English ≠ Anglican

It’s not just the American mainline that is running dry ; over at EPPC, George Weigel notes the latest divorce for Henry VIII’s ecclesial progeny: “England’s cause, and Anglicanism’s, are no longer thought to be the same.” Unfortunately, this arguable de facto split between the Church and society of England is not due to recent First Amendment importation or imposition; the British have not suddenly recognized the spiritual and social value of disestablishment:

“English = Protestant” has been replaced by a new equation: “English = Multiculturally P.C.” Evensong is still sung superbly in King’s College chapel, Cambridge; but the psalms and canticles echo amidst the real absence. Bunyan’s Pilgrim has come to an even deeper slough: not of despond, but of spiritual apathy and boredom.

Into that slough now rides Father Aidan Nichols, the distinguished English Dominican theologian. His small book, The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England , makes a bold claim about the past and a bold wager about the future: “England is in fact inseparable from Catholicism, unimaginable without it.”

Moreover, Father Nichols argues, to preach, teach, propose and invite the conversion of England is not bad manners, but true courtesy. Replying to a BBC interviewer who fretted that England’s return to the Catholic orbit would violate contemporary ecumenical and multiculturalist sensibilities, Nichols responded . . . :

“If Catholic Christianity conveys in human form the divine revelation which is the greatest truth, goodness and beauty man can know, then all the elements of truth, goodness and beauty in the theory and practice of other forms of Christianity and indeed in other faith traditions would attain their crown in this [Catholic] context, would come to their intended fulfillment.”

Father Nichols’ description of the cultural challenges of the New Evangelization after Vatican II rings true far beyond Land’s End: our problem today is less the new atheism than the new apathy, an apathy that has grown exponentially amidst uninteresting and soggy Christianity, material wealth, and the decline of any public consensus that some things are, simply, true.

Like those who will read him with appreciation here in the former colonies, Father Nichols also recognizes that the challenge of spiritual boredom in post-Christian culture cannot be met by Catholic Lite. It can only be met, and the 21st century world converted, by Catholicism in full.

Aidan Nichols’ Unfashionable Essay —published last February—is already sold-out. Perhaps the converstion, or reversion, of England is not so unfashionable after all.