Well I can hardly say I’m a JHN scholar. Mostly I’ve read his contributions to the Tracts For The Times, though I also had a failed attempt to slog through the Apologia Pro Vita Sua. I fully intend to engage with him more in time.

I’ve heard his works are profound. A difficult challenge, but profound.

And those who remain in the Anglican Church and want some sort of special episcopal provision are in fact doing the same thing. They want their own Anglican episcopus vagans. I think this is so far from the spirit of the Tractarians that it is something else entirely.

I was recalling a “Tract” by a certain Samuel Keyes on “Baptism Being Bigger Than Schism” and I wonder if Baptism is bigger than gender?

…and I hope by now you will be able to recognize the difference between how I mean that and how that might sound coming from a more progressive Episcopalian. After all, by all most accounts I’m pretty damned conservative!

There was of course, a parting of the ways, drawn out over the last few decades, punctuated mainly by women’s ordination in the US and then in Britain. Forward in Faith and Affirming Catholicism are its offshoots, and they can argue to death over which one is the true inheritance of the Tractarians. Personally it is very odd to hear female clergy and parishes with female clergy describing themselves as “Anglo-Catholic,” but I can’t stop anybody from doing it, so there’s no sense in trying.

The SSC has come to be known by many people as a trad organization against the ordination of women, even though it got started by ritualist priests long before this was ever an issue. Surely those of you of more “affirming catholic” tendencies can at least see the traditionalist point of view. The intolerance of the American and (now) English governing structures is rather appalling, but not totally surprising. I appreciate the suggestion that has been offered elsewhere that in the process of demanding women bishops the Synod has effectively destroyed any illusion of an episcopally governed Church… there will be women bishops, but there will no longer be any coherent idea of the episcopate (other than nominal administrators of a democratic church).

And Tony, I do see what you mean about congregationalism, though I still don’t see it exactly. But it’s true that there is something deeply problematic about the whole “I’m in communion with this bishop but not that bishop even though we claim to be in the same church.” But that is the way it has been everywhere in the Anglican world following women’s ordination… and this is why it was such a stunning defeat to its opponents, no matter how you look at it: even if we were allowed to keep to ourselves, in a sense, we were forced to live with the dissonance of such arbitrary and uncatholic arrangements.

This can really only be a “watershed” moment if the C of E is considered the ideal paradigm of Anglican existence since outside of them women bishops have been the norm in several Anglican bodies. No doubt, as William Sachs argues in his must-read book “The Transformation of Anglicanism,” the decision to go ahead with womens ordination was monumental and monumentally important in later Anglican problems up to the present day, but the “watershed” seems to me to be still yet to come, in where Anglicanism will be at the next Lambeth and/or whether or not the Covenant ‘works.’

I think that it’s a fair point that both you and Scott make that finding a coherent “Anglo-catholicism” is perhaps a pointless endeavor, but I’d like to think it a labor that is worth undertaking, to train ‘Catholic’ clergy and to compose an appropriate catechism. But it will certainly end up being pointless if we fizzure out from fellowship with one another. I don’t know if ACs just don’t communicate enough or if we don’t spend sufficient energy in laying out what is ‘Catholic’ as compared to what is ‘Protestant’ and where those two find homes in various Anglicanisms but I wish we had more public and informed conversations about it.

At root I’d locate the insufferable Anglican ‘toleration’ which so easily and has often degenerated into indifference to doctrine and practice. But most people love this about Anglicanism so I usually just end up pissing people off when I say this. Nevertheless current global problems cannot but be at least in part caused by the elevating of difference to a virtue. It’s not so-called “diversity” that is glorious but the patient struggle within diversity that generates holiness! *off soapbox*

With Scott, I find attempts to locate the bene esse of the Catholic tradition in male episcopal succession to be unjustifiable. While I recognize the significance of the change in practice to include women – whereas I feel that many don’t totally appreciate the divergence with historical practice – I’ve found the ‘arguments’ against the practice so very weak and unchristological that I ultimately have no sympathy with the traditionalist position on that; especially when it is made so core to our identity.