Good Call

Now that liberals in the Church of England have pushed through the notion of women bishops, it is worthwhile to revisit a prescient essay, written back in 1994, on the occasion of the C of E first allowing women into the priesthood. Entitled "The End of the Oxford Movement," it uncannily predicts the events now taking place in the Anglican Church:

As Newman himself was frustrated in attempting to link the early Church to an orthodox Anglicanism or Reformed Catholicism, modern Anglo-Catholics are realizing the impossibility of a via media between Rome and the Reformers. Fr. Ian Ker, the authoritative biographer of Newman, comments that the Synod's recent decision is a victory for the liberals and may mark the end of the Anglican Church's unity. He wonders how long Evangelicals will remain in harmony with liberals now that the Anglo-Catholics are leaving or are marginalized.

Fr. Ker repeats Newman's warning that the Church might become so "radically liberalized . . . as to become a simple enemy of the Truth." To him it seems "only a matter of time, how long the Anglican Church retains any part of the faith." At least one thing is clear: The Oxford Movement has served its purpose and has now come to an end.

This short piece, published in This Rock, is well worth reading in its entirety. Its author, by the way, was a young Rhodes Scholar, a recent convert from Hinduism to Catholicism, by the name of Bobby Jindal, now Governor of Louisiana and a possible vice-presidential candidate.