I have discussed Christianity on this blog numerous times over the years; especially as I began writing on it regularly around the time of my conversion and before I was received into the Catholic Church in 2017. This naturally meant it was on my mind and I often wanted to write about it and share what I was reading and learning. I even have an entire unpublished story of my conversion that I may still make public one day; when I feel it is ready. This may never be.
In these posts, I know I’ve mentioned at least once that I was brought up in the Anglican Church of Australia which is part of the Church of England. Until, the 1970s, this was the largest Christian Church in Australia but it has dropped off significantly in observance To say “significantly” is classic British understatement and “disastrously” is perhaps more apt. This was also around the time churches within the “Anglican Communion” began “ordaining” women beginning in the United States Episcopal Church. This began in Australia shortly after my birth though I didn’t really know of it until I was older. Christianity as a whole, has seen steady decline in Western nations but due to mass immigration, the Catholic numbers have been more steady in Australia.
The reason why I’ve used the “scare quotes” above is deliberate. The Anglican Church is at best, separated from the Catholic Church and should not be regarded as a legitimate church by Catholics. This is even more so now that it claims more acres than it does adherents and has continued to depart from even the most basic tenets of Christianity. More importantly, women can not be ordained to the priesthood and so can not be bishops or even deacons. This is an ontological impossibility and not up for debate or serious discussion. This has special relevance now because since earlier this year, there has been a woman who dresses up as a bishop and claims to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. More scandalously, the public head of the Catholic Church has written an official message to her on the Vatican website and even received her in Rome.
As someone who left Anglican Church for the Catholic over this and a number of other issues, I have a pretty strong opinion on this.
When I was received into the Catholic Church, I knew I was not joining a church that didn’t have its problems. At no point in history up to the present period could I have done so. There will be problems until the end of time but it is hard to argue that the problems aren’t considerably worse now. There are various points that people can and like to date these problems but a picture like the one above, is something that was unthinkable until very recently in history. While not in my own living memory, there are many people alive today who were alive when this was unthinkable.
The easiest response for the Church would have been no response at all and this would consider the bare minimum. This wouldn’t have been my preference but it would have been a good example of the power that silence can have. Instead, she has been greeted in an official Vatican document as, “The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dame Sarah Mullally” and “Your Grace“. This is wrong. She is not a priest. She is not a bishop and she is certainly not the Archbishop of Canterbury. There is no Archbishop of Canterbury and the closest person to that title today would be the Archbishop of Southwark, who heads the diocese in the same geographical region of the Catholic Church in England.
Mrs. Mullally is a woman wearing men’s vestments and people who dress in the clothes of another sex are called transvestites. And much like with transvestites, the worst thing you can possibly do is affirm their delusions by calling them what they aren’t. The only thing that somewhat mitigates the sin of her transvestism is that she isn’t wholly conscious that this is what she is doing because nobody would have ever told her so. A lot of people in official positions acknowledge her non-existent title and this apparently includes the Bishop of Rome.
I haven’t checked much Catholic commentary about this and I really don’t want to read any rationalisations because there is no way to rationalise this. It is an insult to saints like St. John Fisher, St. Edmund Campion and St. Thomas More among many others who died defending the Catholic Church. Did they die for nothing? Should Pope Clement VII have simply allowed King Henry VIII to remarry and sent an official letter of congratulations after he passed the Act of Supremacy? After all, it would have saved a lot of lives if he had. Those are the implications one can draw from even seeming to accept the legitimacy of this office; especially when a woman is now claiming to be the head.
Further still, if Mrs. Mullally is recognised as a validly ordained priest and validly consecrated bishop, what is preventing the same happening in the Catholic Church? I am not asking this rhetorically as these actions by the Vatican will raise these questions. She is also married and has children so this raises yet another question about priestly celibacy. I know the answers to these questions but many now do not and partly because the clarity the church should provide on these issues is increasingly absent. It is especially concerning for those both outside and inside the church who believe it can be changed to suit modern sensibilities though the Truth does not change.
I frankly couldn’t care less what happens to the Church of England. It only exists because it is a state church and has extensive real-estate. When I attended a country church while in England in mid-2006, I made up about 10% of the congregation and almost every other parishioner was significantly older than me. This was twenty years ago and things have certainly not gotten better in the two decades since. One of the main reasons for this drop off is that it has abandoned it’s mission. This began back when King Henry VIII made himself pope so he could annul his own valid marriage. But even if you acknowledge the legitimacy of the church in the centuries that followed, it began to waver and break when it opened the door to contraception at the 1930 Lambeth Conference; this decision then spread through to other Protestant churches. The evil of contraception was something that still largely united Christians until this point. Then there was the faux ordination of women and the toleration (followed very shortly by the promotion), of the sin of sodomy. As this was done, attendance continued to dwindle because there was simply nothing to be gained from attending.
This is why I didn’t even think of returning to the Anglican Church when I had a reversion some twelve years ago. It had largely abandoned the faith before I was born and I saw little point in returning to a dying church. It was for the same reason that I was drawn to the Catholic Church which despite many issues, was much more consistent on the issues Christians always believed until very recently. Even King Henry VIII didn’t allow his subjects to divorce and it remained extremely rare in England until last century.
However, this does very much matter for the Catholic Church which I joined accepting both that the Church of England was wrong and the Sacred Tradition of the Catholic Church was right. It is the Anglican Church must reconcile itself to the Catholic Church and not the other way around. That means all female ordinations being declared null publicly as they are in reality. That means apologising for all that happened since the 1500s. This would be a very messy process but one that would leave everything much cleaner in the end.
One might assume that I’m going to jump from the Bark of Peter into a smaller ship in the Aegean or Black Sea with scandalous news like this. But I’m not. As stated earlier, I knew joining the church was not going to be easy and that there are people within the hierarchy and various other positions that actively work against it. I know this for sure as I’ve met quite a few in my relatively short time as a Catholic. Unlike all too many Christians of the Evangelical variety, I also take seriously my Matthew 24:36, ‘that day and hour no one knoweth, not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone.’ So I won’t claim this as a sign of the end times but it certainly is not a good sign and this still troubles me deeply.