COMMENTARY
“stripped of both Wings” A former AnglicAn chAplAin to the Queen of englAnd tAlks About his entry into the cAtholic church — And the demise of AnglicAnism n BY DR. GAVIN ASHENDEN*
Gavin Ashenden, a former Anglican bishop, is blessed by Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury, England, during Ashenden's reception into the Catholic faith on December 19, 2019. Ashenden, a former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, said Prince Philip, who died April 9, 2021, was a man deeply interested in God. (CNS photo/Simon Caldwell) Rifght, Ashenden meeting with Pope Francis
*Dr. Gavin Ashenden is a former Anglican Archbishop and Honorary Chaplain to Queen Elizabeth of England, now a Catholic convert and layman. After a distinguished academic and clerical career, he was appointed Chaplain to the Queen in 2008; he resigned in 2017. In December 2019, Dr. Ashenden was received into the Catholic Church by the Bishop of Shrewsbury, England.
A
moment sometimes comes when we suddenly see things entirely differently. Philosophers often call this “the moment of disclosure.” More popularly we talk about the moment that the penny drops. One of those moments came for me when, after a vote in the Church of England’s General Synod, the progressives refused to make any space for those who wanted to practice the faith as it had been received, as my Bishop expostulated with despair as we left the assembly: “That,” he said, “is the end of the 500-year ecumenical experiment that was Anglicanism.” I thought he was perhaps a bit overwrought, but as I thought it through I began to realise the force of his observation. What he meant was that in the civil war between puritans, Anglo-Catholics and progressives, the progressives had just landed a knockout blow that would reconfigure the Church forever. The Church of England is a confusing entity. It looks like one Church, but it isn’t; it was a conceptual compromise from its inception. To put it simplest, the Church inherited Catholic buildings and ecclesial structures but dressed and prayed as Protestants. Over the years the pendulum of power swung backwards and forwards between Puritans
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INSIDE THE VATICAN JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022
and Sacramentalists, but in the 20th century, the Church began to buckle under the assault of secular culture, led first by Darwin, Durkheim, Marx and Freud, and secondly, it crumpled under the assault of 19th-century German theological revisionism. But it was the feminism of the second half of the 20th century that did more harm. A state Church is particularly vulnerable to cultural change. If the society it serves begins to reject Christian values or culture, it is faced with a dreadful dilemma. Either it has to go along with the repudiation, sprinkling putative blessing on the sub- or anti-Christian direction in which society goes; or else it has to take a moral stand and call society to return to Christian values; in other words, to repent. There have been moments when repentance was tried. Wesley called for it over personal sin and corporate disbelief in the 18th century; Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, over slavery in the 19th century; Bishop George Bell, over the carpet-bombing of German cities and the slaughter of civilians in the 20th century. But the feminism of the second half of the 20th century brought not only women priests, but acted as a Trojan horse for a variety of secular utopian values: relativism, equality of outcome, the triumph of the subjective over the objective, the campaign to cleanse the womb of unwanted infants, repudiation of patriarchy and “toxic masculinity.” Though attractive in secular terms, they all undermined aspects of the integrity of Divine Revelation. And so began an increasing process of preferencing a spiritual agenda for fixing things on earth rather than carrying souls to heaven; the Gaia of ecological apocalypticism
