A Case Without Parallel: The Bishops of London and the Anglican Church Overseas, 1660–1748

1993 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-475
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Yeo

‘For a bishop to live at one end of the world, and his Church at the other, must make the office very uncomfortable to the bishop, and in a great measure useless to the people.’ This was the verdict of Thomas Sherlock, bishop of London from 1748 to 1761, on the provision which had been made by the Church of England for the care of its congregations overseas. No Anglican bishopric existed outside the British Isles, but a limited form of responsibility for the Church overseas was exercised by the see of London. In the time of Henry Compton, bishop from 1675 to 1713, Anglican churches in the American colonies, in India and in European countrieshad all sought guidance from the bishop of London. By the 1740s the European connection had been severed; the bishop still accepted some colonial responsibilities but the arrangement was seen as anomalous by churchmen on both sides of the Atlantic. A three-thousand-mile voyage separated the colonists from their bishop, and those wishing to seek ordination could not do so unless they were prepared to cross the ocean. Although the English Church claimed that the episcopate was an essential part of church order, no Anglican bishop had ever visited America, confirmation had never been administered, and no church building in the colonies had been validly consecrated. While a Roman Catholic bishopric was established in French Canada at an early date, the Anglican Church overseas had no resident bishops until the end of the eighteenth century. In the words of Archbishop Thomas Seeker, this was ‘a case which never had its parallel before in the Christian world’.

2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-27
Author(s):  
Thomas Scheck

The English Catholic apologist John Heigham (1568–1632) deserves to be better known in light of the significant historical consequences of his efforts in the field of Catholic apologetics. Heigham’s tract, The Gagge of the Reformed Gospel (1623) accused the Reformed Church in England of heresy and innovation and summoned the readers back to the Roman Catholic Church. This work was answered by Richard Montagu (1577–1641), the future bishop of Chichester and Norwich in his book, A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624). Montagu’s book provoked a storm of controversy within the Church of England because the author simultaneously replied to Heigham’s Catholic arguments and attacked Calvinism within the Church of England, which he labelled ‘Puritanism’. A series of books attacking Montagu were then published by English Calvinists who accused Montagu of popery and of betrayal of the Reformed cause. These disputes contributed to the Calvinist/Arminian division within the Anglican Church, a religious controversy that was one of the contributing causes of the English Civil War. Thus the seed planted by Heigham’s tract grew into a forest of religious controversies and ended in a war. This article summarizes the content of Heigham’s tract and the principal ideas of his Catholic apologetics, after recounting the main events of Heigham’s little known life. Then Montagu’s response will be surveyed and the reactions it spawned.


1983 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-224
Author(s):  
Rene M. Kollar

From 1906–13, Abbot Aelred Carlyle (1874–1955) enjoyed immense popularity as an Anglo-Catholic, and, according to some, could have easily become the spokesman for this section of the Anglican Church. Through perseverance and diplomacy, he singlehandedly founded the first Benedictine monastery in the Church of England since the Reformation. Unlike others who sought and failed to bring Roman Catholic practices into the Established Church, Abbot Carlyle enjoyed the explicit ecclesiastical sanction of an Archbishop of Canterbury for his work, and with this seal of approval he could dismiss critics and disbelievers. By 1910, Abbot Carlyle and his community on Caldey Island, South Wales, had become a paradise for High Churchmen. The Abbot's charismatic and hypnotic personality attracted many who nostalgically longed for the glories of a medieval and united Christendom. Armed with a High Church theory of Benedictinism, Caldey became an enclave of ritualism, the “naughty underworld” of the Edwardian Anglican Church. Caldey was, at its peak, an exemplar of pre-Reformation Roman Catholic monasticism. In 1913, the experiment was in ruins. Carlyle refused to yield to the reforming zeal of the Bishop of Oxford and his attempts to force Caldey to conform to the comprehension of the Anglican Church. The result was sensational: a group of monks renounced the church of their baptism and sought admission to the Church of Rome.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-87
Author(s):  
Andrew-John Bethke

AbstractThe article surveys liturgical developments in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa from 1908 to 2010. The author uses numerous source documents from several Anglican archives to analyse the experimental and fully authorized liturgies, detailing the theological and sociological shifts which underpinned any significant changes. The author includes several sources which, until this point, have not been considered; particularly in relation to the reception of newer liturgies. These include letters, interviews and newspaper articles. Influences from the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of South India, the Church of England, the Episcopal Church in the USA and the Church of New Zealand all contributed to the authorized rites in the local church. Furthermore, the article shows that local, traditionally disenfranchised voices are now beginning to be included with liturgical transformation.


2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (34) ◽  
pp. 334-338
Author(s):  
Christopher Hill

Mathew's varied ecclesiastical progress presents a fascinating case study of an episcopate detached from a main-stream Christian community and alerts us to the danger of solely considering ‘episcopal lineage‘ as the litmus test for apostolicity. Mathew was born in France in 1852 and baptised a Roman Catholic; due to his mother's scruples he was soon re-baptised in the Anglican Church. He studied for the ministry in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, but sought baptism again in the Church of Rome, into which he was ordained as a priest in Glasgow in 1877. He became a Dominican in 1878, but only persevered a year, moving around a number of Catholic dioceses: Newcastle, Plymouth, Nottingham and Clifton. Here he came across immorality, and became a Unitarian. He next turned to the Church of England and the Diocese of London, but was soon in trouble for officiating without a licence. In 1890 he put forward his claim to Garter King of Arms for the title of 4th Earl of Llandaff of Thomastown, Co. Tipperary. He renounced the Church of England in 1899 because of vice. After founding a zoo in Brighton, which went bankrupt, he appeared in court in connection with a charge of embezzlement. He then became a Roman Catholic again, now as a layman.


1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Taylor

ABSTRACTThe eighteenth century is traditionally seen as an interlude between two vigorous movements of church reform. This article explores the problems and attitudes which underlay the absence of major structural reform of the Church in this period. To do so, it examines the failure of attempts, especially those of the 1740s and 1750s, to create an anglican episcopate in the American colonies. The leaders of the Church of England were agreed that the need for American bishops was pressing, on both pastoral and administrative grounds, and the 1740s and 1750s witnessed two proposals for their creation which were supported by virtually the whole bench of bishops. Both failed. The whig ministry resolutely opposed these initiatives, largely out of fear that any debate of church reform would revive the political divisions of Queen Anne's reign. The bishops, moreover, were prepared to submit to this ministerial veto, despite their belief in the necessity of reform, not through political subservience, but because they too feared renewed controversy about religion and the Church, believing that such controversy would revive both anti-clerical attacks from without and bitter divisions within.


1890 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 93-99
Author(s):  
James William McIlvain

There are among the archives of Maryland preserved at Annapolis (the colonial records are perhaps the best in the country) some curious documentary proofs of the existence of a large number of Puritans in the colony. Indeed, these State papers contain almost all the account that we have of their presence there at an early date, as all their purely ecclesiastical documents have perished. They were there, however, from a very early period, and in such large numbers, that Maryland cannot be called a Roman Catholic colony in the sense that Massachusetts can be called a Puritan colony, or Virginia a colony of the Cavaliers. The Protestants were in the majority from the very beginning, as the reports of the Jesuit fathers clearly show. The celebrated Act of Toleration was evidently a compromise between the Lord Proprietor and his Protestant subjects, a piece of legislation which reflects great credit upon the common-sense of Lord Baltimore, even if we may suspect that on this occasion he made a virtue of necessity. Of these Protestants so large a number were Puritans in their sympathies, that they ruled the colony during the Commonwealth, passing a law, which is little to their credit, which deprived both Papists and prelatists of any part in the government. For a long time the colony continued Puritan in its tone. So late as 1676 Lord Baltimore objected to the proposed action of the Privy Council of England looking toward the establishment of the Church of the mother country as the established church of Maryland, on the ground that the large majority of the inhabitants of the province were either Presbyterians, Independents, or Quakers. He represents those of his own faith as being but a small minority. The Episcopalians, also, did not form a majority until some time after the establishment of the Church of England, at the beginning of the next century.


Moreana ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 41 (Number 157- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-71
Author(s):  
John McConica

During the period in which these papers were given, there were great achievements on the ecumenical scene, as the quest to restore the Church’s unity was pursued enthusiastically by all the major Christiandenominations. The Papal visit of John Paul II to England in 1982 witnessed a warmth in relationships between the Church of England and the Catholic Church that had not been experienced since the early 16th century Reformation in England to which More fell victim. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission was achieving considerable doctrinal consensus and revisionist scholarship was encouraging an historical review by which the faithful Catholic and the confessing Protestant could look upon each other respectfully and appreciatively. It is to this ecumenical theme that James McConica turns in his contribution.


Author(s):  
Hiermonk Ioann ( Bulyko) ◽  

The Second Vatican Council was a unique event in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Initiated by Pope John XXIII, it was intended to make the Roman Catholic Church more open to the contemporary society and bring it closer to the people. The principal aim of the council was the so called aggiornamento (updating). The phenomenon of updating the ecclesiastical life consisted in the following: on the one hand, modernization of the life of the Church and closer relations with the secular world; on the other hand, preserving all the traditions upon which the ecclesiastical life was founded. Hence in the Council’s documents we find another, French word ressourcement meaning ‘return to the origins’ based on the Holy Scripture and the works of the Church Fathers. The aggiornamento phenomenon emerged during the Second Vatican Council due to the movement within the Catholic Church called nouvelle theologie (French for “new theology”). Its representatives advanced the ideas that became fundamental in the Council’s decisions. The nouvelle theologie was often associated with modernism as some of the ideas of its representatives seemed to be very similar to those of modernism. However, what made the greatest difference between the two movements was their attitude towards the tradition. For the nouvelle theologie it was very important to revive Christianity in its initial version, hence their striving for returning to the sources, for the oecumenical movement, for better relations with non-Catholics and for liturgical renewal. All these ideas can be traced in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and all this is characterized by the word aggiornamento.


Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller

Grace and Freedom addresses the issue of divine grace in relation to the freedom of the will in Reformed or “Calvinist” theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century with a focus on the work of the English Reformed theologian William Perkins, and his role as an apologist of the Church of England, defending its theology against Roman Catholic polemic, and specifically against the charge that Reformed theology denies human free choice. Perkins and his contemporaries affirmed that salvation occurs by grace alone and that God is the ultimate cause of all things, but they also insisted on the freedom of the human will and specifically the freedom of choice in a way that does not conform to modern notions of libertarian freedom or compatibilism. In developing this position, Perkins drew on the thought of various Reformers such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Zacharias Ursinus, on the nuanced positions of medieval scholastics, and on several contemporary Roman Catholic representatives of the so-called second scholasticism. His work was a major contribution to early modern Reformed thought both in England and on the continent. His influence in England extended both to the Reformed heritage of the Church of England and to English Puritanism. On the Continent, his work contributed to the main lines of Reformed orthodoxy and to the piety of the Dutch Second Reformation.


Author(s):  
Tony Claydon

In the period 1662–1829 the Church of England saw itself simultaneously as a national Church for England, as a branch of the European Protestant Reformation, and as a part of a community of Churches across the continent. These identities caused tensions by suggesting different answers to the question of who were true Christians abroad. Anglicans might feel affinities both with Roman Catholic establishments and with the Protestant populations who challenged them. These tensions were managed in part by ambiguity and a determination not to press one identity too hard at the expense of others. This allowed the Church to maintain strong links with a wide variety of the faithful overseas. But tensions were also managed by an increasing spirit of accommodation. Both the Toleration Act of 1689 and the eventual emancipation of Dissenters and Catholics were aided by the struggles of the Church to contain its own internal diversity.


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