THE P RTAL
May 2014
Page 24
Syllabus Errorum
A
s Catholics
throughout the world are joyfully celebrating the
sesquicentenary of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, we Ordinariate Catholics
have special insights to bring. We have, after all, walked on the wild side and in
consequence we know a thing or two about error.
The catch-all ending
to Pio Nono’s eighty
anathemas (that ‘the
Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself,
and come to terms with progress, liberalism and
modern
civilisation.’)
is
just about the opposite of
contemporary Anglicanism,
where ’progress, liberalism
and modern civilisation’ set
the ecclesiastical agenda.
It seems a long time since I
was being told by Anglican
hierarchs that there was
no such thing as a ‘liberal
agenda’.
An
evangelical
archdeacon admonished me
in solemn tones: I was simply
scaremongering to suggest
that the arguments in favour of
women’s ordination and those
in favour of gay liberation
had much in common. It was
wrong to characterise WO as
the thin end of a wedge. Now
that we are beginning to see
the thick end of the wedge, I
wonder if he has changed his
tune.
crisis over civil
marriage and divorce
George Carey famously claimed that, by its failure to
ordain women, the CofE was ‘in danger of not being
heard if women are exercising leadership in every
area of our society’s life save the ordained priesthood.’
(1992) Step forward, then, Justin Welby, on the subject
of homosexual marriages (2014): ‘others will see the
Church as increasingly irrelevant and promoting
attitudes akin to racism.’ There is clearly no adequate
Anglican term for déjà vu; and I suppose, as a catholic,
that I am not allowed the schadenfreude. But it does all
rather take the biscuit.
raised on his watch. He is simply playing his allotted
part in the tragi-comedy of the culture wars between
Enlightenment liberalism and Christianity which has
been unfolding for the best part of five hundred years.
Marriage discipline and its implications, naturally,
has an added poignancy for
Anglicans; but the crisis over
civil marriage and divorce
(involving
the
Papacy,
the French Republic and
Bismarck’s kulturkampf ) was
a central issue for Pius IX.
What he would have made of
a British Conservative party
which supported a wholesale
redefinition of marriage itself
is anybody’s guess.
redefinition of
marriage
W. E. Gladstone was
famously fulsome in his
condemnation of both the
Syllabus of Errors and the
doctrine of Papal infallibility.
He was so in the confidence
that he voiced the opinions of
all right thinking Englishmen
(and women, no doubt, if
he had bothered to consider
their opinions). But times
have changed.
The Established Church can no longer be relied
on to be the bulwark of sound Christian values, as
Gladstone blithely supposed it could. It has become
what Pio Nono feared would be the fate of the Catholic
Church at the hand of continental liberal secularism:
simply a machine for baptising the ambient culture.
Despite the ridicule to which he was subjected, he is
belatedly having the last word. It seems that Giovanni
Maria Mastai-Ferretti, not William Ewart Gladstone,
got it right in the end.
So let’s hear it for the Syllabus Errorum – all the way
Welby, of course, is no enthusiast for gay marriage – to the offices of The Tablet.
he would rather, I am sure, that the subject had not been
Geoffrey Kirk
contents page