Could a C of E person please explain this to me

[Crepusculum]

Good day all,
yesterday I went for an idyllic walk with a friend in the English countryside just outside the town of Wye. About halfway round the walk we stumbled upon a 900 year old Norman Church which is now Church of England (presumably since the reformation) and found it open. In we went and took a look around. There was a tomb dedicated to one of its parish priests in the 1400s and a lovely floor plaque series in memory of the Carter family from the 1600s to the present day.

However, when we got to the altar something confused and troubled me - the original altar had been destroyed of course, but in its place was a wooden affair, upon which was written the creed, the ten commandments (protestant version), and the Our Father (with doxology). The creed was intact - even down to the capitalisation of “I believe in the holy spirit, the holy Catholic church…” and that’s the part that had me confused. If the congregation of this parish spent every sunday looking up at that altar, how is it that it didn’t trouble them also - they are swearing allegiance to something they are not actually in allegiance to - how are they reconciling this? How would you reconcile this if this was your parish?

 

[puzzleannie]

if it were me I would say we profess the Creed with the understanding of the meaning of the word “Catholic” in it, the universal Church. and I would probably rationalize that it means all Christians who profess that creed, not merely RC.

 

[SD_Catholic]

I believe the Methodists use the same Creed wording also with a small “c”… even our “Catholic” Creed uses a small “c” atleast the one I seen… as it is to mean the universal Church… But I do agree that I would wonder how they justify seperation when using these words, since it includes “one” and “apostolic” or “Communion of Saints” depending on which Creed it is (which I think the Anglicans may believe in this?)… either way I wouldn’t want the words “One Holy Church of england” in my Creed even with a small “e”.

SD

 

[Contarini]

Good day all,
yesterday I went for an idyllic walk with a friend in the English countryside just outside the town of Wye. About halfway round the walk we stumbled upon a 900 year old Norman Church which is now Church of England (presumably since the reformation) and found it open. In we went and took a look around. There was a tomb dedicated to one of its parish priests in the 1400s and a lovely floor plaque series in memory of the Carter family from the 1600s to the present day.

However, when we got to the altar something confused and troubled me - the original altar had been destroyed of course, but in its place was a wooden affair, upon which was written the creed, the ten commandments (protestant version), and the Our Father (with doxology). The creed was intact - even down to the capitalisation of “I believe in the holy spirit, the holy Catholic church…” and that’s the part that had me confused. If the congregation of this parish spent every sunday looking up at that altar, how is it that it didn’t trouble them also - they are swearing allegiance to something they are not actually in allegiance to - how are they reconciling this? How would you reconcile this if this was your parish?

Protestants have always confessed faith in the Catholic Church. The use of lower case to make a distinction is a fairly modern business. Protestants redefined what the Catholic Church meant, but they had no problem saying that they believed in it. There are two reasons many modern Protestants have such a problem and need to be reassured that “Catholic” doesn’t really mean anything scary:

1. They are far more individualistic than their ancestors.
2. Out of courtesy, they commonly use the phrase “Catholic Church” to describe the Roman Communion. Sixteenth-century Protestants would not have done this. They didn’t think that the churches in communion with Rome were Catholic, and so they didn’t call them Catholic. They called them “Romanist” or “papist.” This was rude, but it was at least clear.

Anglicans, however, do not have these problems. We have always confessed without embarrassment that we are Catholic. That is one reason why Anglicans are more likely to insist on the phrase “Roman Catholic” than other Protestants of a comparable degree of moderation (in other words, it’s not the sign of anti-Catholicism it might be in some other traditions, and I think folks on this board often don’t understand this). It means a lot to us that we are Catholic. Now what we mean by it varies. For many of us, it means basically what it meant to our sixteenth-century ancestors (such as Richard Hooker): that we belong to the worldwide company of particular churches holding to the essentials of the faith and practicing the two sacraments of the Gospel. For Anglo-Catholics, however, “Catholic” means that we have apostolic succession and thus the Real Presence in a sense not possessed by Protestants. It thus places us on the Catholic side of the Catholic-Protestant divide, along with the Roman Communion and the Eastern Churches.

Edwin