Unity Through Faith

Recent days have seen dramatic political change after an election held in a highly polarised national context. At such times of stress and tumult, when many feel deeply uncertain about the future, we do well to look instead to the eternal verities of our faith. There are two central beliefs that Christianity brings, uniquely, to an increasingly secular culture. First, a frank recognition that this “transitory life” is lived in a fallen world that is inherently imperfect. The second, is a firm commitment to the possibility of a world made good, which is to say, a world redeemed in Christ. This provides an assured basis for Christian hope, both for the world ultimately, but also, for each of us as individual followers of Christ.

I was powerfully reminded of this latter point while attending the funeral Mass of the Resurrection held for our one time parishioner and later Roman Catholic priest, Father Corey Bassett-Tirrell. Quite shockingly, and quite unexpectedly, he was found dead by a brother priest last week, at the age of only forty four.

His vocation had been discerned after a quite complicated early life, and his career as a priest was frankly admitted to have been one marked by times of deep difficulty, of which we had at times spoken together and upon which we were united in prayer. Yet, the presence at his funeral of seventy of his colleagues and multiple bishops of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, in a packed church, attested to his impact as a priest of Christ. His ministry had, it became clear, been given deepened effect by the shared awareness of the struggles and difficulties with which he had so long wrestled. There was manifest thus, a deeply moving testimony to the effectiveness of his pastoral witness amidst his sometimes painful personal vulnerability.  But powerfully transcendent above all this was the abiding sense at his funeral of the sure and certain Christian hope in the resurrection and life to come,  to which we all were united in commending his soul to God.   

That notion of unity in faith is also timely to dwell upon for a quite different reason, as we shall next week (from Thursday at 4 p.m. and all day Friday) be hosting in the parish a conference upon the powerful Christian concept of catholicity.    

The word catholic, with its Latin root is a cognate not only of the Greek katholicos in meaning “universal”, but also theologically, of the Greek concept of oikoumene or “the whole inhabited world”. In the New Testament in a way that probably reflects ultimately Stoic philosophical roots we find this view of the world as a space inhabited by people of the same nature and then in Matthew 24.13, we have the instruction that “the gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the inhabited world (oikoumene).” 

Lactantius (c. 250–325 BC) had already been able talk of “our” orbis/oikoumene , a compound which was probably coined as a parallel to “our sea” (mare nostrum) Hence, the project of evangelization was soon tied in the early church to the goal of establishing a universal church that was “catholic” in being aimed at the whole world (See Martyr. Polycarp. 8, 1).  

And later, the first Council of Nicaea (325 CE) was called an “oikoumenical synodos,” since it aimed at uniting all of Christendom (see Eusebius. vit. Const. 3.6). In the year 444, And the terms even became titles as we see when Dioscourus of Alexandria was addressed for the first time as oikoumenikos patriarches (despite the objection of Pope Gregory the Great), and the title remains with the Patriarchate of Constantinople where His All Holiness is the Ecumenical Patriarch.

The first use of the term “Catholic Church” in the sense meaning “universal church” seems to be in the writings of Saint Ignatius of Antioch in his Letter to the Smyrnaeans (circa 110 AD) just as he is also considered to have left us the earliest recorded use of the term “Christianity” (Greek: Χριστιανισμός) in about 100 AD.

All of which sets the stage for the challenge before us here as not only Christians but as Anglicans when we claim to be specifically Anglo-Catholic and thus to uphold the authentically universal or Catholic Christian faith.  

It was the French monk, St Vincent of Lérins right back in the fifth century AD., who offered in his work known as the Commonitorium the triple test of ecumenicity, antiquity, and consent, whereby the Church could differentiate between true and false catholicity which he defined with deceptive simplicity as ‘what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all’. 

Come to the conference to hear multiple angles of reflection on how the later church, and we as Anglicans in particular, have later developed our wider theological reflections on being Catholic from these early beginnings.

The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector