The choice to the Church: speak up or keep your head down
by Gavin Ashenden, Christian Today:
How might St Paul, the Archduke Ferdinand and the Catholic Church come together in a story set at the end of 2022? They might offer themselves as useful interpretative devices as the story of what is happening in the Church in the West today continues to unravel.
Some commentators who have been following my journey and reading my work have taken an interest in the fact that I have withdrawn my application to be ordained as a priest in the Catholic Church, and wondered why. The dynamics that drove the story might have a wider application than just us.
In my critique of the heterodoxy of developing Feminism and its promotion of relativism and all things gay, I found myself on a journey that left an increasingly compromised Anglicanism and went into the Roman Catholic Church – along with very many others.
There are two ways of engaging with this: looking back or looking forward. Let’s not look back; this is not the moment to re-hash Calvin, Zwingli and Luther. Things have moved on. Even in the Christian world.
Imagine for a moment the Reformers of the Sixteenth century ignoring what was going on in their day, and being fixated with, say, the Synod of Brixen 1080. Then Henry IV of Germany and Pope Gregory VII were squabbling over an investiture controversy. Would you still fight about this over 500 years later? “Forget the reforms of 1519 Martin, let’s do a rerun of that seminal struggle in 1080. Where exactly do you stand on that one?”
It is more constructive to look forward instead and deal with the issues we face today.
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