Soldier of Christ: A Sermon preached for the Patronal Festival of S. Martin of Tours, Brighton
11 November 2008
November 11th is a day with an inordinate number of significant commemorations. Of course, it is the festival of your beloved patron S. Martin of Tours, one of the most endearing of patron saints. From the fourth century to the Middle Ages much of Western Europe including England began a forty day fast on 11 November so that this day was known as Quadragesima Sancti Martini. On the Eve and the Day itself it was customary to feast, eat and drink heartily; so it is that Martin is the patron saint of innkeepers, vintners and alcoholics.
Not only that however, it is also, and sombrely, the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice in 1918 which brought to an end the Great War fought at so great a cost. It is the fateful day in 1992 when the General Synod of an organisation called the Church of England voted to permit the ordination of women to the presbyterate, an act which changed the face of the Church and launched a period of internal division and ecclesiological chaos which now appears to be reaching its endgame. Of course, on the same day Forward in Faith was launched on an unsuspecting world as the political, if not the militant, wing of the Anglo-Catholic Movement. And if that was not enough, November 11th was also the day on which Martin Luther was baptised. Well, I suppose that explains why it all went wrong.
And, if we stretch things a little, today marks the first time that a representative of your new secular patrons has been here. This year the patronage of this church; that is the right to present the Vicar to the Living was given to the Society for the Maintenance of the Faith, of which I am the Patronage Secretary. The Society’s constitution also requires it “to promote the Catholic Faith” – not that it needs much promotion here, I confidently expect. And, if that were not enough, we meet for this festival in the 175th anniversary year of the foundation of the Oxford Movement, that great movement of Catholic revival in the Church, of which this church has been such a prominent witness for nearly 150 of those years.
And at the heart of that Catholic Revival is that which we are met to do tonight, that which lies at the heart of this parish and its life, the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass. The Oxford Movement, its heirs and successors, placed the Eucharistic celebration at the very centre of the Christian life and of the Church. This holy of holies, this divine sacrifice would lead all to a new understanding of the vocation of all Christian people to the holiness of life. It is an expression of all that we are and it is the focus, the locus divinum, of all that we do. It is the axis mundi et caeli, the intersection of earth and heaven, where we are drawn by its mystery into the closest possible communion with God in Christ Jesus and to one another. We do more than hear Mass or make our communion. The self-offering of Christ, the Divine Victim, draws us ever more completely and intimately into the sacrifice made on the wood of the cross so that we might live more fully to him, imitate him, serve as he served, love as he loved, proclaim his Good News, announce the kingdom, make new disciples.
Flowing from that was the impetus for S. Martin to share his cloak with a beggar: “I was naked and you clothed me.” Unlike S. Martin, however, the General Synod and the Bishops of the Church of England did not share their cloak with us, rather they passed by on the other side and threw us a Code of Practice on the etiquette of begging.
Perhaps I have intruded a note of contention. But in this year of anniversary the Movement which began in Oxford in 1833 is facing what might be its final crisis and the year seems ablaze with ironies: an inclusive church has no room for those of conscientious dissent: a catholic church embracing a protestant ecclesiology: a mission shaped church fatally undermining itself by its own actions: the most Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury since Cardinal Pole presiding, it seems haplessly and unhappily, over the destruction of his church’s Catholic heritage and preferring Protestantism in fancy dress, “salvation by haberdashery,” as someone unkindly put it, to the reunification of Catholic Christendom. But S. Paul in his Second Letter to Timothy has been here before us: “The time is sure to come when, far from being content with sound teaching, people will be avid for the latest novelty and collect themselves a whole series of teachers according to their own tastes; and then instead of listening to the truth, they will turn to myths.” Perhaps the words of the Psalmist might accurately represent the more pessimistic mood of Anglo-Catholics “For the enemy hath persecuted my soul … he hath laid me in the darkness, as the men that have been long dead.”
But there is also a note of defiance and of militancy. S. Martin was a soldier, named, after all, after Mars, the god of war. He may have turned his back on killing his fellow men when he said that he could not fight having become a follower of Christ, but he remained a combatant in the theological and doctrinal warfare of his time. He fought the intellectual fight against the Arians in defence of orthodox Trinitarian faith and he triumphed.
Our defence of the Catholic Faith as the Church of England has received it and, until recently, understood it, must be as robust and combative. The Catholic Movement is at its most feeble when it accepts compromise. What we seek is a Catholic solution: a solution that we can live with in conscience. That cannot be achieved by a Code of Practice; by a system that legislates for discrimination; that cannot of its nature provide for the permanent preservation of our Catholic integrity and our understanding of Episcopal authority and the Apostolic Succession, the bedrock of Tractarianism; that is demeaning and patronising both to women and to us; that cannot provide for parity and equivalence. The bishops have plunged us into this mess but they seem like rabbits caught in the headlights of their own folly and indecision.
“I remember the time past; I muse upon all thy works,” says the Psalmist and we are often told that we dwell too much and with rose-hued spectacles on our past. But looking back on the past is part of what it is to be a Catholic and Christian. Ours is a religion located and rooted in the specificity of the past, in time and place and the Tradition is indispensable to our self-understanding and the authentic expression of that religion.
If the Oxford Movement stood for anything, if the inheritors of that Catholic tradition today stand for anything, it is for religious truth; and if its religious ideals are false, then we are in a religious cul-de-sac and we can have no relevance to a living faith. However, “the Tractarians, were not a mere ecclesiastical party. They possessed, to a far greater extent than is usual in England, a common body of intellectual and spiritual principle,” which although caught up in the political and ecclesiastical circumstances of the time “can be disentangled from them … and which remains of vital importance for the religion of the modern world,” the religion of our own time, the society and the culture in which we live.
The presenting issue may be the admission of women to the Episcopal office but the argument rests on whether the Christian religion should be transformed by the spirit of the age and absorbed into the secularised culture of the modern world. We have a prophetic heritage which gives us a prophetic voice. The Oxford Movement stood pro causa Dei, asserting the divine claims of the Church against the apostasy of the nation and of the modern world, and protesting the enslavement of the Church to the secular power.
Pope Pius IX’s condemnation in the Syllabus Errorum of 1864 of the proposition that the Church can and ought to reconcile itself with liberalism, progress and modern civilisation, echoed the ethos of the Oxford Movement. To the liberal churchman and churchwoman the truth of the proposition is self-evident and the condemnation by Pope, prelate, priest and pious laity is seen as an act of blasphemous folly against the new enlightened orthodoxy and of intellectual stasis. Catholic condemnation of the proposition is as shocking to the mind of a liberal churchman as the denial of God, or of the immortality of the human soul is to us.
To the Oxford Movement it was self-evident that the Church could not reconcile itself with an anti-dogmatic, egalitarian principle; it could not genuflect to the mores, the fashion and fancy, the values and ethical principles of a secular polity and culture. The Oxford Movement was not deceived by the illusions of the world. “They read the signs of the times better than the men who professed to be in sympathy with the spirit of the age. They knew where the world was going … They believed that Christianity was once more faced with the prospect of persecution and that it must be prepared for a long struggle against the powers of the world.” What must be understood is that we do not object merely to the particular policies that are being pursued by the General Synod, but that we reject the basis on which they are posited; we deny the philosophical, doctrinal and ecclesiological assumptions upon which they are based.
We have not abandoned that cause. Our consciences will not permit us to allow the principles for which we stand to fade away without doing all that lies within our power. And if we are to take Cardinal Kaspar’s call for a second Oxford Movement seriously, and to re-assert and re-articulate those Catholic principles in this Church, we must not walk away from the battlefield. Equally, we must make it clear to those who do not wish to see us driven out (there are those who, difficult though it may be to believe, would be happy to see these troublesome priests and people go) that we cannot stay at any price; we cannot cling to the wreckage of a glorious past as the price of our conscience.
“Deliver me, O Lord from mine enemies: … show thou me the way that I should walk in,” pleads the Psalmist. Our trust is in God and we have the example of the saintly patron before us. S. Martin, that soldier for Christ, epitomised the defence of orthodox doctrine against the heterodox sway of the age; as a bishop, he held to the doctrine, the tradition and the order of the Apostles, and by his selfless giving exemplified Catholic social and ethical doctrine. In our changing and fragile world, we ask his intercessions that we may see the way aright to follow in the way of truth, light and holiness, knowing that in God’s mercy “It is not too late to seek a newer world … to sail beyond the sunset … We are … strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”
Father William Davage Patronage Secretary of The Society for the Maintenance of the Faith, Patron of the parish