Fr Fynes Clinton was not only a seminal thinker in formulating the Anglican Papalism position, but also the develoment of the entire course of Anglican Ecumenism in relation to the Orthodox Churches, as well as the Catholic Church. Our Chairman, Very Revd Archimandrite John Salter, has written his long anticipated biography. Fr John Hunwicke writes this review for the Catholic League (founded by Fynes Clinton in 1913), which we gratefully acknowledge in reprodcuing it here.
The Anglican Papalist: a personal portrait of
Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton
by A.T. John Salter
; available from and published by the Anglo-Catholic History Society
ISBN
978-0-9560565-2-8
£20.00
Pbk; 194pages.
Fr John Salter’s
book delivers precisely what it claims to provide; a personal account of the
priest who was for half a century the dominant figure in the Papalist movement
within Anglicanism, and Founder of the Catholic League. It is not a work of
scholarship … not a half-baked spin-off from a DPhil thesis; you will search
in vain for the detailed footnotes of a youthful scholar covering his back. In
compensation, you will find yourself personally immersed in a period and in a
person both known intimately to the author.
Anglican Papalists
are often written up very engagingly and with due tribute to their
eccentricities – as a body of people who appeared to pretend that they were
Roman Catholics and whose deep sense of obedience to authority led them to
disobey every maxim of the ecclesial body which paid them (perhaps unjustly, I
have felt that this is the picture which emerges from the writings of Michael
Yelton). Salter does not make this mistake. He perceives the deeply doctrinal significance of
Fynes-Clinton’s life, and brings out what is creatively unusual in his witness.
FC, for example, believed strongly that the See of Rome is the divinely
appointed centre of unity; and that the decrees of the [first] Vatican Council
are normative. But this in no way diminished his affection for the Orthodox
East. Commonly, anti-papal Anglicans use Orthodoxy as a convenient weapon with
which to attack the Papacy, while ultramontanes regard Orthodox as schismatics
or worse. FC admired the Orthodox and secured their affection (and honours) by
his unceasing hard work, especially for the troubled Serbian Church. But his
‘Romanism’ brought him into conflict with Canon J.A. Douglas and Mr Athelstan
Riley and led to his removal from leadership in an Anglican-Orthodox society of
which he had himself been one of the founders. FC instinctively realised the
truth later to be expressed in the CDF document Communionis notio (1993): that, although ‘wounded’ by their
separation from Rome, the Eastern Churches are true ‘particular churches’. He
even planned for Hagia Sophia to be recovered from the Turks and handed over to
the Orthodox rather than to Eastern Christians in communion with Rome! The
little Orthodox chapel in the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham is an initiative of
FC, just a few feet from the foundation stone of the Holy House, with its
‘papalist’ inscription (full text in Salter) which so infuriated the Bishop of
Norwich. FC’s balanced stance, so obviously right to our way of thinking,
represented in the inter-war years a rare combination.
Of very considerable
importance – and relevance to our own times – is a document which Salter prints
in full. Towards the end of 1932, in anticipation of the anniversary of the
Catholic Revival, FC and Fr Robert Corbould composed a manifesto to which
hundreds of papalist clergy subscribed. “In the modern Anglo-catholic movement
much of the enthusiasm over the observance of the centenary cloaks a marked
departure from the original Oxford principles …” The authors describe the
creeping influence of Modernism in matters Christological; the growth of
Relativism (“mutual toleration of opposed teaching”).They disclaim the popular misconception
that Catholic identity is assured “by revival of ceremony”. Firmly, they “reprobate
the toleration and even positive support by certain Anglo-Catholics of the
immoral sanction of artificial contraception given by many bishops at Lambeth”.
Here are the authentic tones of S Pius X (Pascendi
Dominici gregis) and the affirmation of Christian sexual mores by Pius XI (Casti conubii) and Paul VI (Humanae vitae). This manifesto anticipates by sixty years the current
distinction between real Catholicism, resolutely counter-cultural, and the
flaccid conformities of ‘Affirming Catholicism’. Inevitably, it concludes that
“the real and essential goal is reunion with the Apostolic See of Rome … the existence
of the Church of England as a body separate de
facto from the rest of the Catholic Church
is only tolerable when it is regarded as a temporary evil”.
Salter’s book is to
be unambiguously commended. By its pages you will live through the days when
exiled East European royalty enlivened the social life of London, and you will
be reminded by the heroic figure of St Elizabeth of the New Martyrs of the Communist
Yoke of Russia, alias Her Imperial Highness
Grand Princess Elizaveta, that Ruritania was not entirely a land of fopperies.
You will meet the mysterious, little-known figure of the Jesuit bishop Michel
d’Herbigny, who flutters through the period sabotaging ecumenism, playing off
Greeks against Rumanians and Serbs against Russians and Catholics against Orthodox;
who attempted unsuccessfully to infiltrate and sabotage the Malines Conversations.
You may get some surprises: did you know that the Holy See was lobbying the
British Government to stop Russia liberating Constantinople from the Turk and handing
over Anatolia to Orthodox Hellenes? You will be shocked, I suspect, to know
that Paul VI returned to the Turkish government the Ottoman flag captured at Lepanto.
As our own day watches the Christian populations of Iraq and Syria being killed
or driven into exile by a Western-encouraged ‘Arab Spring’, you may feel some
sympathy with FC’s rhetoric about “the black trail of the Turk … so hateful
to the Englishman sickened with the massacres of Christians in these last years”.
We who have been told so little about the realities of the ‘Kosovo’ problem, or
the ‘enormity’ (FC’s word) of the Zionist appropriation of Palestine, may gain
a more rounded understanding of how so many current problems arise from this
little known yet comparatively recent period of history.
Should mainstream
schools give up their endless courses about Nazi Germany and adopt Salter as
the text-book for a new course enabling the kiddies to understand the world they
are actually living in? No … it would be too topical and too raw … ‘Hitler’
is as safely irrelevant a syllabus as the Wars of the Roses.