Falling in love with love
Patrick Marnham
That the Archbishop of Canterbury should have emerged from his great intercommunion initiative with egg on his face seems to have surprised no one. People are beginning to expect Dr Coggan to appear in this nutritious camouflage. Ever since his original Appeal to the Nation it has been the special mark of his office, and last week's demand for instant intercommunion between Anglicans and Roman Catholics was in the same extemporised tradition.
There was for a start the prim rhetoric. Having drawn our attention to 'the two great longings that burn in my heart' and 'the pain of separation', Coggan then begged Catholic forgiveness for 'the sins of Anglicanism' (which by his description seem to have amounted to a lack of courtesy at garden parties), and finally, speaking of course in Westminster Cathedral, he suggested that lay Catholics all over the world should just do their own thing. Dr Coggan is an impulsive and emotional man, a sort of clerical demon lover, and it was natural for him to present intercommunion as an affair of the heart, an instance (in the immortal words of the religious correspondent of The Times) of 'churches falling in love with each other, like men and women'. The Coggan idea is that the four hundred years of hotly-disputed theology, and a world of temperamental and intellectual difference, should melt in the heat of his passion. The clincher, itself a little dated, was that since the young people were all doing it, where was the choice?
The object of all this ardour, Cardinal Hume, ('She didn't say Yes, She didn't say No, She didn't say Stop, She didn't say Go') was on this occasion actually moved to an answer — a resounding No; a short word but one which, like Yes, seemed quite beyond the oral capacity of his predecessor. And so the result of the demon lover's premature exhortation was a slap on the wrist, and a thorough airing of all the matters which still divide Anglicans and Roman Catholics. Not quite what the Doctor had intended.
It was the unecumenical conviction that opposing dogmas retain a more than symbolic importance which was the basis of Cardinal Hume's refusal. One of the distinguishing features of the modern ecumenical movement, apart from its stifling party manners, is the pretence that doctrine is incidental to belief. For the ecumenical Coggan-style Anglican the distinction between his belief that communion is God's love feast, with any old divine qualified to act as 'the caterer', and the Catholic belief that communion is the conclusion of a ceremony of sacrifice 'in which the reality of Christ's presence' (Cardinal Hume last week) is to be found 'in the sacred species', is mere legalism. But for the ecumenical Hume-style Catholic, even talk of 'catering' is likely to cause offence. It is almost as though the great ecumenical vessel has at last struck an unbudgeable rock of belief, the Catholic belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation, the real presence. Of course none of the religious leaders of either faith is going to be so gauche as to say so. Apart from being a breach of party manners, they are all too compromised by now for any straight talk about fundamental doctrines.
The three outstanding areas of substantial doctrinal disagreement between these churches are Papal authority, transubstantiation and the Virgin Mary. Coggan is apparently prepared to make the necessary submission to Papal authority, and Rome can be expected to abandon much of its old teaching about Mary, which is very vulnerable to the sniping of atheist Bible scholars; the Nuns will be furious but they will just have to put up with it —like the rest of the troops. But transubstantiation cannot be surrendered without dismantling the Mass, and from the Catholic point of view no further tampering in that area is advisable in the foreseeable future. Attendances are down quite far enough as it is. It is all very inconvenient.
The sight of the Catholic Church trying to make some sense out of the saintly but random inspirations of John XXIII has been one of the great dramas of recent times. How proud the leaders of the Church must feel today as they survey the wreckage. The central authority of Rome disputed, abandoned or compromised; the clergy piping up from every quarter with its discordant views on the pill, the Trinity or the price of American wheat; the universal liturgy succeeded by a confusing babble of tongues; the narrow gulf with the Orthodox churches threatening to widen under the promise of women priests; and, last of all, the faithful — strengthened in their faith?
'A man can accept anything to do with God until scholars begin to go into details and implications . . . I used to believe in Revelation, but I never believed in the capacity of the human mind . . . The Catholic solution of the problem [of eternal salvation] satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempts to rationalise it by means of dogmatic theology fail to satisfy the reason. And the reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life.'
This reflection by Graham Greene is an indication of the Catholic Church's fatal error in encouraging unity. It used to be a strength of the Church that, while loudly asserting the uses of faith and the spirit, it could wrestle with the demands of the reason in relative privacy. But an ecumenical theology has to be hammered out in public, where its inherent absurdity is plain for all to see. It is, fortunately, impossible to institutionalise the human spirit.
As light relief from this dramatic pageant the present Archbishop of Canterbury is more than welcome. In his case perhaps one is reminded not so much of churches falling in love with each other 'like men and women' as of the Shetland and the Clydesdale. But since Coggan, our demon Shetland, seems incapable of staying on his ladder it may be necessary to resort to the traditional method, in which the Clydesdale has to be persuaded to enter a pit.
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