Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• The mysterious, immutable Newman. Someone neither his conservative nor liberal commentators could put in a box but that didn’t make him a Modernist. Rejected by the Anglicans (rightly so according to their principles, which we see being played out among them now in their fights) for being Catholic; not trusted by the ultramontanes because he kept that cool Oxonian ‘patristic tone’ to the end. One of his own points, in his apologia, was that the middle’s not necessarily right but a muddle. From Arturo.
• Western Christianity’s spiritual amnesia. Yes! But why doesn’t this mainline fave become Catholic then? My guess: it’s like when the neocons thrown out of power imitate us libertarians to get back at the Democrats in charge. The Modernists play high-church to score points against the fundygelicals, ‘the wrong sort of white people’. Like the neocons and the left both are parts of the same thing. In this case you see two progenies of English Calvinism, mainliners and fundygelicals, that, as usual, don’t like each other. Anyway the amnesia/manufacturing of history began at the ‘Reformation’ — there were no Protestants in 1095 — and accelerated among the upper classes in the 1700s, with much of the rest of the mainline still giving lip service to credal orthodoxy and orthodox morals (Catholicism’s cultural capital) until very recently (arguably they’re catching up with the Unitarians). From Tripp.

Labels: Anglicanism, history, the Catholic faith