Liberal Anglicanism: It's Not for Everyone

Pope Francis at the Synod on Synodality on Oct. 23.
He's the guy with the big chair (WSJ photo)

Religions don't survive long unless they provide answers to basic philosophical questions. Furthermore, the questions should not be limited to those that puzzled its original adherents. To endure centuries, even millennia, they must address the human condition broadly. The trick is to understand which principles are immutable and which are not.

Ontario priest Raymond de Souza laments that Pope Francis is overturning too many beliefs too quickly.

conversations veered off to consider whether Catholicism would do better as a facsimile of liberal Anglicanism: ordaining women, revising sexual morality, enhancing lay governance—and, of course, trying to arrest climate change.

Ouch. We Episcopalians felt that one.

Father de Souza wants more dogma and fewer questions.

The articulation of dogma—traditionally the work of Rome—doesn’t bind the soul as much as it frees it, in the same way that a martyr is free, already living beyond the world’s power. Such confidence and clarity have dissipated in Rome in recent years. Question marks litter the landscape; certainty appears to be the problem, not the solution. Without dogma, we’re left only with our own conclusions, which aren’t truths worth dying for and thus aren’t truths worth living for.

I personally like having the Catholic Church argue articulately for traditional Christian theology and practices. Such voices have been stilled in the Episcopal Church, and they shouldn't be excised from American Christianity entirely.