Our Lady Saint MaryBarry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Religion
Our Lady Saint Mary
Barry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint -- Meditations
It is a common reproach against the Anglican Communion that is "does not
know its own mind." It would be much truer to say that there are many
members of it who have been at no pains to ascertain whether it have a
mind or what that mind is: who have been content to confound the mind of
the Church with the mind of the party to which they are attached by the
accident of birth or of preference. I do not for a moment contend that
the party (to use an ugly but necessary word) to which I am attached
stands, in all things, in perfect alignment with the Anglican
Formularies. There are circumstances in which it appears to me to be
necessary to appeal from Anglican action to the mind of that larger
Body, the whole Church of Christ throughout the world, to which the
Anglican Church points me as its own final authority. In so doing I do
not feel that I am disloyal, but that I am actually doing what
authority tells me to do. These are cases in point. I do not believe
that a local Church can suppress and permanently disuse sacraments of
the universal Church. The Anglican Church by its suppression of the
sacraments of Unction and by its almost universal disuse for centuries
of the sacrament of Penance, compelled those who would be loyal to the
Catholic Church to which it appealed to act on their own initiative in
the revival of the use of those sacraments. I do not believe that the
local Church has the right or the power to forbid or permanently disuse
customs which are of universal currency in the Catholic Church. I do not
believe that it has the right to neglect and fail to enforce the
Catholic custom of fasting, and especially of fasting before communion.
I do not believe that any Christian who is informed on these things has
the right to neglect them on the ground that the Anglican Church has not
enforced them. On the basis of its own declarations the ecumenical
overrides the local; and if it be said, "What is a priest, that he
should undertake to set the practice of his Church right?" the answer is
that he is a man having cure of souls for whose progress in holiness he
is responsible before God, and if those who claim authority in such
matters will not act, he must act, though it be at the risk of his
immortal soul.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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