgiveness through the Precious Blood of Christ; we can do nothing to earn or deserve the plenary Absolution, the liberation form sin and evil, that God wills to give us in this Mystery of His love. God's love is more powerful than our sin, and He manifests the power of that love in the Sacrament.

Please remember that the Sacrament is personal, it restores a personal relationship and communion between God and the penitent sinner, it is not judicial or juridical in that sense that God only matches us or corrects us according to the level of our own repentance or contrition for sin. If we come to the Sacrament with a true penitent heart and a lively faith, earnestly desiring forgiveness for all of our sins, remembered or forgotten, mortal or venial, we are forgiven, full stop. If our past confessions were somehow flawed or if we feel that we did not manifest enough genuine contrition, then subsequent confessions in and of themselves cover that concern, for the very desire, the very remembrance of such perceived failings, is the matter of the Sacrament to be forgiven, and is forgiven through repentance. It is our hearts that Our Lord sees in the penitence we offer, and if we offer our sorrow for sins, past or present, well-remembered or obscure, God's mercy and reconciling love forgives all. The Absolution in the Sacrament of Penance depends upon the power and promise of Christ to forgive sinners, not on the perfection of our own confession, for no sin-laden mortal can perfectly confess. We are only asked to confess to the best of our weak ability, for it God Who moves us to penitence in the first place. Grace prevenient and actual, going before us and leading us to Confession, grace giving us the consciousness of our sins, grace moving us to repentance and faith, grace empowering us to make a good confession, that is what we need, and precisely what God provides. We must ultimately abandon our sins, not only in the sense of not holding on to them in order to commit them again, but we must abandon them to God and allow Him to forgive us, for He has, and will yet forgive our sins and free us from the power of sin in our lives. Jesus is the beginning, the middle and the end of Penance. In the Sacrament of Penance Christ Himself, the Absolver, the Priest, the Intercessor, compensates for our weakness and our failings and our flawed and imperfect contrition and presents us to the Father in Himself, free from sins and given a new life, His Life. All we can bring of our own merit or substance to Confession is our sins - Christ's righteousness and holiness is His gift to us in Penance, Christ becomes our vindication, our sanctification, our justification, our righteousness, our absolution. Jesus Christ saves us by His freely-given and totally unmerited grace in the Sacraments, and so it is with Penance. Let us trust utterly in Him and not fear to relinquish ourselves into His hands. We must indeed 'let go and let God.' Christ will make up for where we lack in the Sacrament of Confession, as He always prevails for us in the whole sacramental life. Commend your sins to the Cross and rest in the Lord Jesus, Who died to make it possible for you to be liberated from these fears.

2. The Absolution itself, the sacramental gift, is not conditional in that once the sacramental grace is imparted by the priest in the Name and Person of Christ, the gift is given and is objective in its efficacy and effect. It is conditional in the sense that the person who receives the gift objectively must then subjectively cooperate with the grace, and use it to his salvation. We are saved by grace apart from works of the law, but then, being given this grace, we must 'work out our salvation with fear and trembling' for we are 'God's workmanship, made for good works' by grace. If restitution should be made for a serious sin, then it is the obligation of the penitent to see to it, as a matter of charity and justice, that the wrong, if it can be rectified, should be in an appropriate and Christian manner. It is not a matter of God withholding His forgiveness, it is a matter of the Christian soul truly responding to and cooperating with the grace has been so freely given. We are made holy and brought to communion with God by synergy, for God will not impel or force us to receive His grace or live lives pleasing to Him: He will, however, equip us with His grace to do what is right and to obey the commandments. 'If you love me, keep my commandments.' It is not a matter of saving ourselves, but of fulfilling and actualising the new life of God in us by allowing Our Lord to reproduce His life in us. God will not withhold His Absolution from an authentically penitent heart; the grace given sacramentally in Penance will enable and empower the penitent then to exercise the life for which the grace is given. The Sacrament is not conditional; once it is given, it is given as divine grace objectively communicated to the recipient. But how we use that grace and the extent to which we cooperate with it is up to us, aided as we are by divine grace all the while. Reconciliation and restitution lie with us as the fruit of that forgiveness which we have been given by God.

3. Finally, scrupulosity should be guarded against because it can itself become a sin or lead us into sin - it can evolve into the sin of despair, that is, the belief that God does not love us and cannot forgive our sins because we are so evil or so far beyond the pale that God could not possibly care for us or forgive us as other men. Despair is the unwillingness to allow God to forgive us because we place a barrier of disbelief and unreceptivity before God's merciful countenance. The sin of despair is really a form of spiritual narcissism, a self-absorption and self-obsession that sees one's own sins as more important or powerful than God. In turn, the sin of despair easily leads to the sin of presumption, a libertinism, which believes that, because God cannot and will not forgive our sins, we might as well sin and sin boldly, a self-permission to commit sins with the underlying assumption that one is already beyond the reach of God's forgiveness and mercy: that is a most serious state indeed. Mild scruples may sometimes, if only rarely, be helpful in the keeping us in check and motivating us to true repentance and amendment of life, but there must be a deliberate balance in the Christian life and an unhealthy preoccupation with one's sinfulness or evil can assuredly be destructive to a happy and peaceful conscience; it can cripple the soul, making it impossible freely to live the Christian life with that vital virtue and characteristic, joy! Scruples are not the same thing as a genuine contrition for sins because of our love for God, for scruples tend to dwell not on God but on self, and direct the soul to be anxious and to worry about itself and about a perfection achieved apart from God's grace. We are called to be penitent, not scrupulous. Scrupulosity tends to devolve into selfishness, a dysfunctional egotism focussed on self and one's own needs and imperfections rather than on God and His attributes, virtues and graces. The Catholic life is a wholesome life, a life of spiritual joy and peace, which are the fruits of the Holy Spirit. If scruples so disturb the conscience and paralyse the soul that they stifle the spiritual growth of the individual, they are clearly harmful and should be, again, abandoned to the mercy and providence of God.

Many heresies have arisen because of scrupulosity, most especially Calvinism, Jansenism, and every form of puritanism, which robs us of the joy and happiness of life, eschews the goodness of human life and creation, and smothers the true Christian spirit of wholeness and personal integration brought about by the Incarnation. There is an essential difference in the life of a Catholic between a healthy and graced illumination of conscience by the Holy Ghost regarding sin and a properly-formed conscience sensitive to moral evil on one hand and scrupulous self-loathing or self-deprecation on the other. We are called truly to repent of our sins by mourning for them and lamenting their wickedness in contrition, but we are equally called to have hearts overflowing with joy, rejoicing in the overwhelming love of God Who forgives us all our iniquities and is 'faithful and just to forgive us all our sins.' Contrition, after all, is about love, love for God and our detestation of that which comes between us and God's love as a result. Repentance should flow from love, and Absolution should be gratefully received by love. 'Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.' That is Our Lord's message to us about our struggle, our war against the world, the flesh and the devil. Let us rest confidently in the promise and victory of Christ. If you have a doubt about a thought, word or action, whether or not it is a sin, it is best simply to confess it and ask a priest about it in Confession. At that point, it should be released and not allowed to preoccupy or worry again.

Women's Ordination Neither Divisive Nor 'Theological' Says Anglican Essentials Canada

http://www.anglicanessentials.org/nr_022908_2.htm

'Correction of misinformation about women’s ordination

29 February 2008

Some recent media stories have implied that women’s ordination is somehow an issue in the current crisis in the Canadian Anglican church. It is not. While the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone currently does not practice women’s ordination, the North American churches which have sought and received refuge under the Primate of the Southern Cone are completely free to practice their consciences on this matter. Of the eight clerics currently licenced by Anglican Network in Canada moderator Bishop Donald Harvey under the jurisdiction of the Province of the Southern Cone, three are women, including the Rev Desiree Stedman (Ottawa) who holds the prestigious role of assistant to Bishop Harvey. The real issue is theological (! emphasis added): the profound differences on key Christian teachings and the irreconcilable views of the Bible. Even to say the issue is sexuality is a gross simplification. Sexual ethics is merely the tip of the iceberg, a reflection of much deeper theological constructs. Parishes that have chosen to take such a difficult and serious decision – to seek the protection and care of a bishop outside the Anglican Church of Canada – do so because the parishioners deeply value their Anglican heritage and want to stay true to global and historic Anglican teaching and orthodoxy. They want to faithfully preserve what has been entrusted to them by their Anglican forbearers, so they can pass it on, intact and unaltered, to future generations. These parishioners, while perhaps in the minority in Canada, stand firmly in the mainstream of global and historic Anglican teaching and orthodoxy. Their beliefs are shared by roughly two-thirds of the 77 million Anglicans worldwide. So, it could be said that rather than leaving, they are actually staying – staying true to the fundamental and historic tenets of Anglican Christianity and staying in full communion with the global Anglican Church. They have acted only after exhausting all possible alternative avenues.'

Editor's note: -Ugh.

Thoughts on Rome

...I am fascinated and encouraged by the irenicism and openness to Anglo-Catholics demonstrated by the Orlando RC Diocese. That a Roman priest would bend the knee to the Blessed Sacrament in an Anglican parish church or attend Benediction given with an Anglican monstrance manifests the actual position so many Romans sincerely hold regarding us. Church of England friends of mine have reported through the years that they have freely concelebrated Mass and received Holy Communion with Roman priests, even with the knowledge and consent of the local bishops. Many European and Latin American RCs, who are not English-speaking, have always been incredibly accepting and welcoming of Anglicans, and clearly do believe in the validity of Anglican Orders. Only Anglophonic RCs from the former British Empire seem still to harbour the angrier resentments and condemnations of the past. Father Tavard, the famous Assumptionist RC priest in England, writes in his excellent books on the subject that lay Roman Catholics intuitively know that Anglicans are Apostolic and possess Holy Orders and the Blessed Sacrament: he attributes the phenomenon to the consensus fidelium of the Church, the common sense of the People of God. The TAC-Rome dialogue will be most intriguing to follow and it will be interesting to see what the Vatican does. Cardinal Kasper does not want a traditional Anglican presence in communion with Rome, but the Pope seems very sympathetic to the idea. We shall see indeed...

Vatican Rules Modalist Baptism Formula Invalid

REPLY FROM DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH ON BAPTISMAL FORMULAE
VATICAN CITY, 29 FEB 2008

Made public today were the responses of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to two questions concerning the validity of Baptism conferred with certain non-standard formulae.
The first question is: "Is a Baptism valid if conferred with the words 'I baptise you in the name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and of the Sanctifier', or 'I baptise you in the name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer'"?

The second question is: "Must people baptised with those formulae be baptised in forma absoluta?"

The responses are: "To the first question, negative; to the second question, affirmative".

Benedict XVI, during his recent audience with Cardinal William Joseph Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, approved these responses, which were adopted at the ordinary session of the congregation, and ordered their publication. The text of the responses bears the signatures of Cardinal Levada and of Archbishop Angelo Amato S.D.B., secretary of the dicastery.

An attached note explains that the responses "concern the validity of Baptism conferred with two English-language formulae within the ambit of the Catholic Church. ... Clearly, the question does not concern English but the formula itself, which could also be expressed in another language".

"Baptism conferred in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit", the note continues, "obeys Jesus' command as it appears at the end of the Gospel of St. Matthew. ... The baptismal formula must be an adequate expression of Trinitarian faith, approximate formulae are unacceptable.

"Variations to the baptismal formula - using non-biblical designations of the Divine Persons - as considered in this reply, arise from so-called feminist theology", being an attempt "to avoid using the words Father and Son which are held to be chauvinistic, substituting them with other names. Such variants, however, undermine faith in the Trinity".

"The response of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith constitutes an authentic doctrinal declaration, which has wide-ranging canonical and pastoral effects. Indeed, the reply implicitly affirms that people who have been baptised, or who will in the future be baptised, with the formulae in question have, in reality, not been baptised. Hence, they must them be treated for all canonical and pastoral purposes with the same juridical criteria as people whom the Code of Canon Law places in the general category of 'non- baptised'".

'Life After Life After Death'

The Right Reverend N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, has recently begun a powerful and utterly captivating media campaign on behalf of his new book Surprised by Hope, in which he challenges conventional notions about death and the life after death for Christians: he teaches in fabulously lucid and comprehensible language the Anglican Catholic, and most especially, New Testament doctrine of the Intermediate State, Paradise, the Day of Judgement, the General Resurrection and the Life of the World to come - the New Creation of heaven and earth as one reality, the future world transfigured by divine grace. He especially challenges the common evangelical belief which holds Christians simply 'die and go to heaven.' The popular platonic and gnostic assertions that we cease to be physical and material in the World to Come and that we will not have physical bodies and lives in the Resurrection are marvellously toppled in favour of the biblical teaching of a future divinised, deified material creation, which will be in communion with God the Father, resplendent with the glory and power of the Holy Ghost and filled with the Resurrection Life of Jesus Christ. Bishop Wright, as he says, is concerned with 'life after life after death.' His traditional Anglican and Catholic catechesis on this subject has never been clearer or more needed. The following websites give an excellent overview of Bishop Wright's teaching, which is, in a word, brilliant!

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4351680: What Happens When You Die?

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1710844,00.html: Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop

http://www.anglicantv.org/blog/index.cfm/2008/2/23/Interview-with-Bishop-NT-Wright: Anglican TV interview with the Bishop

Why I Love the APA

In case I have not said this before!...

To put it in the most basic terms, I became an Anglican at the tender age of 12 because I was convinced, both spiritually and intellectually, that Anglicanism is not a sect or denomination, but simply the Catholic Church of the English-speaking world, the ancient Catholic Church of the British Isles, possessive of all the essential elements or constitutive characteristics of the Church founded by Jesus Christ. That inherent catholicity and apostolicity of Anglicanism makes her a living manifestation or portion of the One Church, for Anglicanism has no faith or order of her own, only the Catholic Faith and Creeds and Catholic Sacraments and Ministry of the Catholic Church of the ages, without addition or diminution. To this day I still hold that conviction with the greatest intensity and belief. Anglicanism is the Church qua Church. Such a position is not a theological value judgement of other churches or ecclesial communities, it is simply what I believe and know Anglicanism to be, a pure historical form of Catholicism, a jurisdiction continuous with the Church of the Apostles and Fathers. Anglicanism is Western Orthodoxy, the Western counterpart of the Eastern Churches, maintaining and preserving the ancient Christianity of the Western Rite. Anglicanism, real Traditional Book of Common Prayer Anglicanism, is not The True Church. But it is A True Church. I am an Anglican because I believe Anglicanism is not only 'mere Christianity' - it is, I profess, 'mere Catholicism' in its heart and soul. After all, we do not want simply 'mere' Christianity per se, but 'more' Christianity, the fullness of the Christian Faith.

It can truly be said that once one is an Anglican, one is always an Anglican, in the deepest recesses of one's being.

As to the Anglican Province of America: The APA offers a jurisdictional and administrative stability my previous jurisdiction did not possess when I left it. I have discovered the APA inculcates a culture of classical Anglicanism which I believe most closely resembles the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion in the days of their orthodoxy. The APA has consciously avoided the nagging temptation to recreate Anglicanism in its own image or with a new and different culture, but wilfully intends to continue what is most edifying, what is best, in the received Anglican tradition of historical reality and experience. Most people remark when encountering the APA in worship and practice that it feels like the Episcopal Church before the rot of heresy set in. I believe that is absolutely true. The Affirmation of Saint Louis (1977) states succinctly: 'In this gathering witness of Anglicans and Episcopalians, we continue to be what we are. We do nothing new. We form no new body, but continue as Anglicans and Episcopalians.' The APA, in my personal experience, most closely abides by this mandate. The APA is not a form of 'neo-Anglicanism.' It simply is Anglicanism as that wonderful ecclesiastical and religious phenomenon has been handed down to us. We continue the mission of the Church Catholic as we have received it. For that reason I do believe the future is very bright indeed for the APA, as we are without a doubt one of the fastest-growing and most stable Continuing Churches in the USA: we are currently 75 parishes and 132 clergy across the country. The Lord has blessed and continues to bless us as we focus on being orthodox Prayer Book Catholics in the Anglican Tradition.

Barthian Neo-Protestantism

Here are some fissiparous and unorganised thoughts on Barth...

Karl Barth is a twentieth-century manifestation and embodiment of puritanism, of a biblicist protestantism that adheres to sola scriptura and sola fide. As such he denies any role to the authentic expression or interpretation of Scriptural doctrine as conveyed by and enshrined in Church Tradition. His focus is on the renewal of the magisterial protestant confessional religion of the sixteenth century and so his version of 'neo-orthodoxy' is better described as neo-protestant orthodoxy in the mould of Luther, Calvin and the sixteenth century reformers. During seminary I took a marvellous course on the work and writings of Archbishop William Temple of Canterbury, one of the greatest modern orthodox theologians in the Church of England. When the subject of Karl Barth arose, we discovered very quickly that the Anglican approach to Holy Scripture and the necessity and authority of Holy Tradition was at antithetical odds with the strictly 'sola scripturist' approach of Barth, whose Church Dogmatics are a carefully designed and nuanced re-presentation of the systematic theology of the Calvinist reformation. For Barth, the Bible alone is the standard of dogmatic truth and Christian practice, in opposition to the belief that the Church needs the consensus fidelium and consensus patricum of the earliest centuries.

Barth states that Scripture must be read and applied fresh in every generation on the basis of its direct content, to the exclusion of any applicative or hermeneutical role of Tradition as the transmission of the Gospel in the context of the living and worshipping communion of the Church.

In this respect, Barth is radically anti-Catholic, or at least anti-ecclesial, in his assertion of an absence of any collective and consentient Church authority in the transmission of the Scriptural kerygma. For Anglicans, of course, it is 'the Church to teach, the Bible to prove.' The Bible is the Church's Book, which is only rightly and authoritatively interpreted through the lens of the Church's ongoing life, witness and worship. Scriptura omnia continet, Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, prima scriptura, Scripture is the uniquely-inspired and primary, most important, source of doctrine and practice for the Church's life - but the Holy Catholic Church and the Anglican formularies do not teach sola Scriptura, that is, that the Bible alone, apart from the canon of ecclesiastical tradition inherited from the Creeds, Councils and Fathers, establishes the regula fidei, the Rule of Faith, the salvific doctrinal deposit of Christian belief. Bible and Church are inseparable, for the Bible was written by the Church, in the Church, and for the Church. Barth maintains that even Scripture itself cannot be strictly equated with revelation, the Word of God, and so Tradition is regarded in an even dimmer light as a divinising of human thought and human modes of speech and language.

He holds that the Church confuses God with the Bible and the Church! In his understandable and praiseworthy effort to demolish liberalism, a quasi-Christian form of secular humanism, he undermines the genuine article by attacking Christian and world history and professes that no human form or creation however noble can infallibly convey revelation or signify God's Word - the baby goes out with the bathwater. Humanity, all human form, transmogrifies into ideology, merely human principles. Barth accused Catholic Tradition of making itself into a divine revelation, although he asserts it is merely a human construct. Tradition, for Barth, is merely human philosophy, a concept anathema to him, for he sees philosophy as man's attempt to make his own word God's Word. Barth holds that Tradition impedes and confuses the revelation God intends to give through Scripture, for Tradition can only be a human and fallible enterprise. The most severe critique one can offer, I think, concerning Barth is that his systematic theology seems to deny any real Incarnation of God the Word as Man, for Barth seems to say that no human realities can be associated with God to such an extent that God actually and unfailingly mediates Himself and communicates His Life and Word through that which is human. God will not limit Himself to the human, and yet that is precisely the point of the Incarnation, the willing kenosis and self-abasement and self-limitation of God to the human sphere. Or, at least, I should think such an anti-Incarnational stance seems to be the logical consequence of his view of Scripture and Tradition, which strikingly divorces God from the process of human history and society. A God who does not communicate His Word infallibly in Scripture and indefectibly in the Church and her Tradition cannot ultimately be a God who assumed human nature in the Incarnation. I would actually dare to state that Barth, being a neo-Calvinist, brings Calvinism to its proper conclusion, which is nothing short of gnosticism, that God eschews human life and the material world and remains purposely apart from His own creation, and thus the only access to God is through intellectual noetic gnosis and the spirit, not the world of matter redeemed, transfigured and sacramentalised by the Incarnation and Atonement.

Anglo-Catholicism and Barthian neo-orthodoxy agree to some degree on the inspiration and authority of the Holy Scriptures, and both serve to be strong and principled reactions against theological liberalism-modernism, but from those points forward the two movements part company in most profound ways and could not be more different. Barthian neo-orthodoxy is really a form of sixteenth-century reformation-based discarnate biblicism. Barth produces yet another instance of confessional protestantism's exchange of one form of tradition for another: Apostolic Tradition, the Traditio Ecclesiae handed down by Christ through the Apostles and their Successors in the episcopate, is displaced for a radical synthetic hermeneutic loosely based on the Calvinist confessions in which even Scripture itself is not held to be identical with the revelation of the Word of God, although the revelation is given through Scripture as a condescension of God's love and mercy. Barth's approach to Scripture is the classical protestant model, and thus is, frankly, Quranic, the Bible alone, but he then empties the Scriptures of their inerrancy by being unwilling to state that Our Lord is actually present in and uniquely linked to the Scriptures. Thus, Anglicans, with their sacramental view of creation, the Church and the Bible, have a higher view of Scripture than Barth himself.

I may have completely and utterly erred in my reading of Barth, but this is what I remember of my reading of him from my seminary days...

The Validity of Holy Baptism

Thank you so very much for your excellent letter about your Baptism. Please rest assured that you have no need to doubt the validity of your Baptism in Jesus Christ, for all that is necessary for a valid Baptism is the administration of the sacrament with the proper matter and form, water that flows on the head with the simultaneous recitation of the sacramental form, the Name of the Blessed Trinity. Water and the Name of the Trinity are all that are necessary for valid Baptism, regardless of the interior intention of the celebrant, so long as the ecclesiastical community in which the baptism is given affirms the dogma of the Holy Trinity. Although non-Trinitarian baptisms could theoretically be valid, as was the case with Arian baptism, today the Church declines to recognise the validity of baptisms conferred by unitarian or polytheistic sects, such a Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons.

In 1949 the Roman Catholic Holy Office in an official notice recognised the validity of almost all Trinitarian Christian baptism, including that of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and, of course, Episcopalians. There is only 'one baptism for the remission of sins,' which is the Church's one baptism, and so long as the matter and form of the sacrament as instituted by Our Lord and possessed by the Catholic Church are used, the sacrament is always, always valid ex opere operato - the sacrament is valid because of the covenantal power and promise of Christ, Who alone is the true Priest Celebrant and Administrator of all the sacraments, including Baptism. All the baptised, regardless of what sect or ecclesial body to which they belong, are in fact baptised into the Holy Catholic Church and incorporated into Christ by virtue of the One Baptism of the One Lord and One Faith (Ephesians 4).

Even the Eastern Orthodox recognise, under normal circumstances, the validity of all Trinitarian Christian baptism. You see, the interior intention of the celebrant does not effect or convey the efficacy or validity of Holy Baptism; rather it is the very matter and form given directly by Our Lord Himself. Even Jews, pagans and atheists can validly baptise in an emergency; they can administer clinical baptism or baptism in extremis, so long as they merely intend to perform the rite of Baptism as Christians understand it, in other words, to 'do what the Church does' in a general sense. Baptism is the universal sacrament of salvation, and so Our Lord has made it to be the easiest sacrament to administer, as it is the most necessary. Thus it is virtually impossible to invalidate a Christian baptism, if one uses the matter, water, and form, Trinitarian formula, given by Christ. Only those heretics who actually change the Trinitarian formula to something other than that instituted by the Saviour in Saint Matthew 28 can really invalidate a baptism - for example, if one were to change the form to 'Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier,' as many wrong-headed Episcopalians and even Roman Catholics have done in recent years, such a modalist formula would render a purported baptism invalid. Even the use of the form 'in the Name of Jesus Christ' is of doubtful validity, and such a baptism would have to be re-administered sub conditione, conditionally. But the normal administration of Baptism in any Christian communion, with water and the invocation of the Thrice Holy Name, is always and everywhere valid.

To quote from an earlier post on the sacraments:

Holy Baptism depends for its sacramental validity upon those same five components which are necessary for any valid sacrament: proper minister, matter, form, subject, and intention. The necessary intention for a valid baptism is, simply, 'generally to do what the Church does.' This is not to intend what the Church intends, but to do what the Church does, i.e., simply baptise. This general intention suffices, even if the minister and the subject hold to an heretical doctrine of the sacrament being conferred. So long as one intends seriously to perform the rite of baptism that is, seriously to perform the Christian rite however understood, the intention is valid for the administration of the sacrament. So long as one merely intends to do what Our Lord Jesus Christ or the true Church do in baptism (even in opposition to the Catholic Church's doctrine), such an baptism is valid, even if heretical views are maintained on baptism itself. Heretical views on the sacrament of order do not invalidate baptism (see below the decision of the Roman Holy Office on Oceanic Methodist Baptisms 1872). This position is precisely the position Saint Augustine of Hippo took against the Donatist schism, and it has been the general and authoritative teaching of the Western Church since the fourth century. Saint Thomas Aquinas echoes this teaching in the Summa Theologica, Supplement, Question 38, Second Article. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine defends this very point in his On the Sacraments In Gen. I.21. Those who dissent from the Catholic Church can validly baptise, even if they hold doctrines on the very sacraments themselves at odds with the Church, as long as the Church's basic rule on baptism is preserved.

Sacramental intention, for Anglicans at least, is usually understood as external or exterior intention, which is manifested ritually, in the liturgical rite used for the administration of the sacrament. Internal intention or personal intention are not usually brought into the discussion because it is impossible to determine in any given case what the personal or interior intention of the minister of a sacrament is. If the sacraments depend on the personal orthodoxy or right belief or interior disposition of the minister, no sacrament could ever be held to have a moral certainty of validity, as one could never determine such a needful state in the mind or heart of the bishop or priest in question. Sacraments are by nature ecclesial, ecclesiastical, and this is particularly the case with baptism, which makes us members of the Church. Sacraments belong to the Holy Catholic Church, and as such to a particular local Church specifically. What matters is the Church's intention. The necessary intention of the Church, and of the minister who functions publicly as the agent, officer and representative of the Church, is put forward in the Church's official rite, the matter and form, used for the conferral of the sacrament.

The Roman See's Response to the dubia concerning the Methodist Baptisms in Oceania (1872):

All theologians agree that concomitant error (or heresy) in the mind of the minister does not necessarily vitiate sacramental validity: nor does even openly professed lack of Catholic intention, provided that there be present the minimum intention of doing what Christ or the true Church does. Many decisions of the Holy See have confirmed this principle, perhaps the most often quoted in this context being the ruling of the Holy Office in 1872 about the validity of Methodist baptisms in Central Oceania. Two dubia had been proposed:

1. Whether baptism administered by those heretics [Methodists] is doubtful on account of defect of intention to do what Christ willed, if an express declaration was made by the minister before he baptised that baptism had no effect on the soul?

2. Whether baptism so conferred is doubtful if the aforesaid declaration was not expressly made immediately before the conferring of baptism, but had often been asserted by the minister, and the same doctrine was openly preached in that sect?

To these the Sacred Congregation replied:

Reply to the first question: in the negative, because despite the error about the effects of baptism, the intention of doing what the Church does is not excluded. The second question: provided for in the answer to the first.

The implications for the validity of Anglican Orders are clear as well...