Our "native High Church traditions"

In my post reflecting on the Scottish Episcopal Church, I suggested that a "relaxed, natural catholic Anglicanism" - something I have experienced in Scotland and New England - contrasted with the "often artificial anglo-papalist ethos ('more Roman than the Romans') of many English anglo-catholic parishes". From a different perspective, an anglo-catholic blogger has suggested something similar.

Fr Ivan D Aquilina commented in the aftermath of the launch of FCA. He was one of very many disappointed anglo-catholic bloggers critical of the conservative evangelical dominance at the launch - despite the presence of some anglo-catholic bishops from the States:

"The fact that Anglo-Catholics in North America are part and parcel of this movement does not mean that we should be too. Many readers will know that Anglo-Catholicism in the States and here is different, especially in the way we think about re-union with the See of Peter".

Aquilina's observation regarding the papalist focus of English anglo-catholicism perhaps reflects something of the fact that the Oxford Movement was conceived and born in a crisis over authority - a crisis that found its iconic resolution in Newman's move to Rome. The catholicism evident in parts of TEC derives from both the high church tradition in the northern colonies pre-dating 1776 and Seabury's relationship with the SEC, with its theological and liturgical traditions derived from Laud's 1637 Prayer Book. It is, to use the words of Peter Nockles, one of those "native High Church traditions" that stands historically apart from the Anglo-Catholic movement which emerged from Oxford.

Nockles states:

"In truth, the significance of 1833 in the annals of the nineteenth-century Church of England has been misunderstood. The Tractarians sharpened a sense of High Church party identity in the Church, but they did not and could not create it ... Thus Tractarian historiography was mistaken in suggesting that the Oxford Movement first rediscovered 'Anglicanism' and that what became known as 'Anglo-Catholicism' was a natural or lineal evolution".

It is perhaps somewhat pejorative to describe these two traditions as those of Anglican papalist catholicism and Anglican patristic catholicism. But two quite distinct traditions there are.