The news from Rome is stark. Pope Francis, that most unpredictable of pontiffs, has sounded the alarm over a potential schism within the Catholic Church following the ordination of several controversial bishops. My immediate thought, however, was not for the Vatican’s internal squabbles but for the crumbling edifice of the Church of England. For Britain’s state religion has long since ceased to be a bastion of theological clarity; it is a mirror of our national confusion, a muddle of platitudes and political correctness that would make a Victorian bishop weep into his port.
The comparison is instructive. The Catholic Church, for all its scandals and contradictions, still possesses a spine. It can threaten schism because it has something to schism about: doctrine, tradition, the very meaning of the priesthood. The Anglicans, by contrast, have spent a century softening every hard teaching, diluting every creed, until their faith is a kind of spiritual chamomile tea: soothing, perhaps, but utterly lacking in stimulant. When the Archbishop of Canterbury prattles on about inclusivity, I am reminded of Gibbon’s lament for the decline of Rome: a civilisation that forgot what it stood for. We have forgotten what we stand for.
The Pope’s warning should terrify us, but not for the reasons the news anchors think. It is terrifying because it shows that even the oldest institution in the West can still tear itself apart over principle. The Anglicans cannot tear themselves apart because they have no principles left to fight over. They are a corpse that has been propped up by the state and by a vague cultural nostalgia. The ordination of women, the embrace of same-sex marriage, the redefinition of sin as a social construct – these were not victories for progress. They were the gradual evacuation of meaning from a once-great institution.
And what of the state? The Crown remains the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a title that now seems almost satirical. For what does the state govern? A body that has become a department of social services with a sacramental veneer. The monarch, poor soul, is supposed to defend the faith, but what faith would that be? The faith that now blesses everything and condemns nothing? The faith that has made its peace with the spirit of the age, which is the spirit of nothingness?
I recall the words of the great Victorian intellectual John Henry Newman, who abandoned the Church of England for Rome precisely because he saw the drift, the slipperiness of its claims. He understood that a church that cannot define itself soon becomes a club. And clubs, as we know, are subject to fashion. The Anglican club is now desperately unfashionable, except among the liberal elite who enjoy its ceremonial theatre while ignoring its creeds.
The Pope’s crisis is about authority and tradition. The Anglican crisis is about the absence of both. We are watching the death of a once-vibrant faith, and the mourners are few. The state should disestablish the Church of England, not out of secularist spite, but out of mercy. Let it die with dignity. Or, better yet, let it be reborn in the fire of genuine disagreement, even if that means schism. At least then it would be alive.
As for the Pope, I wish him luck. He will need it. But I suspect the real lesson for Britain is darker: if the Catholic Church can fracture over principle, what hope is there for an institution that has already abandoned all principle? The bells of St. Paul’s ring hollow now. They are the sound of a nation that has lost its soul. And we are too polite, too muddled, too English to even notice.
