RC v CofE

Charles Moore & Caroline Moore

28 October 2009

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One marriage, two churches

Roman Catholicism is truly catholic, which makes it is profoundly and sweetly inclusive; but it is also thoroughly Roman, which can be triumphantly and repellently exclusive. I found I could not believe that Absolute Truth is embodied in any earthly institution that believes it alone is right. The Nicene Creed states that we believe in ‘one holy, catholic and apostolic Church’; and the visible church, the Church in this world, is intended by God to be one, and should strive to be so. But it will always fail.

The only True Church is the Church Invisible — the ‘communion of the saints’, whose precise membership is known only to God. It is because the one true Church can never be found upon this earth that ‘our conversation is in heaven’. There is a deep felicity in this King James Version of Philippians iii 20, which translates politeuma, or citizen state, as ‘conversation’. Ideas of citizenship, of belonging, and of a true society are bound up with the notion of many voices in discourse.

The Anglican Church has never maintained that it offers the only true path to God. Hooker, indeed, states explicitly that Catholics could be saved.

Hooker offers two ‘pillars’ of authority for the Anglican — the Scriptures and Tradition. Both scripture and tradition in the Anglican tradition are infinitely rich, and infinitely flexible, yet are rigorously explicated. There is nothing woolly in the exemplary diversity of the great sermons of the 17th century, which encompass the surprisingly sweet-natured English Calvinism of Perkins or Sibbes, the scrupulous Armenianism of Taylor, the passionate linguistic exactness of Andrewes, the intellectual and emotional fireworks of Donne. All contribute voices to the Anglican ‘conversation’.

Donne is interesting since he was a Catholic who converted to the Church of England. In his sermons he celebrated the peculiar combination of freedom and stability that his paradoxical spirit craved, and which he evidently found combined so richly in his new-found-land of Anglicanism:

‘God loves not singularity: God bindes us to nothing, that was never said but by one. As God loves Sympathy, God loves Symphony; God loves a compassion and fellow feeling of others miseries, that is Sympathy, and God loves Harmony, and fellow-beleeving of others Doctrines, and that is Symphony. No one man alone makes a Church; no one Church alone makes a Catholique Church.’