SDR: What is your main concern as a member of the clergy?
FB: The enormous shift in our culture away from religion as a part of everyday life. There is a sort of — I won’t say it’s a science — but a certain quasi-intellectual scientism that assumes anything to do with the spiritual realm or religion is inherently irrational and that what one does when one chooses to believe is to close one’s mind. But I am of the conviction — and one of our great witnesses, a woman named Flannery O’Connor, who was a fiction writer for the most part back in the ’50s and ’60s made it clear — that it’s the fullness of the Catholic faith that keeps the mind open to mystery. Anything else that limits our understanding to what we can see and measure through the tools we have, it is that kind of thing which narrows the mind because there is so much more going on than meets the eye.
SDR: Why Anglican?
FB: Being a Catholic represents and embodies continuity with the church from the very first centuries, and Anglicanism expressed its Catholicity by endorsing fundamentals about which everyone was expected to agree, but everything after that, we could disagree. They centered on the decisions of the church in the first millennium before the first split between East and West. So, what all Christians believed in the first millennium — that’s what I mean by Catholicism…. I don’t believe Catholicity is limited to Anglicanism by any means. It is certainly embedded in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches as well.
Read it all.
FB: The enormous shift in our culture away from religion as a part of everyday life. There is a sort of — I won’t say it’s a science — but a certain quasi-intellectual scientism that assumes anything to do with the spiritual realm or religion is inherently irrational and that what one does when one chooses to believe is to close one’s mind. But I am of the conviction — and one of our great witnesses, a woman named Flannery O’Connor, who was a fiction writer for the most part back in the ’50s and ’60s made it clear — that it’s the fullness of the Catholic faith that keeps the mind open to mystery. Anything else that limits our understanding to what we can see and measure through the tools we have, it is that kind of thing which narrows the mind because there is so much more going on than meets the eye.
SDR: Why Anglican?
FB: Being a Catholic represents and embodies continuity with the church from the very first centuries, and Anglicanism expressed its Catholicity by endorsing fundamentals about which everyone was expected to agree, but everything after that, we could disagree. They centered on the decisions of the church in the first millennium before the first split between East and West. So, what all Christians believed in the first millennium — that’s what I mean by Catholicism…. I don’t believe Catholicity is limited to Anglicanism by any means. It is certainly embedded in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches as well.
Read it all.
