What I believe
On being a Catholic stranded in a post-modern, post-denominational world

The link is to the long version.

The short version: because of my Anglican background I use Catholic in an Anglo-Catholic way but without buying into the branch theory (which I explain below), having given up on Anglicanism as Protestant.

Catholic:

• Apostolic succession. Where the bishop is, the church is.
• The rest of the common set of beliefs and practices of the ancient churches claiming that succession. The branch theory of course doesn’t work because the ancient churches 1) aren’t in communion with each other and 2) don’t recognise Anglican orders. That said the theory in a way is 19th-century high Anglicanism’s gift to us, semi-outsiders pointing out how much we have in common.
• Doctrine that one’s church is infallible on matters of faith and the one true church. This is what separates us from liturgical Protestants like the Anglicans and some Lutherans who like us claim apostolic succession and in some cases believe and practise just about everything else we do. (And what separates the ancient churches, Rome and the Orthodox being the biggest and second biggest, from each other.) A Catholic church is not a denomination, the Protestant idea of the many divided and fundamentally contradictory Christian churches collectively forming the one true church. The branch theory is a sort of limited denominationalism held to by orthodox Anglicans, conservative Old Catholics and the Polish National Catholic Church. According to it all the churches that claim apostolic succession are collectively the one true church. The theory says the vast commonality of beliefs and practices among them constitutes the infallible church.

Labels: Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith