{"id":250,"date":"2009-10-29T17:04:09","date_gmt":"2009-10-29T23:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/?p=250"},"modified":"2009-10-29T19:11:27","modified_gmt":"2009-10-30T01:11:27","slug":"beware-the-anglo-catholics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/beware-the-anglo-catholics-250.htm","title":{"rendered":"Beware the Anglo-Catholics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Sullivan <\/a>links to a feline blog by Chris Dierkes<\/a>. Dierkes studied for the Jesuits before becoming an Anglican. Commenting on Benedict\u2019s overture to Anglicans, Dierkes has this to say:<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

And, if personal experience and lifelong immersion in a sub-culture is any form of persuasive evidence, I can tell you that conservative Anglo-Catholicism\u2013at the clerical level\u2013is totally dominated by gay men.\u00a0 Mostly repressed.\u00a0 What used to be called when I was in seminary, the pink mafia. <\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Anglo-Catholics do have that bad reputation; but I doubt that things are much worse than in the Catholic clergy. The Anglicans just do things more colorfully. One Anglican foundation is especially amusing:<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A slightly less bizarre foundation was the \u201cAnglican Congregation of the<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Primitive Observance of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict.\u201d This was founded in 1896<\/span><\/span>by a former medical student, Benjamin (Aelred) Carlyle, who had been fascinated <\/span><\/span>by the monastic life since the age of fifteen, when he had founded a secret <\/span><\/span>religious brotherhood at his public school. His choice of the religious name of <\/span><\/span>Aelred, after a twelfth-century Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx who had written <\/span><\/span>treatises on \u201cspiritual friendships,\u201d was a deliberate one, for a biography of St. <\/span><\/span>Aelred by Newman\u2019s companion, J. O. Dalgairns, had revealed to him \u201ca monastic world in which natural and spiritual relations could be fused\u201d (Anson,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Building up the Waste Places<\/span><\/em>, p. 134). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Aelred Carlyle was a man of dynamic personality, hypnotic eyes, and extraordinary imagination. In 1906 his community made its permanent home on Caldey Island, off the coast of south Wales (outside Anglican diocesan jurisdiction), where, largely on borrowed money, he built a splendidly furnished monastery in a fanciful style of architecture. The life of this enclosed Benedictine community centred upon an ornate chapel where the thirty or so tonsured and cowled monks sang the monastic offices and celebrated Mass in Latin according to the Roman rite. As there was nothing like it anywhere else in the Church of England the island abbey inevitably became a resort for ecclesiastical sightseers, and many young men were drawn to join the community out of personal affection for Carlyle.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The self-styled Lord Abbot of Caldey introduced practices into the life of his <\/span><\/span>monastery which many outsiders, accustomed to the austere atmosphere of the <\/span><\/span>existing Anglican men\u2019s communities, found disconcerting. \u201cStories Toto Told <\/span><\/span>Me\u201d by \u201cBaron Corvo\u201d (Frederick Rolfe), which had originally appeared in The <\/em><\/span><\/span>Yellow Book<\/span><\/em>, were often read aloud to the assembled monks at recreation time, <\/span><\/span>and during the summer months they regularly went sea-bathing in the nude. Nor <\/span><\/span>did Carlyle make any secret of his liking for charming young men. Spiritual<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

friendships were \u201cnot discouraged,\u201d recalled his biographer, himself a former<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

member of the Caldey community:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026 and their expression sometimes took a form which would not be found In any normal monastery to-day. . . . Embraces, ceremonial and non-ceremonial, were regarded as symbolical of fraternal charity, so our variant of the Roman rite permitted a real hug and kisses on the cheek between the giver and the recipient of the Pax Domini <\/em>at the conventual Mass. (Anson, Abbot Extraordinary<\/em>, pp. 125-126)<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(From <\/span><\/span>UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality <\/a>by David Hilliard) <\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The current Cistercian community at Caldey is not continuous with the Anglican foundation; from Carlyle they have inherited only the building, not, I trust, the eccentricities.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Sullivan links to a feline blog by Chris Dierkes. Dierkes studied for the Jesuits before becoming an Anglican. Commenting on Benedict\u2019s overture to Anglicans, Dierkes has this to say: And, if personal experience and lifelong immersion in a sub-culture is any form of persuasive evidence, I can tell you that conservative Anglo-Catholicism\u2013at the clerical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[296,297],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglicans","tag-anglo-catholics","tag-caldey-abbey","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}