Thomas Elton Brown reflects on The Road to Renewal

Dr. Brown wrote the pioneering study Bible Belt Catholicism: A History of the Roman Catholic Church in Oklahoma, 1905-1945. He was kind enough to permit me to share his personal impressions of my biography of Victor Reed.

I was raised a Catholic in Oklahoma during Victor Reed’s episcopacy. My family was a member of Christ the King parish in Oklahoma City while the then Monsignor Buswell was pastor and the then Father James Halpine was the assistant pastor. Long before Mother Denise was removed from her position as the head of the convent in Tulsa, she taught me second grade at Christ the King elementary school. And I graduated from McGuinness High School in 1964. So much of your monograph was a narrative of my youth. Since I attended McGuinness from 1960 to 1964, you can figure out the events I remembered and the participants I personally knew. It was a first for me as a trained historian to read a scholarly study that both was a narrative in which I would be a primary source and was an analysis about which I had produced a secondary source. I was somewhat schizophrentic in my reading. I would be checking footnotes to identify sources and mulling over the conclusions of each chapter in light of the narrative. Only then I would swing to my personal recollections – “Oh yes, I remember that.” Or “Wow, I didn’t know that.” Or “Oh no, that’s not how it happened” [Or at least, “That’s not how I remember it.”]

In sum, then, I just wanted to let you know that I thoroughly enjoyed reading it – both as an historian of the subject and as a reader with a personal involvement. As I initially wrote, I found it to be well researched and well written – both in a flowing writing style and a readily understandable structure. I thought you did an admirable job of placing Oklahoma within the broader context of the changes occurring simultaneously in other parts of the country. Some reviewers will often conclude a laudatory review by stating the monograph is a model for future studies or breaks new historiographical ground. Being so close personally to the topic and being so far away from active historical scholarship, I am not in position to make such a statement. But I can confidently state that it is as outstanding biography that captured a personality that truly wrestled with a range of issues as he struggled to do the right thing.

The Duncan Deposition

Teaching has kept me from posting over the past month yet it would be remiss to pass over this day without noting the news from Salt Lake City. It would seem that the House of Bishops has now taken its stand by not waiting for the diocesan vote on realignment. Looking back on +Bob Duncan's period in office (13 years and counting), it's interesting to reflect how the persona of a secessionist has been projected on the Bishop of Pittsburgh by his critics back before his consecration. The historical record (of recorded statements at least) does not reflect that. While it's always easy to think how things might have been managed "better" had "we" had the handling of them, it's hard to see a way it could have been avoided. It was always too little and too late. As J. Gresham Machen concluded almost a century ago, Liberal Christianity and its Traditional (Conservative) rival will ultimately come to a parting of the ways. It may be amicable or bloody but in the end it will come. What is important is how one handles the fragments.

For the orthodox (especially the ardent proponents of realignment) this is but an incident on the road to a brighter future; it merely confirms their view of the majority of members of the House of Bishops. The damage done to institutional Anglicanism in America, I suspect, is mortal. According to David Virtue, dissenters at the meeting included the bishops of East Tennessee, Easton, Milwaukee, Montana, New Jersey, Northwest Texas,Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Virginia, none of them known for their conservatism. Perhaps they suspect the reckoning that must follow.

And so the legacy of the Episcopal Church passes into history. May the new future be all that its proponents believe it to be. I would that I had their confidence and yet at present I feel nothing so much as a sense of a fading vision. What awaits us beyond October 4 for me still has most uncertain contours.

For the Virtue report, see: http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=9024

And here's a downloadable spreadsheet indicating how the bishops voted, courtesy of TitusOneNine: http://kendallharmon.net/t19/media/Duncan_Deposition_Vote.xls

Paris is Worth a Mass?

Over the weekend, I had occasion to turn to one of the great English historical classics, George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England, published in 1935. The following passage immediately caught my eye.

Liberalism in its Victorian plenitude had been an easy burden to bear, for it contained - and who could doubt it? - a various and valuable collection of gold, stocks, bibles, progressive thoughts, and decent inhibitions. It was solid and sensible and just a little mysterious; and though one could not exactly gambol with such a weight on one's shoulders, it permitted one to walk in a dignified manner and even to execute from time to time those eccentric little steps which are so necessary to the health of Englishmen . . . . But somehow or other, as the century turned, the burden of Liberalism grew more and more irksome; it began to give out a dismal, rattling sound; it was just as if some unfortunate miracle had been performed upon its contents, turning them into nothing more than bits of old iron fragments of intimate crockery, and other relics of a domestic past. What could the matter be? Liberalism was still embodied in a large political party; it enjoyed the support of philosophy and religion; it was intelligible, it was intelligent, and it was English. But it was also slow; and it so far transcended politics and economics as to impose itself upon behavior as well. For a nation which wanted to revive a sluggish blood by running very fast and in any direction, Liberalism was clearly an inconvenient burden. (pp.7-8)

No prizes for any analogy that might be drawn with the just-concluded Lambeth Conference. The reported optimism of the Archbishop of Canterbury at the conclusion of the conference embodies so much of the eerie twilight that characterized those last days of Edwardian complacency that ended with a gunshot at Sarajevo. Yet Dangerfield's thesis is pertinent to our present condition, for he held that the disintegration of Liberal England had preceded the outbreak of the First World War. "The question is," Lord Selborn told his fellow peers as they debated the Liberal-sponsored Parliament Act of 1911 which would strip them of their power indefinitely to veto legislation passed in the Commons, "shall we perish in the dark, slain by our own hand, or in the light, killed by our enemies?" (64)

A similar question hung over Lambeth 2008. Behind all the worthy language of building relationship and understanding cultural context, lurked the spectre of division and subdivision. Critics of the meeting predicted even before it began that it was so structured as to fail to express any view that might be regarded as definitive; so far, they seem to have been proved right.

To my mind, this is not something that can be blamed solely on the Archbishop of Canterbury. Unquestionably, the choice of an indaba structure was guaranteed to produce an outcome very different from that of Lambeth 1998, yet it was open to those conservatives who went to Lambeth to decline to participate in such activity with any bishop who refused to disavow the recent innovations in theological teaching and practice, as defined by the Windsor Report. With the boycott by most GAFCON participants, the only bishops to whom this would have applied would have been certain representatives of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. Yet - the statement from the Sudanese bishops apart - no such declaration was made.

By the same token, I now find it increasingly difficult to view Rowan Williams with quite the same level of equanimity as heretofore. While I agree that the covenant process cannot and should not be rushed and I accept as valid his argument that his powers beyond the Church of England are seriously constrained, if he believes that the traditionalist point of view is a valid expression of Anglicanism there are many ways in which his moral authority could have been exercised to provide temporary shelter for those in the minority, in liberal and conservative provinces, if necessary. In North America, the threat of recognition of the CANA and AMIA bishops would probably have been enough to elicit compliance with Dar-es-Salaam. Archbishop Rowan spoke at great length in his presidential addresses about the need to build trust. When things have reached the state that we currently endure, building trust involves giving the minority the minimum they feel they need, even if it seems excessive.

In 1911 the House of Lords died in the dark; within a decade their Liberal foes had faded from the scene and the Lords endured with a power of temporary veto. In 2008 it would appear that the Anglican Communion is resolved to die in the light.

A Hymn For Lambeth 2008?

If Samuel Stone was good enough for 1867, he's good enough 140 years later. And let's be clear about Verse Three. Every part of the Church - the orthodox included - have issues to address. Triumphing in our own strength could be as deadly as succumbing to heresy.

The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord,
She is His new creation
By water and the Word.
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood
He bought her
And for her life He died.

She is from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth;
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.

The Church shall never perish!
Her dear Lord to defend,
To guide, sustain, and cherish,
Is with her to the end:
Though there be those who hate her,
And false sons in her pale,
Against both foe or traitor
She ever shall prevail.

Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed:
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song!

’Mid toil and tribulation,
And tumult of her war,
She waits the consummation
Of peace forevermore;
Till, with the vision glorious,
Her longing eyes are blest,
And the great Church victorious
Shall be the Church at rest.

Yet she on earth hath union
With God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won,
With all her sons and daughters
Who, by the Master’s hand
Led through the deathly waters,
Repose in Eden land.

O happy ones and holy!
Lord, give us grace that we
Like them, the meek and lowly,
On high may dwell with Thee:
There, past the border mountains,
Where in sweet vales the Bride
With Thee by living fountains
Forever shall abide!

Samuel J. Stone (1839-1900)

First Peer Review

Professor Thomas W. Jodziewicz of the University of Dallas has been kind enough to offer some positive impressions of my first monograph. To learn more, read his review at:

http://www.catholichistory.net/Book%20Reviews/BonnerRoadRenewal.htm

Pittsburgh Convention Comes Early!

Diocesan Convention is now brought forward one month, with threatened deposition by the September meeting of the House of Bishops cited as "sufficient cause." On Saturday October 4 delegates will meet at St. Martin's, Monroeville (which also hosted the special convention back in 2003, where the process of disassociation began). It's going to be a bumpy ride.

See: http://www.pghanglican.org/Conventions/2008%20Pre-Convention%20Letter%20_October_.pdf

Tending the Sheep: Pittsburgh’s Episcopal Bishops

This is the second of three articles that will appear in TRINITY, the diocesan publication of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh. They represent an overview of a manuscript history, which will be published by Wipf and Stock in 2009.

Part I http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com/2008/05/out-of-this-furnace-episcopal.html

“We had a very weary ride over, or rather through, very bad roads to Waynesburg,” wrote John Kerfoot (1865-1881), “where at long intervals some ministers of ours held services years ago. We held service and I preached in the Court House, where we had a large and reverent congregation. We were guests of a family once ours, in which . . . the Prayer Book, and the memories of the early Church home, hallowed and taught by it, still kept their hold. Time has been sadly lost in that south-western part of the Diocese.” The office of bishop of Pittsburgh has never been a sinecure. The primitive transport networks of the nineteenth century imposed a particular physical strain and prior to the division of the Diocese of Pennsylvania in 1865 the western portion of the state received few episcopal visitations. Bishops can, however, be equally vulnerable to the distractions of external commitments. “It is painfully apparent to me,” Alden Hathaway (1980-1995) ruefully admitted in 1988, “that over the past few years I have lost control of my calendar and my appointments. It is driven by the needs and desires for my time of a great variety of good and worthy projects, but the result is that they control me rather than I having any intentional order and design to the stewardship of my time.”

Six of Pittsburgh’s seven bishops came to the office as outsiders, a pattern that owed much to a lay preference for a bishop without ties to local clergy. “Only two men in the Diocese, I was told,” Cortlandt Whitehead (1882-1922) sardonically commented years after his election, “had ever seen me – one a clergyman and one a layman – neither of whom voted for me – men of sense and fine discernment.” Perhaps the most brutal election – requiring no less than sixteen ballots – was that of 1922, which finally chose Alexander Mann (1923-1943), rector of Trinity Church, Boston. In 1980 another stormy convention witnessed a closed session in which Dean John Rodgers of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry (who had been nominated from the floor) was interrogated by convention delegates angry that they lacked adequate background information. Thankfully the convention then took only five ballots to elect Alden Hathaway, a decision that would mark the beginning of a singular change in outlook for the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Fifteen years later, Canon Robert Duncan would be elected as Hathaway’s successor only after his initial rejection by the nominations committee and nomination from the floor with the backing of a wide cross-section of members of the diocese, many of whom did not share his theological convictions.

In the course of 250 years, Pittsburgh’s Episcopal bishops have represented a wide cross-section of the various schools of churchmanship, from the stately Anglo-Catholicism of John Kerfoot to the Broad Church pragmatism of Alexander Mann and the Evangelical fervor of Alden Hathaway. Not all were cradle Anglicans. While Robert Duncan (1996- ) waxes lyrical about his Anglo-Catholic upbringing (“If it hadn’t been for that parish church,” he says today, “I think I would not only have emotionally died but I would have physically died”), John Kerfoot was baptized a Presbyterian, a fact that concerned him enough to request a conditional baptism before his ordination in 1840. By contrast, Robert Appleyard (1968-1979) was an ordained Methodist minister before joining the Episcopal Church during the Second World War, distinguished by being the only English-speaker in his sixty-member Confirmation class on the island of New Guinea.

Several of Pittsburgh’s bishops have enjoyed prominent national roles. John Kerfoot , who helped broker an agreement to readmit southern Episcopalians to the General Convention a year before his election, was active in the debates that consolidated the ascendancy of the high church party within the Episcopal Church, while Austin Pardue (1944-1967) served as chairman of the national church commission on industrial work during the 1950s. Many bishops have also understood their responsibility to preach to the wider world, prompting Cortlandt Whitehead to denounce the 1892 Geary Act limiting Chinese immigration, Austin Pardue to become the first Episcopal bishop to address a national convention of the United Steel Workers, Robert Appleyard to promote Project Equality as a part of the national campaign for civil rights and Alden Hathaway to protest abortion outside the Pittsburgh offices of Planned Parenthood.

Such episcopal activism has nevertheless always been grounded in a coherent worldview, something that many postwar bishops have been obliged to emphasize. Austin Pardue, a writer of popular theological treatises during the 1950s, was one of the first to warn of the dangers of an entirely personal faith. “The debunking of faith, the Bible, the Prayer Book, the Creeds, theology, the Sacraments, and the Church,” he wrote in 1948, “have all made us more and more disrespectful toward the eternal verities and therefore we have created inadequate little philosophical codes of transitory values which we claim to be ‘a religion of my own.’” Twenty years later, Robert Appleyard would be more concerned with a theology that united discipleship and action. “We can identify with those movements that have to do with good government, fair housing to all everywhere, equal rights and the highest standards of education for everyone,’ he explained in 1968, “We can pray for those whose lives have become so bitter, so empty, so disconsolate, that they are not able to get down on their knees and pray.” By the 1980s and 1990s, however, the concern of the bishops of Pittsburgh was with the need to defend catholic tradition and biblical authority. “I have often been in the thick of conflicts within the Episcopal Church,” Robert Duncan reflected in 2002. “I make no apologies for this. Guarding the Faith is central to a bishop’s ordination vows. But others understand the meaning of the same vows and the same Faith differently.”

The shifting character of ecumenical dialogue – a central concern of many church leaders, tells its own tale. Episcopalians need to understand “what the true Catholic position is,” Bishop Whitehead warned in 1897, “as opposed to Romanism and Papalism, and understanding also what true Protestantism is, against what we protest and for what reasons.” Over thirty years later, his successor was more optimistic. “[Our] influence is out of all proportion to our numbers,” Alexander Mann insisted in 1933, “and when the Episcopal Church speaks in her corporate capacity, no Christian Communion in the country commands more truly the attention of thoughtful men . . . We are told that our position is illogical, but after all what is it but the position of the family, where one son is an extreme radical and one is an ultra conservative, but where all the children are held together by the bond of a common loyalty, a common love and trust.”

The postwar world would witness further development of ecumenical principles. Austin Pardue promoted connections with the Orthodox and Polish National Catholic Churches and in 1963 issued a pastoral letter responding to Pope John XXIII’s invitation to worldwide unity that was invoked by no less a figure than the Catholic ecumenist Cardinal Augustin Bea. Robert Appleyard led his diocese into Christian Associates, an ecumenical grouping formed in the 1960s to bring together many of southwestern Pennsylvania’s Christians, while Alden Hathaway established a deeper relationship with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. In 1988, Hathaway and Catholic Bishop Donald Wuerl pioneered the Christian Leaders Fellowship. The following year Hathaway signed a concordat with the Southwestern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “By rooting [our discussions] in the context of the local working experience,” Hathaway explained, “the understanding and respect of the church’s beliefs would be increased and thereby the appreciation for the theological strengths of the various communions.”

Ultimately, however, it is as bishops in the Anglican Communion that Pittsburgh’s leaders have been judged and will continue to be judged. “These rapidly growing and multiplying Anglican Churches of ours, are too much one to live and work apart comfortably;” declared John Kerfoot in 1879, “and are too strong and spreading to work apart safely; and too brave and independent to fear each other in a blessed co-partnership under Christ, in their holy task of winning souls and building up the kingdom . . . [The Lambeth Conferences] keep the one Faith written out brightly in the old lines of catholic Truth; these old lines traced afresh in living colors, which the truthful and obedient shall hereafter see with thankful memories of our counsels, when we shall have gone where the Truth and its sunlight shall never grow dim.” Almost a century later, Austin Pardue predicted that the Anglican Congress of 1963 might be the beginning of a process by which the Anglican Communion might “begin to act as one Church and not as 18 separate and individual churches.” Today, as the world waits for the outcome of Lambeth 2008, it may be expedient to remember the purpose for which the episcopate was consecrated and to pray that the price of leadership for all affected may not be too severe.

The Waning of Apostolicity: A Word from Bishop James Adams

James M. Adams is the Episcopal Bishop of Western Kansas.

Although he is a member of the Anglican Communion Network, his Diocese is not.

The Episcopal Church has declared that it is indeed a church apart from the Anglican Communion. And this has not occurred because of sexuality, women's ordination, differences in doctrine, nor polity.

It has happened because The Episcopal Church no longer recognizes the universality of Anglican Holy Orders and truly is no longer a member of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church most of us were ordained into. How far will the separation go? I fear it will eventually be complete and Episcopalians can throw away all the books which claim it is an Anglican Church because it will have divorced itself from its past and become something apart.

Maybe that is what the majority want. Then those who have trouble with the historic Creeds of the Church can cut those out of the liturgies and declare a universal salvation at no cost or sacrifice. And it will be worth what people are willing to give for it. As little as possible.

From: http://www.kendallharmon.net/t19/index.php/t19/article/13003/#more

Making Corrections

An occasional embarrassment of publication is the discovery of errors. While these are often purely textual, they occasionally involve the reproduction of local urban legends. This past month I became aware that this had occurred in my first published monograph, The Road to Renewal. I must therefore admit that on page 202, I describe the publicity given by the National Catholic Reporter to Father John Bloms following his employment of girl servers at the Catholic parish in Ada, Oklahoma, as dating from 1964.

The diminutive Benedictine did indeed feature on the front page of the national paper celebrating the Eucharist facing the people and flanked by two young female parishioners, but although he instituted this practice in 1964, it was not until November 24, 1965 that reporters finally caught up with him. Two weeks later, the National Catholic Reporter dutifully reported that Father Bloms had signified his submission to an episcopal injunction to cease and desist.

While my error does not detract from the essential truth of the story, it nevertheless requires correction and this seems the best forum in which to acknowledge it.

The Gathering Shades

I came across this only recently but it seems so pertinent to the season that I place an extract here. I suspect that others are experiencing the same emotions.

Comfort, content, delight

The ages' slow-bought gain

They shrivelled in a night,

Only ourselves remain

To face the naked days

In silent fortitude,

Through perils and dismays

Renewed and re-renewed.

Though all we made depart,

The old commandments stand:

"In patience keep your heart,

In strength lift up your hand."

Rudyard Kipling, "For All We Have and Are" (1917)