My good friend Peter Yancy chimed in with a response to this 2014 article , entitled ". I reproduce his comment here with my reply:
Very well written, and a thoughtful article. I agree with your conclusions, Christopher, but I was wondering: Is it possible that a High Church Anglicanism could serve more to unify than a strictly Anglo-Catholic model? What I mean by that is the High Church model of the Caroline Divines, as opposed to many in the Anglo-Catholic community who seem to ape Rome. At times it amazes me to see certain Anglo-Catholics using missals, wearing Roman Catholic vestments of post-18th century design, and commemorating the feast days of post-Reformation Roman Catholic saints such as Bernadette of Lourdes. The use of the rosary and sacred heart images is another issue as well. The Laudians had no desire to replace the Prayer Book with a missal, or to pray the rosary, to wear chasubles and birettas, or decorate the churches with images. I am not trying to sound overly harsh towards those Anglo-Catholics who engage in such things, but do you see my point? A large number of Anglo-Catholics come across more like Old Catholics than Anglicans. Perhaps a more traditional High Church model such as that advocated by the High Churchmen of the 17th century would offer a better model of Classical Anglicanism than what many are offering now.
My reply:
I do indeed see your point, Peter. There is no need for Anglicans to ape Roman practices in order to be genuinely Catholic, though disagree on whether or not certain Anglo-Catholic practices, such as the use of a missal, is inherently Roman. But I do think that both Caroline and *Tractarian* divinity (as opposed to later Ritualist and Anglo-papalist movements) have things to teach us all about being genuinely Catholic. Canon Middleton argues, and I tend to agree with him, that all of orthodox Anglican divinity, from the Reformers to the Tractarians, have aspired to represent the Catholic faith in its purity, nothing more and nothing less. He cautions, however, that each of these strains of Anglican theology might have so aspired with certain Anglican "agendas" lying at the core, and that the best way to rid ourselves of these agendas is to seek to conform fully to the minds of the Fathers and Doctors of the undivided Church of the first milllennium. I believe we can do so, on the one hand ridding ourselves of those agendas but at the same time maintaining distinctive English Catholic contributions to both theology and spirituality. We're not Romans, and we're not Orthodox. But we are Catholic.