What is the Anglican Communion?

In 1930, the Lambeth Conference, a meeting every ten years of the bishops of the Anglican Communion, presented the following definition:
 

The "One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church" was founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ in His life and in His Passion on the Cross to provide all men with such a purpose throughout the ages of history. One of the living branches of this universal Church is the worldwide Anglican Communion now embracing many millions of communicants of many races and nations. This worldwide Communion is represented in our country by the Episcopal Church. This Church is not a provincial sect founded in modern times, but an integral part of the Anglican Communion, to whose official position as a branch of the "one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church" (Nicene Creed) it is irrevocably committed by the American Prayer Book.¹

To you, Our Mother, Ecclesia Anglicana, through the Episcopal Church of this country, offers not some part or some special version of the faith, but the complete and authentic "Catholic and Apostolic faith" of your fathers, preserved at the cost of age-long effort and sacrifice against the attacks of heresy and sectarianism.

The word Catholic means whole or complete. The Catholic faith, therefore, means the Christian faith understood not in any part alone, however important this part may be, but according to its integral wholeness, with nothing of vital importance excluded or omitted. Since the Christian religion is a many-sided instrument given by God as the means of saving man from the manifold evils he has brought upon himself by sin, Christianity will be essentially complete or "Catholic": (1) by including all the instruments which God has ordained as the regular means of human salvation; (2) by offering these universal instruments of salvation to all men; and (3) by offering them to all men throughout all the generations. This Church is "Catholic" in all three senses.

(1) This Church was given all the sacramental instruments of healing human life from sin. In His infinite wisdom and power, God has offered special means of salvation to special individuals and groups, living under special conditions, at special periods of history. Thus the thief on the Cross was granted a very special opportunity for the exercise of faith in recognizing the divinity of Our Lord during the desperate moments of the Crucifixion. The Christian martyrs during the bloody Roman persecutions, as well as many contemporary martyrs of the Nazi tyranny, have been granted special opportunities not open to all, for the exercise of Christian heroism. They have also been granted special forms of grace, enabling them to meet these situations with exceptional strength and virtue. But in addition to these unforeseeable and extraordinary channels of grace, God has granted certain general means of salvation which are accessible to all men, whatever their time and circumstances. These divinely given instruments, by which the human understanding is illumined and the human will strengthened for the performance of those works of sacrifice and redemption that common men must perform in every walk of life, if man is to be restored and saved, are called sacraments. In their "Catholic" entirety they consist of the two great sacraments, Baptism and Holy Communion, and the five sacramental rites: Confirmation, Penance, Holy Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Unction. The Anglican Communion is a branch of the "Catholic" Church. Hence every one of these seven divinely ordained instruments for the regeneration of the common life of man is available in this Church.

(2) This Church offers the sacraments to all men. These sacraments are capable of healing every man and every woman whatever his or her race, nation, state, or condition. They are intended not for this nation or this race or this trouble alone, but for all races and all nations and all troubles. This is the second sense in which the Anglican Communion is all-embracing or "Catholic." This Church appeals not to any particular race, or nation, or caste, or class, in any particular difficulty. The healing sacraments committed to its charge have been given by God for the healing of man. In order to perform this missionary function, the Church of the first centuries carefully set down a written or scriptural record of the Incarnation, the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the events immediately following the central facts of human history. Through centuries of desolation and barbarism the Church has preserved and devoted herself to these scriptural records for two purposes.

First of all, they are the means by which the Good News of the Gospel is manifested to all people who possess the rudiments of culture. The Bible today is thus the herald of Christianity which prepares the hearts and minds of men for that full participation in the redemptive work of the Incarnation which they can achieve only as actual members of the Church.

In the second place, they are the lasting rule of faith. They spread the news to successive generations. These records were produced by the Church herself under the guidance of the Holy Spirit by which she is animated. Hence, they do actually describe the Incarnation, the central event of human history, together with the events leading up to it, and the events succeeding it, the most essential facts of Christian history. In this way they constitute the regula fidei, the rule of faith, the central core of Christian teaching, no vital feature of which can ever be safely neglected or ignored. When carefully guarded and assimilated under the guidance of the Holy Spirit they preserve unity of doctrine through the flux of time.

The Bible did not produce the Church. The Church produced the Bible. Hence it is the Church's duty to extend and to develop the teaching of the Bible, ever bringing it to fruit in the changing circumstances of each new day. But every new addition to or application of the Church's teaching must be tested and brought into genuine accordance with the rule of faith, the Bible, which if properly understood, expresses the essential kernel of Christianity and, in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest western Catholic theologian, "manifestly and literally conveys what is necessary to the Faith." (Summa Theologica, Part I, qu. I, Art. 10, ad I).

If you have attended Morning or Evening Prayer in an Episcopal Church, you have heard Biblical Psalms recited or chanted. If you have attended Holy Communion, you have heard parts of the New Testament read, and the Nicene Creed, in which the essential Biblical teaching was succinctly formulated by the Church of the fourth century, recited by the whole congregation in accordance with "Catholic" practice. The Anglican Communion is a branch of the "Catholic and Apostolic Church." Therefore the Bible is the rule of her faith. Her prayers and ritual, the whole language of her worship, is the language of the Bible, translated into the living language of our country. This Church makes use of all the universal means of healing which God has granted. This is the first sense in which she is complete or "Catholic." In accordance with the will of God, she makes these healing medicines available at the present time, not to any restricted caste or class, or group, or nation, or race, but to all men, whoever, wherever, whatever they may be. This is the second sense in which this Church is "Catholic." There is also a third sense.

(3) This Church offers the sacraments to all generations. This Church was not founded by men alone. She has not been maintained by men alone, even well-meaning men who have read the Bible. She was founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ during His incarnate human life on earth, established by the gift of the Holy Spirit at the first Pentecost, and continued by this same Spirit without interruption down to the present day, as He has promised that it will continue until the end of time. Thus the members of this Church are not only those of every class, caste, nation or race of today; they include the prophets who prepared the way for the coming of Our Lord, the Apostles who aided him in His work, the Saints who continued it, and all the humble Christians of every succeeding generation who have freely given themselves to Him, availed themselves of His healing Grace, and thereby continued and extended His redemptive influence in their thought, their labor, and their life among their friends. The Episcopal Church is a living continuation of the original "Catholic and Apostolic Church."

This claim is no mere verbal phrase or figment of the imagination. It is a sacred fact. The Priest of this Church was ordained by a Bishop. The Bishop of this Church was ordained by a Bishop [who was also consecrated] to perpetuate the Sacramental ministry which stretches back without a break to the original apostles, who were commissioned by Our Lord Himself. The fallen human will alone and unaided cannot be trusted to carry on the work of God. What God has begun, God must constantly be present to finish. Hence this is no human copy or cunning imitation of a divine original. This is the divine, original Church itself, which, by the Grace of God, has survived centuries of barbarian opposition, pagan hatred, and shrewd secular attempts to humanize and dilute her teaching. She still stands before you in your own city, offering you the opportunity of freely allying yourself with the divine plan for human redemption, and of giving yourself as an instrument for extending it into your life and work and the life and work of your community.

If you have attended an Episcopal service, however, you realize that it has been conducted in the English language. No doubt you have also heard of the Reformation, and are aware that about 400 years ago the Church in England was separated from the Roman Church which now claims to be the whole Catholic Church. These facts will certainly tend to raise questions in your mind. Surely, you may say, the Church, widely known in this country as the Episcopal Church, cannot be the whole Catholic Church. Clearly it is descended from the English Church, which, during recent centuries, has pursued its own course with other Protestant sects which protested against Roman abuses in the 16th and 17th centuries. Is this not a reformed or "Protestant" Church? Is it not true that in America the word "Catholic" is commonly applied, in accordance with Papal claims and wishes, to the Roman Catholic Church? These questions demand an answer, and this answer demands at least a brief glance at the tragic, tangled skein of modern history.

The "Catholic" Church is one trunk with several branches. She remains essentially one, for she acknowledges one Lord, and is animated by one divine spirit, binding different men into one great social body or instrument to heal the diseases of society, and to redeem men from pride, hatred, avarice, and those other iniquities from which men cannot save themselves by their own strength alone. But the Church is also an actual body of living men, working through their actual thoughts and aspirations. And living men are not actually one. They are divided into different groups and nations, with very different languages and traditions. Hence to become an actual leaven in the sinful life of living men, the one "Catholic" Church has had to put forth various branches to bring the healing sacraments to different divided groups.

Thus from the earliest centuries the Church of the East, now known as the Orthodox Church, was distinguished in language, liturgic tradition, and other minor respects, from the Church of the West. In the eleventh century these differences led to a cleavage in which the two branches of the Church divided, though without either one abandoning any essential element of the universal faith. In the 14th and 15th centuries, western culture suffered a grievous decline, and ghastly abuses and corruptions spread into the Western Church. In the 16th and 17th centuries, these abuses brought forth a great movement of revulsion now called the Reformation. One phase of this movement remained within the Catholic Church, and achieved a genuine purification of certain abuses such as the promiscuous sale of indulgences now admitted even by Rome to have been abuses.

A passionate sense of revulsion is often unable to distinguish between abuses and that which is abused. Thus on the continent of Europe, where feeling ran particularly high, the furious zeal of the reformers made them innovators and destroyers, who rejected not only genuine abuses, but essential articles and sacraments of the faith. They separated themselves from the Catholic Church and founded new sects of their own. Christians at the present time hope and pray that these separated brethren will be received into the Church once more, and that all the branches of the Holy Catholic Church will be restored to complete sacramental, doctrinal, and ecclesiastical union. If such union is to be achieved, the churches of the Anglican Communion must play a most crucial role.

The Reformation in England look a unique course. Long before this in the Middle Ages, the Church of England had allied herself with the long and arduous struggle of the freedom-loving English people against alien tyranny. Hence the Church had insisted upon her right to be free from political constraint imposed by reactionary external powers, and had often defended this right against unreasonable and arbitrary Papal decisions and decrees. A memorable manifestation of this truly Catholic alliance of Church and people is the famous statement of Magna Charta that Ecclesia Anglicana libera sit, that the Church of England be free from the alien influence of autocratic political authority. In accordance with this alliance, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1207-1228, refused to publish Pope Innocent III's excommunication of the barons who signed the Magna Charta. After many struggles with reactionary Papal authority, in the course of which she freed herself from many medieval abuses, the Church of England finally joined the Greek Orthodox Church of the East in refusing to recognize the political sovereignty of the Pope. But she did not abandon any essential part of the "Catholic and Apostolic faith." The Bible and the great Creeds remained the rule of her faith as in the undivided early Church, which had maintained her unity during the difficult first five centuries of our era, without any "infallible" Pope. Finally, thanks be to God, throughout the bloody period of strife, sacramental continuity with the Apostolic Church and the Catholic Church of the ages was never lost.

This branch of the Church has now spread to America and to all other parts of the world. In 1888 at the third Lambeth Conference of Bishops, representing every part of the Anglican Communion, including the American Episcopal Church, its Faith was defined as resting on a four-point basis (the Lambeth Quadrilateral); the Sacraments, the Bible, the great Catholic Creeds, and the Episcopate. These four have always been essential to the Catholic Church. The worldwide Anglican Communion, now including some forty million communicants, does not claim to be the whole Catholic Church. It does, however, claim to be an integral part of this Universal Church, entrusted with the peculiar function of offering the Faith to all the freedom-loving peoples of the world, whose age-long struggle for liberty and democracy it has fostered, supported, and shared, as thoroughly consonant with "Catholic" Christianity.

But there are certain definite historic misunderstandings which require clarification. You may remember, for example, that the "infallible" head of the Roman Catholic Church did finally officially excommunicate the English Church. In 1896 Pope Leo XIII even went so far as to declare that Anglican priests are not really priests, and that the Anglican Church is not really a Church at all. Since the Pope claims to speak as the "infallible" head of the whole Catholic Church, how then can the Anglican Communion, now clearly rejected by Rome, claim to be a genuine branch of the Catholic Church? But can the Pope speak as the "infallible" head of the whole Catholic Church? This premise of the argument is certainly open to discussion.

The doctrine of Papal infallibility is subject to certain criticisms even from a Roman Catholic point of view. In the first place, this doctrine was not strictly defined and declared officially as a Roman Catholic dogma until the Vatican Council of 1870. Prior to 1870, no question of Papal infallibility arose in the modern defined sense. In the second place, the undivided Church has never agreed as a whole that Papal declarations constitute the supreme authority of the Church in matters of Faith and Order. If the views of the early Fathers of the first five centuries and those of the Eastern Catholic Church are taken into consideration, one may suppose that the supreme authority lies not with any one office, or group of offices, but rather with the whole body of the Church itself.

The whole Church is the ultimate authority. According to this view, no doctrine can be considered an essential dogma of the faith until it has been winnowed and sifted by a process of assimilation involving every genuine member of the Church, and finally accepted by a universal Council in which every genuine member of the Church is represented by officials with delegated authority. This democratic conception of the early Catholic Church, according to which the priestly hierarchy serves and represents the whole body of the Church in carrying on the great redemptive enterprise in which every humblest member actively shares (instead of dictating its own predetermined decisions to inert subordinates), was clearly stated by St. Cyprian in his great treatise on the Unity of the Catholic Church in the third century (De ecelesiae catholicae unitate), and suggested by St. Augustine in the fifth (De Doctrina Christiana, Book II, chapter 12).

This concept still lives in the Greek Orthodox Churches and in the Anglican Church of the West. The Roman Catholic doctrine of Papal infallibility has never received the sanction of undivided Catholic authority. Hence a Church cannot be legitimately excluded from the Catholic fold simply because it is not in communion with Rome. All branches of the Church must share the blame for the present tragic divisions of Christianity, divisions arising from the decay of the late middle ages and the barbaric secularism of modern times. Any branch of the Church which has survived the terrible storms and stresses of the past and present retaining all the sacraments, holding the Biblical faith unmarred by heresy, and maintaining sacramental continuity with the Apostolic Church must be regarded as a genuine branch of the Catholic Church. The Anglican Communion meets this test.

How about the American Protestant Episcopal Church? Here you may have a further objection. In this country a Church is either Catholic or Protestant; and this Church, as the very name implies, is a Protestant, and therefore, not a Catholic Church. As a matter of fact, the title Protestant Episcopal was chosen at the time of the Revolutionary War by a group of churchmen in Maryland, a colony with a strong Roman Catholic tradition, when, as a result of American independence, the title "Church of England" became obviously inappropriate. Some name was needed which would distinguish the Church both from Roman Catholicism and from Protestant puritanism. The Protestant Episcopal Church has protested vigorously against the reactionary policies and exclusive claims of the Church of Rome since the beginning of the seventeenth century, without ever falling into formal heresy or taking any step that would in the least jeopardize its claims to catholicity. Hence the title Non-Roman Episcopal, or Protesting Catholic. The original authors would have been amazed at the suggestion that this title implied any challenge to the "Catholic" character of the Church. This leads to a further question.

What is the Peculiar Doctrine or "Genius" of the Anglican Communion? The reader cannot help being aware of the modern Babel of conflicting sects and denominations, each with some distinctive teaching in virtue of which it claims a certain Christian priority over the rest. Hence a further question must rise to his mind. What is the distinctive teaching of this Communion? What in particular does it reject? What in particular does it accept? The Roman Catholics have rejected the ancient Catholic view of the whole body of the Church as the supreme earthly authority in Faith, Morals, and Discipline, and have substituted their own doctrine of Papal infallibility, a doctrine which has produced a distinctive discipline and uniformity, characteristic of the Roman communion. The Protestant fundamentalists, on the other hand, have rejected the ancient Catholic view that the Church produced as her rule of faith, the Bible, which requires interpretation by the Church as a whole in the light of her whole experience and with the aid of the Holy Spirit. They have substituted their own doctrine that the Church has been produced by the written words of the Bible, which carry an "obvious" or "literal' meaning in themselves, and require no interpretation. The Unitarians and humanists have rejected the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity and have substituted an entirely new Creed of their own.

What, then, it will be asked in the first place, is the peculiar theological teaching of this Church? Secondly, what of those "Protestant" groups "within the Church" which dissent from the "Catholic point of view"? In the third place, what of those who believe in "spiritual" religion and wish the Church to keep out of all mundane and political matters? Finally, what of the Roman gibe that this Church lacks all clear-cut Catholic authority, and is, therefore, only a chaos of conflicting parties?

These questions deserve a special answer.
 
 

As to the first question, this Church has no peculiar theological doctrine of its own. It rejects nothing except sectarian rejections. It questions nothing except recent innovations introduced by Rome and by Protestant sects, which have never been accepted and approved by the whole body of the Church, East and West. It accepts officially the "Catholic and Apostolic faith" in its essential entirety with no additions or subtractions.

As to the second question concerning "Protestants" within this Communion, the position of the Church is not necessarily the same as that of dissident groups and parties within the Church. At every period of history, the Church has been attacked not only by manifest anti-Christian forces fearful of its redemptive power, but also by less manifest worldly forces formally within the Church. These forces try to dilute its teaching and deaden the forces of its impact upon prevailing corruptions by leading it toward heresy. Thus in the fourth century the early Church was almost conquered by the heresy of Arianism, which attracted a majority of those calling themselves Christians, and was only just saved from giving way by the courage and zeal of Athanasius and his small party of devoted Catholics.

In a similar way, in our own times, the Church has not only been openly attacked by successive movements of materialism, scepticism, and romantic nationalism, which frankly put man in the place of God; she has also been attacked in more subtle ways internally by professing Christians who have tried to achieve the very same end within the Church by diluting the faith, interpreting the sacraments "inspirationally" or subjectively, and turning the whole Church into an instrument not so much for subordinating man to God, as a great antiquarian magical mechanism for subordinating God to the use of man. No Christian sect or branch of the Catholic Church has completely escaped this disease.

But the worldwide Anglican Communion is more than any particular group or party of its members, however numerous they may be. So far, all attempts of such groups to turn the Anglican Communion into a distinctive sect with a distinctive teaching or theological genius of its own have been overruled. Throughout the 400 years of its separation from Rome it has officially clung to its position as a branch of the "One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church", in spite of secular pressure and even persecution from within and from without. It is safe to predict that she will never be maneuvered out of this position. It would be difficult, for instance, to conceive of stronger ecclesiastical forces in the future than those which so bitterly opposed the great Oxford Movement of Catholic revival during the last century.

As to the third question, The Church is not a "spiritual" opiate for the people. The aim of the Church is to redeem every phase of human life, individual and social, from the disorder of sin. Secular tendencies have so removed the influence of religion from social, economic, and political life, that it has become increasingly difficult for Christians to practice the doctrine they profess. Hence the parishes have been filled with an ever mounting number of "Sunday Christians," who reserve their religion for one day in the week and are eager to find excuses for regarding Christianity as a soothing or restful opiate rather than a challenge to complete devotion. This must be admitted. The Church itself is in no small degree responsible for the appalling misunderstandings concerning Christianity which prevail among the masses, misunderstandings which have been allowed to penetrate widely even among her own members, by her failure to condemn with sufficient vigor and clarity the secular trends of modern life and the increasing injustice and social disorder they have brought in their train.

But in spite of the many failures of the modern Church, weakened by centuries of aggressive secularist attack, one must still ask where else we may look for sounder guidance in the great task which lies before us of rebuilding a just social order after the war. We are likely to think of Christianity as something integrally achieved in the Middle Ages and then abandoned because of modern "progress." But this is a complete delusion. Christianity has never been integrally achieved. The medieval Church gained control of medieval education, and the influence of Christianity penetrated deeply into the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic life of the thirteenth century, giving a certain Christian tinge to the culture of that time. But it never penetrated into the feudal structure of medieval economic and social life. Even St. Thomas defended the radically unchristian institution of human slavery. It took five more centuries of critical reflection to clarify Christian thought on this question, and six centuries of technical progress to make the proposal to abolish slavery into something more than a utopian dream.

Modern science has added very little to our basic understanding of human life and its end. It has however, put into our hands the technical control over nature which, if rightly used, might free our culture permanently from the stigma of slavery, and thus might enable us for the first time in history to mould something like an integral Christian social order. In such an order, which has never been seen on the face of the earth, the fruits of labor might be utilized for the common good, and every man might at last be granted his God-given and hence inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Such, at least, is the vast horizon that stretches before free Catholics of the present day. There are many events, such as the Malvern Declaration of the Church of England, and the Pastoral Letters of the House of Bishops of the American Episcopal Church, which point to the fact that the Church is at last preparing to offer real aid and guidance in the task of building a more just, and, therefore, more Christian social order after the war.

As to the fourth and final question, the whole Church of the ages is the only infallible authority. As to the charge that the Anglican Communion possesses no unrestricted, irrevocable, individual, oracular judge of Faith and Order, if it is a charge, this must be admitted. The Anglican doubts whether any such authority has ever really existed particularly since the division of the Eastern Church from the Western in the eleventh century. In the present abnormal state of the Church, there is no one office or single representative body that can speak out infallibly on matters left undecided by the undivided Church of the first five centuries. Nevertheless, this is far from admitting that all authority has been abrogated. The Anglican Communion is committed to the ancient Catholic view of authority as residing only in the whole body of the Church. She has faith in modern official declarations and pronouncements only in so far as they may really represent the final judgment of this whole body through the ages.

Thus this Communion is absolutely bound, in the first place, by all the final decisions of the great Oecumenical Councils of the undivided Catholic Church of the first ten centuries. She is bound, in the second place, by the general tradition and practice of the Western Church down to the sixteenth century when the separation from Rome took place. Finally, in the third place, and to a lesser degree, she is bound by the partial provincial authority of her own convocations and conventions; such authority, for instance, as has approved the English Prayer Book, instituted certain provincial canons, and piloted the Church through the maelstrom of modern history.

No Anglican claims that these regulations are as absolute, irreformable, and binding as are the decisions of the great Oecumenical Councils. They possess only that limited provincial authority which, pending the reunion of the whole Catholic Church, East and West, is the only authority to be had. They are only fragmentary, and by no means cover all that is essential to the "Catholic and Apostolic faith." In particular, silence on the part of such provincial authority cannot be interpreted as denial of any doctrine or practice supported by the first two authorities. Confronted with exaggerated Roman claims and decrees, the national Churches of the English-speaking world have had to take a stand on certain matters of faith and order which can be finally settled only by the reunited Church as a whole.

By and large this provincial authority has been wisely and temperately exercised in difficult and turbulent times. It has not shirked the task of facing new issues, even when they touched upon the most vital matters. But as long as the God-given essentials of the faith have been preserved (the Sacraments, the Bible, the Creeds, and the Episcopate), it has not insisted tyrannically upon its pro tempore decisions and decrees. For example, the famous Thirty-nine Articles of the Prayer Book which emerged from the storm and stress of seventeenth century England and are pervaded by a certain spirit of ambiguity and compromise now definitely out of date, are not binding at the present on either English Churchmen nor on American Churchmen, but have only a traditional authority. In the present abnormal state of affairs there is therefore a certain diversity of practice and opinion concerning the weight to be given such recent provincial enactments. But in spite of these diversities, the Anglican Church has always preserved the essentials of the faith, and has never sunk to the position of a mere sect with a distinctive doctrine and practice of its own.
 

But you may say, suppose I grant that the Anglican Communion has preserved intact the essentials of "Catholic" worship. Suppose I agree, as this pamphlet has argued, that it has never adopted any distinctive sectarian viewpoint of its own, and that what certain critics call its lack of any peculiar genius is really an indication of true integrity or catholicity. Even admitting all this, there still remains the alternative of Rome. You admit that so far as the essentials of the "Catholic and Apostolic faith" are concerned, an Anglican believes just what a Roman Catholic believes. This being the case, why should anyone prefer Anglican to Roman Christianity? What does this branch of the Church have to offer that Rome cannot provide?

The answer to these pertinent questions is that this is a Church for free people. The peculiarity of the Anglican Communion lies not in what it has preserved for the modern world. This is common to every branch of the Catholic Church. The difference lies in the way in which this great treasure of liturgy, healing, faith, and learning has been preserved. This Church offers it to you: (1), without asking any sacrifice of the intellect; (2) without demanding blind submission to hierarchical power; and (3) with faith in God and trust in the common man.

(1) The early Christians offered the faith to their contemporaries as a purifying power capable of healing not only the subordinate parts of human nature, but the guiding faculty of reason as well. Hence great thinkers and scholars like St. Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine, who had mastered all the science and learning of their time, embraced Christianity not as an irrational escape from the confusions and difficulties into which our reason falls, but as a means of clarifying these confusions with the aid of a divine light, leading us to further truth and making us free from irrational prejudice and obsession. It was not believed in those early days that the faith contradicted any known fact, or that its acceptance demanded any complete or partial sacrifice of the intellect.

Indeed, if this has been demanded, it is extremely unlikely that the faith could have been maintained or propagated as it was, for reason is the guiding human faculty, and no man or woman can abandon it without at the same time to the same degree abandoning his or her humanity. We can indeed, cease to think about certain important matters, and turn over such decisions, with a certain temporary relief to others who may or may not abuse this power. But then we lose our freedom and to this degree become mere instruments in the hands of other men. Genuine Catholicism is radically opposed to this sort of slavery, for Our Lord has said: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." So in a period of great intellectual confusion and despair, very much like our own, the ancient Church offered the faith as a higher truth, in which all the subordinate truths of science and learning find their harmonious places.

This Church now offers you the Christian faith today, at a time of similar confusions and despair in the very same way, not as an irrational escape from reason, but as a higher light, capable of illumining your intellect and further clarifying things that you now perhaps only dimly or vaguely see about the purpose of life and the vast concourse of human history. She asks you to abandon no definite fact, nor any scientific truth that you know certainly to be so. Among other things, she does not ask you to believe that every single phrase and sentence of the Old Testament in its "literal" sense was directly inspired by God. She does not ask you to believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago, or that Jonah was actually swallowed by a large-mouthed fish in the Mediterranean Sea. She does not ask you to reject any authentic result of the modern study of Biblical literature. There is no thoroughly authenticated particular fact or general theory of modern science which an Anglo-Catholic must disbelieve on religious grounds.

Most important of all, you are not asked to question the general philosophic fact of evolution which caused such a furore when it was rediscovered in the last century. That the whole natural world, to which man belongs, is characterized by a process of flux in which higher forms have emerged until the origin of man, is a truth always held by the majority of Catholics up to modern times, including St. Augustine and St. Thomas. This Church does not ask you to disbelieve any such facts. She presents you with further facts, in the light of which, if you will seriously reflect upon them, you will be able better to interpret and understand all the truths that you already know.

(2) This Church, in seeking your allegiance, does not ask that you blindly submit to the irrevocable decisions of any official or hierarchy of officials or board of officials on which you are not represented. She asks your free obedience to decisions of the whole Church, decisions finally made as the result of age-long consideration and debate, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit which lives in the whole Church of the ages, not merely in one chief bishop or one small group of contemporary officials. She expects you to take an active, though possibly an inconspicuous part, in the consideration and resolution of present-day questions concerning Church policy. She asks you to respect and to obey ecclesiastical authority only in so far as it actually expresses the decisions of the whole body of the church which it represents not by an independent but by a delegated authority. She does not ask you to submit to the nervous paternalism of an Index. She has never fostered a spirit of distrust of the common people nor promulgated such anti-democratic theses (never officially abrogated) as those of the famous Syllabus of Pius IX, particularly thesis 63 which condemns any refusal to obey "legitimate princes", and thesis 79 which condemns the freedom of assembly and the freedom of the press.² In other words, she asks you not to become a mere instrument or tool to be used by your superiors in a dictatorial manner, but to participate freely in the life of a great democratic body, animated by the Holy Spirit, and working throughout the ages for the redemption of every phase of individual and social life from injustice, disorder, and sin.

(3) The Church offers you this opportunity to participate in the great cooperative work of redemption, with a full understanding of the great risks involved. She is quite aware of the fact that sin is not overcome automatically by any formal act of joining the Church, or of externally participating in the sacraments. She knows that many of her so-called members are not genuine members at all, that each prospective member may be a Judas about to betray her with a false and sacrilegious kiss. She has been struggling with human sin and perfidy for thousands of years. She well knows the tortuous means of self-deception and the depths of possible infamy which lie concealed within the human heart.

But in spite of all this, she offers herself to you and to every man and woman of every race and nation and class. She trusts that if you take advantage of her offer, you will make every effort to inform yourself accurately of the real meaning of the faith, that you will freely strive with complete devotion to follow the age-long rules of sacramental discipline, and that you will give your self with passionate devotion to the cooperative task of redeeming every aspect of your life and the life of your neighbors from injustice and evil. She knows that if you do this, God will give you the Grace, through His Church, to achieve something which, no matter how insignificant it may seem, will be of lasting and enduring importance in the establishment of the new world which is His Kingdom.

The Church trusts the common man and the common woman. In clinging throughout centuries of bloodshed and pollution and crime to this democratic trust, the Church only follows the example of God Himself, who with legions of angels, and infinite power at His disposal, scorned the fascist method of a coup d'état which might indeed have eliminated sin, but only by eliminating the sinner. So God Almighty, knowing His own power of burning love and sacrifice, and the real need of saving sinners, trusted rather in the common man and his humble toil throughout the centuries. Telling the angels to wait, He gave Himself to be born as a human infant in a stable in an obscure town of a poverty-stricken province, with a sublime indifference to human caution and means of defence. Instead of barricading himself behind great walls and promulgating infallible anathemas and decrees He cast himself into the world as a helpless baby and inaugurated the work of Christian redemption.

The Church is the human instrument for continuing this work in your own city or town among the free people of the modern world. She is a democratic Church who has actively participated in the struggles of the people for freedom from social injustice and tyranny. In these troubled times she has made no concordats with reactionary governments for the sake of preserving her worldly power. ...³ She has never attempted to regiment her own members in order to achieve an autocratic uniformity of belief and procedure. She has rather trusted in the common man. Very often this trust has been betrayed. It is being widely betrayed at this very time. Who of us so-called "members" have unfailingly given ourselves whole-heartedly to the task? Who of Our Lord's own followers unfailingly serve Him? But in spite of this, up to this time, the trust has been justified, for the "Catholic and Apostolic faith" still lives within our ancient Church, the Mother of our democratic culture, and continues to work in the hearts and lives of living men.

For the vast task of building a Christian order after the War, both in this country and in the world as a whole, this Church needs you, and needs your allegiance. Are you perhaps a pagan with no Church connection at all, but perhaps slightly disillusioned with the record of dogmatic secularism both in modern history and in your own life as a means of saving man? Then visit this Church again, for this is not for "good" men or "good" women, but for sinners. Come again, and try to learn something, with others like yourself, of that universal Christian faith which lies at the root of our democratic way of life, our liberal or free education, our deepest moral aspirations, and the whole structure of our culture. Are you perhaps a Protestant, disillusioned with sectarianism? Then visit this Church again, which is no particular sect established by men alone, but a branch of the "One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church", established by God Himself to save all the races and nations of men. Are you perhaps a lapsed Roman Catholic discouraged by the recent alignment of Rome with reactionary secular movements throughout the world? Then visit this Church again which has always trusted the common man. Perhaps it can show you that Catholicism does not mean slavery and political reaction, but the truth that will make men free.

Whoever you are, whatever your background and antecedents, whatever your race, nationality, or class, visit this Church again. Come and join in the great common task of the common man all the world over of building a new world, guided by the eternal light of the gospel, in which all men may at last know the truth and be free.