The old joke that if you assemble five economists in a room and ask them for an economic prediction you will end up with at least six answers could just as easily be applied to the history of the ecumenical movement. Such a joke might seem flippant or dismissive, but it is certainly the story that appears on the pages of Mark Vickers's history of the little known discussions between Anglicans and Catholics in the 1930s.
This book provides an excellent introduction to the lesser known history of the ecumenical movement in a series of conversations between high church Anglicans of the Anglo‐Papalist party, and a small group of Catholic clergy on the issue of corporate reunion. For these Anglo‐Papalists, individual submissions were not the answer to the problem that the Church of England found itself, rather the full reunion of the Church of England with the Catholic Church would be the only thing to save the doctrinal orthodoxy of the Church of England. Perhaps the book's greatest strength is that it places the history of ecumenical dialogue into a wider context. Ecumenism was not something that issued effortlessly from the changes of the Second Vatican Council, but had a much longer and more complex history, particularly within the English context. Moreover, these requests for dialogue made by Anglican clergy were not met with the rebuff of the Catholic hierarchy, indeed the Catholics participated in the dialogues with the full knowledge and consent of the hierarchy, while the archbishops of Canterbury and York treated all of these negotiations with limited interest and for most of the time mild suspicion. The standard narrative, that ecumenism was only able to grow as the Catholic Church gradually opened up to ecclesial communities, seems much less convincing when seen in the light of these conversations in the 1920s and 1930s.
It is perhaps in this way that this book can help us to understand something of the contemporary ecumenical movements. When the plans for the Personal Ordinariate were first announced in 2009, it was painted by some as an act of Catholic aggression, back to the old days before the ‘thaw’ in relations between the Church and other Christian communities. But Vickers helps to show how the Ordinariate was the preferred option for many Anglo‐Papalists with their desire for a corporate solution to the unhappy division between the Church of England and the Catholic Church. In the years 1931–1934 Silas Harris and a number of other Anglican clergymen petitioned for a structural organisation resembling the solutions created for Eastern Catholics to allow them a defined structure within the Catholic Church where dispensations could be given for married clergy, Communion under both kinds, and vernacular liturgy.
One weakness of the book is that while it does make clear that Anglo‐Papalism was quite a small and fairly unrepresentative part of Anglicanism, there is no fuller explanation of what the Church of England looked like in this period. This would certainly help to explain why the 1920s and 1930s was such an important moment for talks on reunion. Much is made of the 1930 Lambeth Conference decision on the use of artificial contraception, but this has now been identified by some Catholics as representing the watershed moment in the twentieth century's moral collapse: the beginning of the slippery slope that we still slide down today. While the book touches on Bishop Gore's modernism, it makes no mentions of the modernist conferences which formed the liberal counterpoint to the Anglo‐Catholic Congresses of the 1920s. The most famous of these was the 1921 Girton Conference, described by The Tablet as the great ‘feast of infidelity in Cambridge.’ It is no surprise therefore that the The Tablet was so dismissive of the claims made by Anglo‐Papalists that they merely found themselves in internal schism within the Church. Because there is no focus on the broader history of the Church of England and Anglican Communion at this time, it is easy to read the reaction of the Catholic press as nothing more than tribal loyalty, whereas, in fact, it was a reaction to a wider set of problems within Anglicanism, all at the same time that modernism within the Catholic Church was receiving widespread, and often heavy handed, condemnation from Rome. For the Anglican modernists and those who attended their conferences, the Catholic Church was less the vague foreign power over the water that threatened fire and inquisition, but was instead seen as a genuine threat to individual personal liberty and conscience. For these churchmen, reunion with the Holy See was the last thing they wanted.
Despite this lack of historical background to the controversies in the Church of England, the author does offer a generous and understanding picture of the men taking part in the conversations. These were men of considerable integrity and as Anglican clergy spent their lives in the service of their people and defending Catholicism and promoting it in the Church of England. It is gratifying that the characters, who could quite easily be dismissed as comic, are given the respect that they deserve. It is interesting to think what might have happened if these conversations had gained more traction, and if an Ordinariate had been set up seventy years earlier what the Church in England as well as the Church of England might look like today. Ultimately the conversations led to failure because their aims were so personal and individual that as a group they did not really know what they wanted, nor could they agree on any concrete proposals.
