It’s a Funny Old World 6

An historical curiosity from my friend William Tighe, a vast repository of information about European history, including its religious history, and including the odder corners of that. He teaches at Muhlenberg College. Here he’s writing on “British Orthodoxy.” The significance of 1994 is that in that year the Church of England voted to ordain women ministers, to the dismay of its conservative wing

I received the little quarterly bulletin/newsletter Anglo-Orthodoxy during the years that it was published, 1982 to 1994.  It was the publication of a group of Church of England enthusiasts for Orthodoxy, largely clerical, a number of whom became Orthodox in and after 1994 (when the Anglo-Orthodox Society dissolved itself, and the journal ceased publication), but a surprising number of whom remained in the Church of England.

They tended to give a good deal of attention to rather marginal Orthodox groups such as the Eglise Orthodoxe Gallicane de France, founded in the 1940s by French “independent clergy” and in the years since then sometimes in communion with one or another canonical Orthodox churches (the Russian Church in Exile for some years and then, after a hiatus, with the Romanian Church), but usually, and for the last 20+ years, in communion with nobody but themselves.  (They had recreated a version of the pre-Carolingian “Gallican Liturgy,” and were often accused by some suspicious Orthodox as having “occult” or “theosophical” tendencies.)

I recall that they devoted a good deal of attention to the reception by the Copts in ca. 1992 of the “British Orthodox Church/Catholicosate of Glastonbury” into their fold, and I also recall, vaguely, some interesting articles by Fr. Farrington on the move, and why it was more expedient for them to hitch up to the Copts rather than to any Chalcedonian Orthodox church.

A friend on at least one occasion attended their Catholicos’ liturgy in the 80s.  He said that it was attended by, besides himself, four elderly ladies, one elderly man, and seven dogs.  He also opined that the people with whom he had occasion to speak afterwards were “harmless eccentrics.”