THE ADDITIONAL CURATE'S EGG

William Oddie investigates the

financial and other consequences of a divided Church of England

THE ADDITIONAL Curates Society (which was not invented by Anthony Trol- lope) has scattered the pigeons on the deanery lawn by firing off, in archetypally Victorian fashion, a pamphlet. The society was founded in 1837 in the springtime of the Tractarian movement; it recently caused considerable annoyance to the women-priest lobby by withdrawing finan- cial support from parishes with women deacons intending to be 'priested'.

Its pamphlet is entitled 'A New Eliza- bethan Settlement?' which seems to promise that a fairly radical historical analysis of current upheavals in the Church of England will be presented. And so it is; but there are plenty of those about at the moment, and the ruling caste of the Established Church has in recent years become expert in the art of maintaining that (appearances to the contrary notwith- standing) nothing untoward has happened, is happening, or is likely to happen.

What seems to be part of a growing con- sensus, nevertheless, is that whether or not a new Elizabethan settlement is on offer, the days of the old one are numbered. When the dust has settled it may well turn out that the author of this pamphlet, Father Stephen Trott — a parish clergy- man in Northamptonshire — will have played a significant part in dismantling it.

His contention, in brief, is that by alter- ing the formularies to which clergy must swear obedience at their ordination, the Church's General Synod has changed the Church of England's doctrine and thus `More bloody cuts!'

exceeded its powers. Those among the large minority which is opposed to this fun- damental change and who wish to set up some alternative ecclesial arrangement perhaps in communion with Rome — are therefore entitled to their share in the endowments of the Church of England. The financial provisions included in the women's ordination package, says Father Trott, are in no way commensurate with the scale of what has to be done. A Royal Commission should, therefore, be set up to divide the Church's substance between the parties to the dispute.

It will have to be demonstrated, of course, that a change in doctrine has actu- ally taken place, since whether or not this has occurred is precisely one of the issues involved in the controversy over women- priests. But if it has, then Fr. Trott's request for a Royal Commission to divide the Church's property may well be less eccentric than it sounds.

For, strange as it may seem, a legal precedent for this suggestion does exist; and the more one looks at it, the more exact the precedent seems to be. In 1904, in the case of Free Church of Scotland vs Lord Overtoun, the House of Lords held that since the Church of Scotland had changed the terms of its adherence to its principal doctrinal formulary, the West- minster Confession, those who had held fast to it — who became known as the `Wee Frees' — were entitled to hold part of the Church's assets, and a Royal Com- mission was set up to oversee the division of these assets.

Two questions seem to be at issue here. Has there been a change in doctrine? And if so, does the General Synod have the right to make such a change? The second question can be easily answered: under the legislation of 1919 governing the Church Assembly (specifically renewed to apply to the Assembly's successor body, the General Synod) it is clearly laid down that 'it does not belong to the functions of the Assem- bly to issue any statement purporting to define the doctrine of the Church of Eng- land on any question of theology, and no such statement shall be issued by the assembly'. Has there been a change of doctrine? The argument that there has seems to be hard to contest; for under the Church of England's canon law (Canon A5), the Church's doctrine is to be found 'in partic- ular . . . in the 39 Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal' (my italics). Assent to these doctrinal for- mularies has to be sworn by Anglican cler- gy at their ordination; this is how the `Elizabethan settlement' is still imposed. For Anglo-Catholic clergy, the doctrine enshrined in the preface to Cranmer's Ordinal has been essential to their submis- sion: this refers to the ancient threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons inherited from the Catholic Church, and expressly states 'the intent that these Orders may be continued, and reverently used and esteemed, in the Church of Eng- land'.

The Anglo-Catholic case has always been that this establishes the Catholicity of Anglican orders. What the General Synod has done by radically tampering with these orders thus constitutes, in effect, a redefi- nition of the Church of England: the ques- tion of women-priests in itself has always been incidental to this for Anglican dissi- dents. The General Synod has made a solemn and unilateral Declaration of the Independence — or to put it another way, of the non-Catholicity — of the Church of England. The definitive nature of this step was understood by the Catholic Church itself within hours of the decision. It con- stituted, said the Pope, 'a grave obstacle' to reunion; and when this Pope speaks of `grave obstacles', he means 'over my dead body'.

What is beginning to emerge from cur- rent events is that the Elizabethan settle- ment was never really a settlement in the first place. There has been in recent years an Anglo-Catholic tendency to romanti- cise the Anglican dispensation once it began to be attacked from a liberal and not a Catholic position; thus, Father Trott speaks of 'the particular genius of the Eliz- abethan Settlement' in 'binding together the Catholic order and sacraments of the Church with the reformed tradition of Elizabethan England'.

But the diverse elements within Angli- canism could only be bound together by externally imposed force: the notion that there has ever existed a 'comprehensive' Anglicanism with which other Churches could do ecumenical business has always been an illusion, as the Catholic Cam- bridge theologian Fr Aidan Nichols has convincingly demonstrated in his timely and indispensable book The Panther and the Hind. The Church of England, as John Henry Newman put it in 1866, embodies

`three principles of religion . . . the Catholic principle, the Protestant principle, and the sceptical principal. Each of these, it is hardly necessary to say, is violently opposed to the other two.'

Newman predicted that if ever the power of the state over the Church of England were relaxed, 'it would be broken up by its internal dissensions'. In 1970, Parliament devolved most of its powers on the General Synod. It has taken only two decades for Newman's prediction to come true. What the Church of England has not yet realised is that if it is really more interested in being an effective Church according to its lights than in the increasingly hollow trappings of

establishment, an amicable divorce between incompatible partners could be the best thing for all concerned. Those who have always stood in the way of ecumenical relationships with the nonconformist churches will then have departed or been marginalised.

Under the umbrella of a now unambigu- ously liberal Protestant and disestablished Church of England, those from other reformed traditions could come together in a United Protestant body. Having gone through a messy divorce, the Church of England would at last find itself. But first there has to be an equitable division of the property; the law may yet award those now leaving the family home more than they have been offered so far.