THE
P RTAL
September 2016
Page 24
A Cause for
Celebration?
Geoffrey Kirk on the coming five hundredth
anniversary of the Reformation
P
reparations are being made across Europe to celebrate the
five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. The Holy Father is to visit
Sweden where he will celebrate with leaders of the Lutheran World Federation (which was founded in Lund
in 1947). Liturgical documents are emerging for suggested groups of Protestants and Catholics who want
to repent of past antipathies and build a new future together. The German Bishops’ Conference has already
produced a paper setting out the grounds for reconciliation and common action.
There has to be a question of where the Ordinariates
fit into this programme of world-wide junketing.
Anglicanorum Coetibus had, you will remember, a
mixed reception. Some saw it as a creative ecumenical
gesture, demonstrating that the Catholic Church could
welcome those of other traditions into its fellowship –
‘united but not absorbed’, a fulfilment of the hopes of
the Malines Conversations.
should, testify to the pressing need for a wholehearted
adherence to the dogmatic structures, hierarchy and
Others, by contrast, saw it as a gesture of Roman magisterium of the Catholic Church.
triumphalism – a ‘conversion of England’ moment.
One journalist expressed the sentiment memorably:
‘Benedict’, she wrote, ‘has parked his tanks on Rowan
William’s lawn.’
The Ordinariate in England remains perilously small.
England (or at least the Church of England) has shown
no appreciable appetite for conversion. So in what way
can we most usefully take part in a celebration of the
Reformation?
The Catholic Movement in the Church of England
in some ways set itself the task of un-doing the
Reformation. ‘Not of our religion, Father’, the fervent
Anglo-Catholic would say of the evangelicals of the
neighbouring parish. It was a movement born with a
sense of irony – the irony of asserting that the church
within which it functioned was something most of its
members passionately believed it was not.
Retrospectively we can see that it could never have
worked – which is why we are where we are. We
were Catholics trapped in a Reformation body, and
that is the burden that we bring to the forthcoming
celebrations.
What that means for emerging patterns of
ecumenism, others must say. But we can, and I believe