Who Is Fr John Hunwicke? -- II

There are two former Anglican converts to Catholicism that I frequently rely on to keep my own Catholic bearings. Both of them explain important things that weren't brought up in my Episcopalian confirmation class. One is Fr Dwight Longenecker, a moderate-to-conservative former priest in the Church of England, now a priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston, SC. (He came in outside either Anglicanorum coetibus or the Pastoral Provision.) At a Lenten mission at our Catholic parish, he gave a quick overview of the kinds of Anglicans, and he made the point that he'd have to listen for a while to what any particular Anglican had to say before he could give a rough estimate of what party he belonged to.

The second is Frederick Kinsman, who was Episcopal Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919 before resigning to convert to Catholicism. He wrote several highly underrecognized books critiquing Anglicanism. Significantly, he was an Oxford-educated member of the Anglo-Catholic faction, which is the same one Fr Hunwicke represents, although as Fr Longenecker points out, there are many subcategories of each faction. Kinsman makes the point that the basic Anglican parties date from the formation of the Church of England in its modern politics under Elizabeth I.

The main parties are High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church, or as Kinsman calls them, Anglo-Catholic, Anglo-Protestant, and Anglo-Liberal. He makes the important point that, through much of Anglican history, the Anglo-Liberals have been the dominant strain with control over doctrine. In The Episcopal Church, its most noted figures have been bishops like James Pike and John Spong. The liberal faction has been generally successful in conflicts over the ordination of women, gays, and transsexuals and, well before then, loosening of policies over birth control and divorce. It's also been able to discipline or force retirements of bishops who opposed such policies.

Kinsman, writing mostly in the 1920s, made the point at the time that such developments weren't anything new. As a matter of policy, Elizabeth I allowed such conflicts to continue unresolved by making no definite determinations but giving each side the impression that she was secretly with them. Thus Kinsman noted in his time that Anglo-Catholics were in a continuing state of bewailing this or that compromise with "true" principles while losing every battle, except that as Elizabeth odrered things from the start, there were no actual principles over which to compromise. As he concluded, Anglicanism was a system in which those who considered themselves Catholic had the latitude to fancy themselves Catholic. This was no matter, as others were actually in charge.

As Anglicanism evolved, Anglo-Catholic style proved extremely popular, although as Fr Longenecker understands, Anglo-Catholic style merges easily with Anglo-Liberal elitism, which is why same-sex "affirming" parishes can mainifest extreme high-church forms in liturgy. Another, minor Anglo-Catholic strain is Anglo-Papalism, of which Fr Hunwicke, both before and after his conversion, is an extreme example. In yesterday's post, I linked to an interview in which Fr Hunwicke made it plain that since his youth, he'd effectively believed he was Catholic. Interestingly, Kinsman seems to have been a member of this faction as well until, as a professor of church history and then a bishop watching at first hand the ecclesial sausages being made, he began to recognize he'd been misled, there were no "truths" to be found in Anglicanism.

For a Protestant to believe he's Catholic reflects a fundamental denial, the same as if someone believed his beat-up Chevy is a Rolls Royce, or a guy who lives in the family basement believes he's married to Jennifer Lawrence. Kinsman believed something like this until he woke up to the fact that he was a patsy in a rigged game. There simply is no equivalence between the Roman Church and Anglicanism. If you want to be Catholic, you have to recalibrate and do what you need to do to become Catholic.

In the interview cited, Fr Hunwicke goes on to say,

Catholics ought to learn from the Anglicans that if a community surrenders to the Zeitgeist instead of following its own faith and fundamental beliefs, this will lead it to disaster and collapse.

I think this misstates the issue. Anglicans, I think the historical record reflects, never had their own faith and fundamental beliefs. What does Fr Hunwicke do with the XXXIX Articles, for instance, which would at least theoretically represent that denomination's fundamental beliefs? How About Article XIX?

As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.

But Fr Hunwicke says that since his youth, he's believed in papal infallibility, which is contrary to Anglican fundamental belief. I'm sure he gets around this with some form of tergiversation or verbal sleight of hand, but his problem is that as an Anglican, an Anglo-Papalist is forced to say that Anglicans don't take the Articles, or at least some of them, seriously. And this isn't recent, it's baked in from the start. So Fr Hunwicke's problem is that from youth, he's been groomed to betray stated fundamental Anglican beliefs -- and by celebrating any Anglican mass in a form other than the Book of Common Prayer, he was doing this himself. Where did he change his mind about fundamental beliefs -- or in fact, has he ever?

His problem is that he continues to think Anglicanism is in some way equivalent to Catholicism. It isn't, in a basic way. If nothing intervenes, I'll have more to say tomorrow.