Have you heard of the Anglican via media? This is the idea that Anglicanism is the ‘middle way’ between Catholicism and Protestantism. The concept is often extended to mean that Anglicanism is the ‘middle way’ between many different extremes. It is the way of compromise, the way of common sense, the way of ‘dual integrities’. I used to be attracted to this theory. It seemed a very creative way to deal with the tensions of Catholicism and Protestantism within Anglican... Read more

Obedience is a vow, and every vow is intended to be woven into life as one of the basic foundations of our existence. We are obedient simply because we are creatures, not the creator. Every day we must be obedient to a whole range of laws we never question. We are obedient to everything from the law of gravity to the law of stopping for red lights. To learn obedience and to value obedience therefore, is a way of squelching... Read more

I’ve just finished Eamon Duffy’s latest, Marking the Hours. As usual, a masterful study of late medieval and the years up to and through the English Deformation. Duffy scrupulously gathers the data, cleverly interprets it and draws the right amount of conclusions from it.Together with Stripping of the Altars and Voices of Morbath, Marking the Hours continues Duffy’s relentlessly thoroughgoingly professional re-assessment of the English Deformation. Always careful in his scholarship and never polemical or extreme, he nevertheless continues to... Read more

The second vow the Benedictine takes is the vow of obedience. Obedience!!?? we howl. But we’re grown ups. We’re supposed to take responsibility for ourselves. We’re supposed to be pro active. We’re supposed to make our own moral decisions. Yadda yadda yadda. Yes, no doubt true up to a point. We don’t want a church made up of doormats and robots. However, the vices of any age are best corrected by the virtues we find most repellent. Our age is... Read more

Amy reports on the ceremony of the Pope conferring the pallium on new Archbishops on this feast day of SS Peter and Paul. Here is what I love about the Catholic Church: the sense of unity, coherence and sacramentality of it all. In a world riven asunder with every kind of religious opinion under the sun, in the Christian Church torn apart and fragmented into tens of thousands of sects, consider the integral unity of the Catholic Church. There on... Read more

Peter the Fisherman. Paul the intellectual. Peter the rough working class man who speaks from the heart. Paul the man who speaks from his head. Peter the peasant. Paul the well connected, well educated Roman citizen. Peter the humble believer. Paul the professional religious man. Peter with the high school diploma. Paul who went to the Ivy League. God chose them both, but he made Peter pre-eminent. He chose the simple man to be the Rock on which to build... Read more

The Benedictine monk vows stability, and this means he will stay in one place. He’s not on the move like a friar or a missionary. He can’t be whisked here and there like a diocesan priest. He stays put. That’s why a Benedictine, when asked will not just say, “I’m a Benedictine monk.” but “I’m a monk of Douai” or Downside or St Vincent’s or Solesmes or Quarr or whatever his monastic house happens to be. That’s where he has... Read more

This quotation of St Irenaeus of Lyons helped to bring me into the Catholic Church: Therefore we will refute those who hold unauthorized assemblies–either because of false self importance, or pride, or blindness and perversity–by pointing to the tradition of the greatest and oldest church, a church known to all men, which was founded and established at Rome by the most renouwned Apostles Peter and Paul. this tradition the church has from the Apostles, and this faith has been proclaimed... Read more

Here Starts a little series on the Benedictine Way The Benedictine Monk takes three vows: Stability, Obedience and Conversion of Life. The three vows are braided together like three strands of a strong rope. Each of the vows has a concrete expression. The vow of stability means the monk promises to remain in one community for life. He commits himself to one family of monks, one place, one set of buildings, one way of life. The whole point is to... Read more

The guy over at Catholidoxies has noticed that Protestant Christians in the mainstream are less and less inclined to refer to God as ‘Father’. He posts on this and expresses his reserve about this practice, wondering if it is heresy or not. Yes it is heresy for some very good reasons. First reason is that God, while being transcendent, is also personal. Therefore it is right and proper to refer to him in terminology that recognizes his person-hood. ‘God’ is... Read more