The more liberal it got, the more snobbish it became From an e-mail circle:
Visiting an elderly shut-in couple when I was an Episcopalian.... They were members of our parish and the husband had read some of my articles and wanted to meet me, so I went to see them one day when our rector made his regular visit. He had been the head pressman of a printing company, that is, a man who got his hands dirty, and he talked about the old days when he’d been on the standing committee of the diocese, and about others who did the same kind of work and had positions of leadership. He didn’t say this with any resentment, but I suddenly realized that even in this conservative diocese, no one of his class or occupation could possibly be elected to any office today. It’s a very different world. But then that kind of working-class Episcopalianism seems almost to have disappeared.
Judging from James Pike’s letter to his mother on why she should convert from Catholicism (executive summary: Catholics are the social inferiors of Episcopalians) this trend had begun quite some time back.
Truer on the coasts, I think, than in the middle of the country (we live outside Pittsburgh). And even in Massachusetts (where I grew up) there were once thriving mostly working-class or mixed-class parishes in the industrial and some rural towns. I think some still exist but you won’t find anyone from them having any position in the diocese’s affairs. That’s an entirely upper-middle-class affair.
Ironically, as liberalism gutted the theological identity of Episcopalianism, the church lost much of its social diversity as well, though “diversity” and “inclusion” became its new slogans. The exact relation of those two movements I don’t know. The second is as likely to be the greater cause as the former.
I have had someone say to me about being a Catholic, and he was perfectly serious, “I won’t go to church with my plumber.” I’d always thought this was a joke playing on a stereotype, but people really say it.
Anglo-Catholicism both in England and the American biretta belt long parallelled Roman Catholicism in breaking out of this, being the exception in their denomination.
The diversity and inclusion games are wholly white upper-middle-class (as Christian Lander notes, to impress others of that class).
Nothing new. All of this underscores both (a) the total incoherence of the “tea party movement” and (b) how it is, at bottom, nothing more than a cynical marketing attempt to re-brand the right wing of the Republican Party.
Deficit déjà vu.To put it into perspective, consider this: The estimated budget deficit — just the deficit — almost matches the entire federal budget when George W. Bush became president in 2001. In this regard second-term Clinton was better than Reagan.
The wrong manhood test: hiking military spending and escalating the Afghan war to look tough.
The day after the snowstorm It wasn’t as bad as two months ago even with more snow. The man who takes care of the house where I live has a snowblower so this morning rather than walking to St Philomena’s I was chanting the epistle in a tongue not understanded of the people as usual.
Bishop Peter Elliott: Am I grateful for my Anglican heritage? Yes, I am. Where did I first learn the Catholic Faith? At home, in the vicarage. I was born into Anglicanism, in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. My father, Rev. Leslie Llewelyn Elliott, was for some time President of the Australian Church Union. While studying theology at Oxford, in St Stephen’s House, I followed my conscience and was reconciled to “Rome” in 1968.
Fr Chadwick: We have seen this all before, and were doctoring up the Prayer Book to make a Mass of it 150 years before the reform of the reform was ever thought of. Our priests in the late 19th century, Fr. Mackonochie and Fr. Stanton, among many other heroes of those days when Ritualist priests were persecuted, were the precedents of the Mass centres in the 1970’s and 80’s, Archbishop Lefebvre and the seminary of Ecône.
The Archbishop of York: as the commenter wrote, the grapes were sour anyway. Being looked after by the Vatican, including over the heads of the local liberal clergy (whose only reasons for not being Anglicans are they hate high church and the English persecuted their ancestors), is as pukka as a proper RC can get!
Arturo’s way I agree with Rod Dreher and others that voodoo is obviously about demonic possession. That said:
For me, there is no bourgeois über-religion of decency that transcends what’s true and what isn’t true. That is a modern invention based on disordered sensibilities, and to say we “good Christians” all worship the same god is an insult to God. For it would mean that we worship a god with various personalities for various kinds of “decent” people. If that is the case, I would rather worship a god who could manifest himself in the Haitian loa as well. That seems a lot fairer.
While the Catholicism of yesteryear was about life, contemporary Catholicism is often about ideology. And I’ll just leave it at that.
True but classical liberalism, with a root in Christianity, offers a way for people of different faiths to live in peace. Not the same as ‘Enlightenment’ indifferentism.
So why is it that we are so disturbed at people being ridden by the loa and eating glass when, in reality, heretics and schismatics should be just as repulsive to us. Is your Presbyterian neighbor who mows his lawn every Saturday and pays his taxes on time every year on par with a Voudou priest? According to your Catholic Faith, he is. And so is Rod Dreher, who abandoned the bark of Peter for the Eastern schismatics. If we are going to speak of demonic influences, let us at least be even handed about it.
This blog doesn’t preach schism. (Why I rejected the Protestant principle — fallible church — behind the historically recent changes in Anglicanism and, it turns out, behind Anglicanism itself.) The ‘Eastern schismatics’ I’ve known and liked in real life for nearly 20 years are immigrant and ethnic Slavs for whom religion is indeed a life not an ideology (an Italian-American friend has found that in a Greek parish, fellow Mediterranean people) or people like the late Fr Anastassy, nothing to do with the ideological online convertodox.
The strict interpretation of extra ecclesiam nulla salus popularised by Fr Feeney (your nice Protestant neighbour = witch doctor = hellbound) is in the range of Catholic opinion but, thank goodness, only opinion!
Stereotypes exist because most of the time they’re true (Cracked doesn’t really refute the Russian one about drinking). The problem usually is they don’t tell the whole truth: again, everything from genetics to culture is not determinative; people vary a lot. Some of them, it turns out, are lies. The basis of put-down Polish jokes for example. Turns out Poles have higher IQs on average than Americans. Where did the slur come from? Cracked doesn’t tell you. I read somewhere that it came from Jewish comedians with roots in Eastern Europe getting back at the Slavs who persecuted them; also where part of the negative Russian stereotype (recycled in ‘Taxi’ and Borat... by Jewish comedians) comes from. Also, among Jews the smart survived the persecution and passed on their genes; a very high-IQ group, many of them probably were smarter than their gentile neighbours in the old country. (And the nerd stereotype is arguably anti-Semitic.)
Colonial Gingrichburg LOL. I’ve read one of his historical novels, 1945, claiming that the US doing the sensible thing and staying out of WWII would have caused Red Dawn with Nazis essentially.
The Patriarch of Moscow, common sense and I agree: Orthodoxy: close to Rome, far from Protestantism. Summing up: the difference between these two Catholic churches is the scope of the Pope and of course there are rival one-true-church claims; union with Protestantism is impossible because they believe in a fallible church. As Charley says the real achievement of ecumenism isn’t church union, which nobody believes will happen, but that the two sides, Catholic and Protestant, really do understand each other better and for the most part aren’t trying to kill each other any more. Not that there are no more battles or bigotry.
Fred Reed on race realists and IQists. I read Steve Sailer, who AFAIK agrees that many Indians are gifted. Theory I agree with: there are differences in intelligence and other talents (in sport for example) among groups thanks to heredity. (The politically incorrect third rail Sailer touches and an idea reinforced for me by many years of dealing with real representatives of different groups who are not the ‘vibrant’ upper-class SWPLised versions.) Where the racists and I of course part ways is these things are only factors not determinative so it would be wrong to rewrite the law based on them. (IQ for example is only a measure of potential not of knowledge or accomplishment thanks to hard work.) People vary a lot. The answer of course is real equal opportunity, which classical liberalism offers to all. By demanding affirmative action — quotas, and if a test is too hard, throw it out — aren’t the left back-handedly admitting Sailer is right?
Brideshead re-revisited.Arturo has a go at RC neocons, not note-for-note as they’re not indifferentists, thank goodness, but very funny about artistic and spiritual mediocrity doing business as orthodoxy. The right-wing version of protestantisation, or as the John Paulistas said 25 years ago, give up that artsy-fartsy old-fashioned stuff and become a charismatic. No, thanks.
I work for a rad-trad organization and often have observed the [self-righteous, uncharitable] behavior you describe, I am sorry to say....
I have recently joined an Anglican Use parish, where I find sound doctrine unapologetically taught and lived, generous-minded congregants, beautiful liturgy in noble English, and wonderful, fitting music. I feel as if I have come home, and in a way, I have. This liturgy, born in the Catholic Church, formed in Protestantism, and now brought full circle back to its roots, offers everything that is needful to worship with joy and generosity — and we get to meet Christ in the sacraments, too! God be thanked for the riches the new Apostolic Constitution is bringing to the Church.
Irinej has retained firm opposition to the Western-backed opposition in Kosovo, the historic heartland of the Serbian church which split in 2008. He said Thursday that “Kosovo is soaked with Serbian blood” and “belongs to us.”
Some jottings about the news
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