THE
P RTAL
September 2017
Page 24
Who is ganging up
on the Holy Father?
CofE experience colours the
Ordinariate
“We have been there. We have the tee-shirt. We bear the scars.”
Says Geoffrey Kirk
T he blogosphere
has been alive, of late, with comment about an article in CRUX denouncing
converts to Catholicism as enemies of the Holy Father’s agenda (whatever that is thought to be). I am not
aware of a posse of vociferous converts ganging up on Pope Francis; but I think I grasp what Austen Ivereigh
and other liberal commentators mean. And it deserves an answer.
Certainly, many of us in the Ordinariates have a
Our devotion to the Holy Father is based on the trust
mind-set which (quite understandably) has been that he will always uphold and express the ordinary
conditioned by past experience. And that experience and perennial magisterium of the Church.
is of a relentless liberalising agenda pursed by guile,
cunning and downright hypocrisy.
True loyalty and fidelity can do no more than that.
Much of that – in relation to the ordination of women
in the Church of England - I have detailed in my book
‘Without Precedent’. But it goes on…
For example: despite assurances by Justin Welby
and others that CofE doctrine about marriage has
not been changed and is not about to be changed, a
major cathedral in our capital city recently hosted the
blessing (with Eucharist) of two lesbian priests. The
ceremony was followed by a party in the nave. The
event was (just) legal in the letter but flagrant in the
spirit.
Such occurrences (with obvious establishment
backing) clearly, as they say, ‘move things on’. They
indicate the determination of an influential part of the
Church of England to become in reality what it has
always tended to be: not a vehicle of the Gospel but a
chaplain to the Zeitgeist.
Now, when converts see (as in the case of extreme
interpretations of Amoris Laetitia) similar nefarious
attempts to push the envelope, they are naturally
alarmed. We have been there. We have the tee-shirt.
We bear the scars.
Small wonder, then that we look to the Papacy, not as
a fount of novelty, but (as Blessed John Henry Newman
put it) as a ‘remora’, or restraint.