Tag: Reformation

Tradition or Accommodation: Why the Church Cannot Heal the World While Sharing Its Assumptions

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By the Archbishop of Selsey

Modernist structures, liturgical compromise, and coalition politics cannot restore what they presuppose as negotiable. Only Tradition—received, binding, and lived—can confront the age.

There is no serious challenge to the contemporary culture that does not first confront the modernist culture entrenched within the Church herself. The Church is not merely a passive victim of the radical secularisation that accelerated in the 1960s; she absorbed its assumptions, vocabulary, and methods, and in doing so forfeited much of her capacity to act as a genuine counter-culture. A Church shaped by the categories of late modernity cannot credibly oppose the consequences of late modernity.¹ ² ³

The secular revolution of the post-war decades was philosophical before it was political. It enthroned autonomy over truth, experience over doctrine, process over form, and subjectivity over metaphysics. When these principles entered ecclesial life—through theological experimentation, pastoral pragmatism, and a systematic aversion to dogmatic clarity—the Church’s prophetic voice was dulled. A Church uncertain about God, man, sin, grace, judgment, and authority cannot meaningfully confront a culture that denies them outright.² ³ ⁴

This internal contradiction explains the failure of so many ecclesial strategies aimed at “engagement,” “dialogue,” and “accompaniment.” Detached from doctrinal precision and moral authority, such approaches merely accept the grammar of the age and attempt to baptise it. What results is not evangelisation but accommodation: the Church becomes a chaplain to the zeitgeist rather than its judge. Having internalised the logic of secularism—relativism, historicism, and therapeutic moralism—she finds herself incapable of resisting it externally.² ³ ⁴

It is precisely here that the incoherence of certain contemporary “traditionalist” projects becomes evident. Many claim to advocate for Tradition from within the structures of the post-conciliar Church while simultaneously defending the Novus Ordo Missae and Pope Benedict XVI’s twin strategies of a liturgical “reform of the reform” and a doctrinal “hermeneutic of continuity.” This position attempts to resolve a real rupture through interpretive and aesthetic means, without addressing its underlying causes.⁵ ⁶

The Novus Ordo Missae is not a neutral vessel awaiting more reverent implementation. It is the liturgical expression of a reconfigured ecclesiology and anthropology: dialogical rather than sacrificial, horizontal rather than vertical, didactic rather than propitiatory. Its architecture of options, its pastoral logic, and its underlying principles presuppose precisely those modern assumptions—adaptability, accessibility, and relevance—that mirror the broader secular project. To defend this rite while claiming to mount a serious resistance to modernity is to underestimate the formative power of liturgy itself. The law of prayer does not merely reflect belief; it generates it.⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹

A recent intervention by Fr Matthew Solomon brings this fault line into sharper focus. Responding to appeals that reduce the question of liturgy to reverence or subjective impact, Solomon insists that such arguments collapse Tradition into preference unless they are grounded in the prior and more fundamental question of obligation: what must be handed on. Reverence, he argues, is neither an impression nor a sensibility, but the fruit of obedience to what the Church has received and is duty-bound to transmit. Where the Novus Ordo Missae is treated as a neutral form capable of redemption through improved execution, Solomon’s analysis implicitly rejects the premise altogether. If the Church’s mission is fidelity to what has been handed down, then the liturgy itself becomes a matter of judgment rather than accommodation.¹

The same unresolved contradiction reappears in broader attempts to build a “traditional coalition” without first resolving the theological questions that divide it. Calls to “unite the clans,” most notably associated with Michael Matt, proceed from a strategic rather than doctrinal diagnosis of the crisis. They assume that the problem is fragmentation among conservatives, rather than disagreement about authority, continuity, and the legitimacy of the post-conciliar settlement. Unity is thus pursued as an end in itself, rather than as the fruit of shared first principles.¹⁰

The same pattern is visible in projects such as the Catholic Identity Conference and LifeSite’s Roman Forum. These platforms often gather speakers who are rightly critical of secular modernity, moral collapse, and episcopal failure, yet who remain fundamentally divided on the causes of the crisis and the status of the reforms that followed the Council. The price of maintaining the coalition is silence—or studied ambiguity—on the very questions that determine whether Tradition is merely preserved as a theme or restored as a governing principle.¹¹ ¹²

This logic also explains the limited and ultimately compromising role played by institutes such as the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter. There is no denying that these communities have helped many souls. They have preserved elements of traditional liturgy, fostered vocations, and offered refuge from the most egregious abuses of the reformed rites. In that narrow sense, they have helped. But they have not furthered the cause of Tradition as such, because their continued existence depends upon accepting the post-conciliar framework as normative and beyond adjudication.¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷

By design, these institutes bracket the central question—what must be handed on—and replace it with a pastoral workaround. Tradition may be preserved here, by permission, as an exception within a reformed system. The cost of that permission is silence: silence about the principles of the liturgical reform, silence about rupture, silence about the authority that displaced the Roman Rite and reserves the right to suppress it again. In exchange for recognition and stability, Tradition is rendered conditional, provisional, and structurally fragile.¹³ ¹⁴

This is precisely why the efforts of bodies such as the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, the Old Roman Apostolate, the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, and the Servants of the Holy Family, together with similar societies, are not merely helpful but vital to the continuance of Tradition in any meaningful sense.¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ ²² ²³ ²⁴

What unites these bodies is not a shared temperament or tactical posture, but a shared refusal to accept the post-conciliar settlement as the unquestionable norm within which Tradition must survive by tolerance. They begin instead from the conviction that Tradition is the Church’s rule of faith and worship, not an optional charism, and that extraordinary measures are justified when that inheritance is displaced, marginalised, or rendered conditional.¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²²

The SSPX, whatever disputes surround its canonical situation, has consistently refused to collapse Tradition into preference or aesthetics. Its founding rationale was not to create a “traditional option” within a pluralist Church, but to preserve intact the Church’s doctrinal, liturgical, and sacerdotal formation at a moment of acute rupture. It named the crisis as doctrinal before it was pastoral, and liturgical as the privileged site where that doctrinal rupture was embodied. In doing so, it preserved not merely external forms, but the internal logic of Tradition as something binding, objective, and transmissible.¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²²

The Old Roman Apostolate proceeds from a similar principle, though by a distinct historical and canonical path. By maintaining sacramental life, priestly formation, and episcopal governance rooted in pre-conciliar theology and liturgy—while explicitly orienting itself toward reconciliation on the basis of doctrinal continuity rather than accommodation—it demonstrates a truth sanctioned institutes cannot: that Tradition does not survive by permission. It survives by fidelity exercised under necessity.²¹ ²²

The same logic is evident in the witness of the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer and the Servants of the Holy Family. These communities have resisted the reduction of religious life to pastoral utility or ideological alignment, and instead preserved a monastic and familial vision grounded in authority, asceticism, sacrificial priesthood, and the integral transmission of the Faith. Their importance lies not in numbers, but in coherence. Where Tradition is treated as obligatory, it becomes resilient; where it is treated as negotiable, it becomes fragile.²³ ²⁴

Taken together, these bodies function as living repositories of memory, practice, and formation. They ensure that the Roman Rite is not merely archived, aestheticised, or nostalgically admired, but lived. They preserve a priestly identity that is sacrificial rather than managerial, doctrinal rather than therapeutic. They keep alive an ecclesial worldview in which authority is real, doctrine determinate, and worship received rather than constructed.⁸ ⁹ ²⁵

By contrast, projects that seek unity without adjudication, or preservation without judgment, may delay decline but cannot reverse it. They depend upon goodwill, episcopal tolerance, and institutional stability—each of which can be withdrawn. The efforts of the SSPX, the Old Roman Apostolate, the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Servants of the Holy Family, and similar societies rest instead on clarity of principle: on knowing what must be handed on, and accepting the cost of handing it on.¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²²

In this sense, they are not obstacles to unity but witnesses to its proper foundation. Unity in the Church has never arisen from negotiated compromise or managed diversity, but from shared submission to what has been received. Until the wider Church is prepared to face honestly the question these bodies force into the open—what, precisely, must be handed on—their existence will remain not only justified, but indispensable.¹⁸ ²²

Only Tradition—understood not as nostalgia, aesthetic preference, or selective retrieval, but as the living transmission of revealed truth—breaks this paralysis. Tradition is fixed in doctrine, objective in sacramental form, authoritative in moral teaching, and supernatural in horizon. It alone provides a metaphysical account of reality that contradicts modern secular assumptions at their root. It restores the Church’s capacity to say no—to error, to sin, and to false notions of freedom—because it is grounded in something prior to and higher than the modern world.²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷

The Church will not renew society by mirroring it, moderating it, or managing its decline. She can only renew society by standing outside the ideological framework of the age and calling it to conversion. That stance is impossible so long as modernist assumptions remain unchallenged within ecclesial structures themselves. A Church formed by the categories of the 1960s cannot meaningfully oppose the consequences of the 1960s.²³ ⁴

The recovery of Tradition, therefore, is not an internal preference dispute, a stylistic quarrel, or a matter of coalition politics; it is a civilisational necessity. To advocate for Tradition while defending the structures that displaced it is to fight the disease with its own symptoms. Until the Church reclaims her own inheritance—her theology, her liturgy, her moral clarity, and her supernatural orientation—she will remain unable to challenge the culture she helped to form. Only a full retrieval of Tradition, received rather than reconstructed, allows the Church once again to become a sign of contradiction to the age rather than a reflection of it.²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷

  1. Fr Matthew Solomon, A Disagreement with Phil Lawler, 19 December 2025. frsolomon.substack.com
  2. Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1998).
  3. Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004 [1968]).
  4. Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995).
  5. Joseph Ratzinger, Address to the Roman Curia, 22 December 2005. vatican.va
  6. Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948–1975 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1990).
  7. Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy (San Juan Capistrano: Una Voce Press, 1993).
  8. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000).
  9. Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005).
  10. Michael Matt, “Unite the Clans,” The Remnant. remnantnewspaper.com
  11. Catholic Identity Conference, official materials. catholicidentityconference.org
  12. LifeSiteNews, Roman Forum event series. lifesitenews.com
  13. Benedict XVI, Summorum Pontificum (2007). vatican.va
  14. Francis, Traditionis Custodes (2021). vatican.va
  15. Diane Montagna, reporting on the 2020 CDF survey on Summorum Pontificum. lifesitenews.com
  16. Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, statutes. institute-christ-king.org
  17. Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, canonical documentation. fssp.com
  18. Marcel Lefebvre, “Declaration of 21 November 1974.”
  19. Marcel Lefebvre, They Have Uncrowned Him (Angelus Press).
  20. Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, doctrinal statements. sspx.org
  21. Old Roman Apostolate, doctrinal and canonical materials. selsey.org
  22. Canonical principles of necessity: 1917 CIC; 1983 CIC, canon 1323.
  23. Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, constitutions. transalpine-redemptorists.org
  24. Servants of the Holy Family, constitutions. servantsoftheholyfamily.org
  25. Pius XII, Mediator Dei (1947). vatican.va
  26. Louis Bouyer, The Decomposition of Catholicism (Ignatius Press).
  27. Joseph Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord (Crossroad).

Put Christ back into Christmas: When naming the Saviour is called extremism

Published on by TheOldRoman1 Comment


By the Archbishop of Selsey

For more than a decade, I have preached the words “Put Christ back into Christmas” from the pulpit. I have printed it on Advent notices, spoken it to families preparing for the Nativity, and used it to remind the faithful that Christmas is not sentiment but the Incarnation—God made man for our salvation. The phrase has appeared on parish notice boards, Catholic mission posters, evangelical banners, diocesan Advent reflections, and catechetical materials across Britain. It has never before been called extremist. It has been catechesis, not controversy.

That is why, when Tommy Robinson announced a public carol service in London using the same phrase, I did not expect the nation’s press to declare it a threat. The phrase did not change. Only the presumption of motive changed. When a minister says it, it is evangelical zeal. When Robinson says it, it is “Christian nationalism.” Here lies the strange crisis of our time: naming the Saviour at His own feast is safe or dangerous depending on who speaks His name.

The accusation is not theological; it is sociological. It does not claim the doctrine is wrong; it claims the speaker is unacceptable. The question has become not “Is Jesus Christ Lord?” but “Who has permission to say so in public?”

The accusation precedes the evidence
The accusation did not arise from what Robinson said. It arose from what might be imagined if the same words were spoken by the wrong person. Newspapers warned of an “extremist event dressed up as a carol service,” of “Christian imagery at protests raising fears of racial nationalism,” and advised readers “not to be fooled by hymns,” as if the Gloria could conceal a programme for civil unrest.¹–⁴ Imagination became evidence. A possibility was declared a certainty. This could be so became this is so.

One national broadsheet framed Robinson’s call to “put the Christ back into Christmas” as “exploiting the Christian message for populist politics,” linking the phrase directly to “anti-migrant rhetoric” and calling his carol service a “political use of Christmas.”⁵

The logic was not: “he said something racist.”
The logic was: “someone like him could say something racist.”
This is not evidence. It is fiction used as accusation, a verdict delivered in advance of any offence.

The manufacture of racism
The racism charge rests on a simple falsehood: that criticism of an ideological current within Islam is a form of racial hatred. But Islam is not a race. To treat theological disagreement as racism is to evacuate the word of moral meaning in order to silence the speaker. It is not a perspective on racial justice; it is a tactic of erasure, turning a debate about belief into a crime against identity.

The accusation also collapses when confronted with Robinson’s actual record. There is no public evidence of him preaching racial superiority or describing any ethnic group as inferior. His record shows the opposite. In the early years of the English Defence League he expelled neo-Nazis and racial supremacists, issued statements denouncing them, and clashed with those who attempted to turn the movement into a racial platform.⁶ He ultimately stepped down because he feared infiltration by racist elements.⁷ He has repeatedly stated that his opposition is to an ideology, not ethnicity, and his collaborators have included ex-Muslims, British Sikhs, and others who reject Islamist extremism.⁸

This is incompatible with the label “racist.” But the accusation is not made because of a record; it is made because the label is useful. When a curate says “Christ is King”, it is evangelical. When Robinson says it, it is “white nationalism.” The content does not change—only the assumption of motive changes.

Importing America into Britain
The second falsehood is the claim of “Christian nationalism.” The phrase is borrowed from American politics, where it refers to a distinct sociological phenomenon: the fusion of Evangelical identity with Republican ideology, a restorative narrative of lost Christian nationhood, and a history marked by civil conflict. There are distinctive features—“Seven Mountains” rhetoric, Confederate symbolism, megachurch populism, and a political bloc shaped by Evangelical voting patterns.⁹ It is a real, debated current in American political religion.

Britain has none of these conditions. There is no Evangelical political constituency, no myth of a lost Christian republic, no Confederate memory, no party shaped by theology, no restorationist nationalism with ecclesial energy behind it. The Church of England is established as heritage, not conviction. Denominations are post-Christian, shaped more by contemporary ethics than apostolic doctrine. The English crisis is not Christian nationalism; it is Christian amnesia. The danger is not that Christianity will govern the nation, but that it no longer governs the conscience of it.

Why then is the American phrase used here? Because it functions as ready-made condemnation. It does not describe what exists; it prevents what might exist. It says, in effect: “You may not speak Christ in public unless authorised.” It is a means of policing proclamation, not analysing reality.

The paradox: the denominations politicised Christmas, not the layman
Here the heart of the matter is revealed.

The denominations did not reject the phrase “Put Christ back into Christmas.” They affirmed its meaning and reproduced its theology. But they condemned the layman who spoke it publicly—not for doctrinal fault, but for identity. It was not Robinson who politicised Christmas, but the denominations who imagined politics into his proclamation. They heard nationalism where there was creed, and then used their rebuttal to preach asylum policy in the name of the Christ they were reluctant to name. Christmas itself was not defended by proclaiming the Incarnation; it was reframed as a message about immigration. The Child was not announced; the visa was. Thus the paradox: a layman proclaimed Christ, and was accused of ideology; the denominations preached ideology, and called it Christ.

This is the inversion: the accusation does not describe Robinson—it describes the response to Robinson.

Denominational adoption of the secular accusation
The Church of England adopted the same framing. According to national coverage, bishops urged Christians to “resist the capture of Christian language and symbols by populist forces” and launched a campaign of bus-stop posters reading “Christ has always been in Christmas” and “Outsiders welcome.”¹⁰ The Independent reported this as a confrontation with the “exploitation of the Christian message for populist politics,” and described Robinson’s call to “put the Christ back into Christmas” as an attempt to “drive an anti-migrant agenda.”¹¹

The Bishop of Kirkstall declared that Robinson’s conversion “did not give him the right to subvert the faith so that it serves his purposes,” and urged believers to resist “populist forces seeking to exploit the faith for their own political ends.”¹¹ No doctrinal error was identified. The issue, again, was not the truth of the Incarnation but the identity of the man proclaiming it.

Coverage in The Telegraph likewise presented the initiative as a “pushback against the rise of Christian nationalism” and the “appropriation of Christian symbols by far-Right protesters,” quoting an open letter from seven Church of England bishops condemning “the co-opting of the cross” at Robinson’s rally.¹² The symbolism of Christianity—the cross, biblical citation, public carol singing—was treated as ideological when carried by laity, though identical when used by denominations.

This is the central paradox made visible: the denominations politicised Christmas in order to accuse someone else of politicising Christmas.

A feast without faith
This controversy is possible only in a culture that remembers Christmas but no longer believes it. Britain still keeps the feast: markets fill the squares; schools sing about angels they do not believe in; “goodwill to all” is quoted without the One who gives peace. The nation loves the warmth of Christmas while fearing the fire that gives it meaning. The census records a fall from 59.3% identifying as Christian in 2011 to 46.2% in 2021.¹³ Among the young, Christianity is not rejected—it is forgotten.

The BBC documented the other side of this crisis: individuals “who do not necessarily believe in God, but have started going to church” after attending Robinson’s rallies, motivated by a sense that Christianity itself “could be replaced” in Britain.¹⁴ They carry wooden crosses and biblical texts not as political symbols, but because they recognise that what once was Christian has become secularised, and seek a return to what gave Britain its moral architecture. The institution’s response has been uncertainty: not doctrine, but discomfort. According to the same report, the Church of England is “grappling with fundamental questions” because this return comes from outside its authorised structures, without catechesis, yet with conviction.¹⁴

The BBC described clergy speaking of a “difficult road” as they attempt to welcome those whose return is motivated by cultural memory rather than doctrinal formation.¹⁴ They do not reject Christ—they do not yet know Him. Yet the institutional response has been to lead with condemnation, describing the presence of crosses as “co-opting” and “excluding others.”¹² The crisis revealed is not a movement of extremism against the Church, but a Church unable to welcome those who come seeking the Christ it no longer proclaims with conviction.

The constitutional duty of the Church of England, and the moral duty of all denominations
It must be stated plainly: the silence—or rather, the mis-speech—of the Church of England is not merely a pastoral failure; it is a constitutional breach. The Church of England is established not as a chaplaincy to private sentiment, but as the public guardian of the nation’s Christian identity. Its bishops sit in Parliament to proclaim the Gospel, not to echo secular narratives. The Coronation oath binds the monarch to defend the faith; those who anoint him are charged to uphold that oath in public life.¹⁵ Establishment is not ornament; it is obligation. When public proclamation of Christ is denounced as extremism, the established church must be the first to correct the error—not the first to affirm it.

Yet the same pattern of abdication was seen among other denominations. A duty rooted in history obliges the Church of England; a duty rooted in baptism obliges every community that bears the name of Christ. The Methodist Church, the Baptist Union, the United Reformed tradition, and other signatories of the Joint Public Issues Team were not compelled by any Crown, oath, or statute to speak—but their speech still bore the weight of Christian witness. They might have defended the Incarnation by proclaiming the Saviour’s birth. They might have used their public voice to call a restless people to faith. Instead, they accepted the same framing handed to them by secular media: that proclaiming Christ at His own feast could be extremist, and that the proper Christian answer to the Nativity was the language of immigration policy.

When they affirmed “Christ has always been in Christmas,” they affirmed the doctrine. When they followed it with campaign posters about “outsiders welcome,” they displaced the doctrine into political messaging. None of these denominations corrected the impossible idea that a carol service could cloak a programme of hate. None challenged the bizarre suggestion that a wooden cross held by a layman is a symbol of exclusion while a wooden cross held by clergy is a symbol of inclusion. None confronted the underlying falsehood: that the birth of Christ is dangerous when proclaimed by the wrong person.

Their failure is not constitutional, but evangelical. By adopting the same secular accusation—and echoing it with ecclesial authority—they participated in the same politicisation of Christmas they claimed to resist. It was not Robinson who turned Christmas into a referendum on migration: it was the denominations who imagined that message into his proclamation and then preached the world’s politics under the banner of Bethlehem.

Establishment gives the Church of England a unique responsibility. But every denomination has a spiritual one: to proclaim the Gospel without fear or favour. If the Church of England must speak to the nation as its established church, the other denominations must speak to the nation as its un-established conscience. In this hour, neither fulfilled the true vocation of Christmas. The Child born of Mary was not announced in the name of salvation, but invoked in the name of policy. The Nativity became a billboard. The shepherds were replaced by slogans.

Establishment demands clear speech: Jesus Christ is Lord.
Evangelical fidelity demands the same.

Until both are recovered, we will continue to witness this strange moment: the proclamation of the Saviour at His own feast treated as extremism—not because it is dangerous, but because Britain has forgotten what Christmas means.

The only restoration worthy of the feast begins where Christmas always begins—not in politics, but in worship. The shepherds did not negotiate asylum clauses; they knelt. The Magi did not issue rapid-response resources; they adored. The world was changed not by a campaign but by a revelation: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Renewal will not come from rallies or counter-posters, but from conversion, catechesis, sacrament, and the fearless proclamation of Christ as truth—not metaphor.

Christmas is not a symbol for a social programme. It is the birth of the Saviour.
If Britain would have Christ in Christmas, it must hear His name again.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour.

Read this and more at Selsey Substack and check out this week’s Nuntiatoria

  1. Daily Record, commentary warning of “an extremist event dressed up as a carol service”, December 2025.
  2. The Mirror, advising readers “not to be fooled by hymns”, December 2025.
  3. iNews, analysis referring to “Christian imagery at protests raising fears of racial nationalism”, December 2025.
  4. The Independent, opinion framing carol events as a “front” for far-Right mobilisation, December 2025.
  5. Eleanor Burleigh, “Church of England hits out at Tommy Robinson for ‘exploiting’ Christmas message”, Daily Express, 7 December 2025.
  6. Interviews and official statements on expelling neo-Nazis from the EDL, 2009–2011.
  7. Robinson resignation citing infiltration concerns, Channel 4 News, October 2013.
  8. Record of public collaborations with ex-Muslim and Sikh activists in multiple interviews (TalkTV, LBC), 2017–2024.
  9. Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead, Taking America Back for God, Oxford University Press, 2020.
  10. Press reporting on Church of England poster campaign, December 2025.
  11. Holly Bancroft, “Don’t exploit the Christian message for your populist politics”, The Independent, 7 December 2025.
  12. Poppy Wood, “Churches using pro-migrant posters to challenge Tommy Robinson”, The Telegraph, 8 December 2025.
  13. Office for National Statistics, Religion in England and Wales: Census 2021.
  14. Aleem Maqbool and Catherine Wyatt, “Tommy Robinson supporters are turning to Christianity, leaving the Church in a dilemma”, BBC News, 23 November 2025.
  15. Coronation Oath Act, 1688.

The Cross and the Flag: Christian Nationalism, Anglican Confusion, and the Kingship of Christ

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By the Archbishop of Selsey

A warning misunderstood
As Britain prepares to mark Remembrance Sunday, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has once again stepped into the public square with an appeal that is at once sincere and symptomatic. Together with several Anglican bishops, he issued a statement condemning what he called the rise of “Christian nationalism” in the United Kingdom.¹

The clergy’s declaration, published in The Catholic Herald, denounced the alleged “misuse of Christian symbols to exclude or stigmatise others.” Bishop Anderson Jeremiah of Edmonton insisted that such actions “betray the heart of the Gospel,” while Bishop Rosemary Mallett of Southwark added that “we must reject any narrative that says the Cross is a symbol of exclusion.”²

Williams himself declared: “It is more than time to challenge the story that every migrant approaching our shores is an unfriendly alien with unintelligible and hostile values. Christian culture, rightly understood, is based simply on the recognition that we share common human needs and that we are given strength and generosity in Christ’s Spirit.”³

The language is eloquent, the tone charitable, yet beneath it lies the enduring confusion that has haunted Anglicanism since its birth — a confusion between revelation and sentiment, between the Church as divinely constituted society and as social conscience for the modern state.

The liberal inversion of the Cross
Williams’ appeal is not without truth: the Cross must never become an emblem of hatred or a tribal totem. But he proceeds as though these are the only two possibilities — either the Cross is sentimental philanthropy, or it is political idolatry. He cannot imagine the third and only true alternative: the Cross as the throne of the world’s Redeemer, before whom all nations must bow.

The danger of false universalism lies in severing compassion from conversion. For the Incarnation does not merely affirm humanity’s shared needs; it redeems humanity from sin. The Christian does not embrace the stranger because all religions teach kindness, but because Christ commands us to love as He has loved — a love that presupposes truth. Without truth, compassion becomes indulgence, and mercy without justice is mere sentimentality.

Thus the Cross ceases to be the key to salvation and becomes an empty metaphor of moral approval. A Christ who demands nothing, who never judges nor calls to repentance, cannot save. He becomes the patron of progressive causes, not the Redeemer of souls.

Christendom and the nation under God
This misreading of the Gospel’s universality manifests most clearly in how modern churchmen misunderstand the concept of Christian nationhood. The Catholic tradition does not equate the faith with nationalism — indeed, it is the only religion that transcends ethnicity and language by divine constitution — yet it insists that the political order itself must acknowledge the moral authority of Christ.

This principle, solemnly reaffirmed by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas, established the Feast of Christ the King as a counter-revolutionary act against the secularisation of nations.⁴ The Pontiff warned that when states deny Christ’s sovereignty, “discord and enmities arise, because they have cast away the yoke of our Lord.”⁵

To be patriotic, therefore, is not to idolise one’s nation, but to seek its sanctification. The Catholic loves his homeland as part of the created order, subject to divine law, not as an end in itself. This is why St. Thomas Aquinas classed patriotism under the virtue of piety — it is honour paid to those through whom we receive temporal goods, second only to those through whom we receive eternal ones.⁶

By contrast, the Anglican position, oscillating between civic religion and moral philosophy, lacks any coherent theology of nationhood. Its ecclesial imagination is tied to the English state, yet its moral sympathies belong to cosmopolitan liberalism. Hence it condemns “Christian nationalism” without offering a vision of Christian order.

A wide view of a cemetery with rows of white gravestones marked by crosses, set against a clear blue sky and distant landscape.

A Remembrance emptied of remembrance
It is particularly revealing that this denunciation was timed for Remembrance Sunday — the day Britain recalls her war dead, whose graves bear not political slogans but the Cross. Those young men did not die for an ideology of universal tolerance; they died for a civilisation shaped by the Cross and for the moral inheritance that Williams now calls oppressive.

Their sacrifice, sanctified by chaplains and priests in muddy fields, was not rooted in a hatred of the foreigner, but in a love of home, faith, and justice. The very “common humanity” Williams invokes was defended by those who knew that civilisation without Christ collapses into barbarism. To forget that is to forget why the Cross stands upon our cenotaphs.

The modern misuse of ‘Christian nationalism’
The term itself has become a rhetorical weapon. Like “far-right” or “extremist,” it is deployed less to clarify than to condemn. Any attempt to restore Christian moral order, to defend natural law, or to preserve the family and national identity shaped by the Gospel is caricatured as “Christian nationalism.”

In truth, what many decry under that label is not nationalism but Christendom — the social embodiment of faith in public life. The Church’s mission is not confined to the sacristy; it extends to every aspect of human order. “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to Me,” says the Lord (Matthew 28:18). To exclude Him from governance, education, or culture is to enthrone chaos.

Two errors to reject
The Catholic must therefore avoid two opposing heresies. The first is the neo-pagan nationalism that substitutes blood and soil for baptism and creed. The second is the liberal humanitarianism that reduces faith to empathy and the Church to an NGO.

Against both, the Cross proclaims that every nation finds its dignity in submission to Christ. “He must reign,” wrote St. Paul, “until He has put all His enemies under His feet” (1 Corinthians 15:25). This reign is not merely spiritual but moral, social, and visible in the institutions and laws that reflect divine order.

The call to restoration
In our day, to proclaim the Kingship of Christ is to invite misunderstanding. It is to affirm that governments, schools, parliaments, and even churches must conform to the law of God. Yet this is precisely the task of Christians who love their nation rightly. Only a people that honours Christ as Lord can preserve liberty without licence and unity without tyranny.

Let us, therefore, resist both the politicisation of faith and its privatisation. The flag must never replace the Cross — but neither must the Cross be hidden out of fear of offending the world. The true synthesis is found not in nationalism but in sanctification: a people, culture, and law transformed by grace.

That is the meaning of Remembrance Sunday for Christians: not nostalgia for empire, nor guilt over history, but thanksgiving for those who died that Christian civilisation might live — and a renewal of the vow that Christ, not Caesar, shall reign.

¹ The Catholic Herald, “Rowan Williams and Anglican clergy speak out against Christian nationalism ahead of Remembrance Sunday,” 7 Nov 2025.
² Ibid., statements by Bp Anderson Jeremiah and Bp Rosemary Mallett.
³ Ibid., Rowan Williams quoted in full.
⁴ Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas (1925), nn. 11–12.
⁵ Ibid., n. 24.
⁶ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.101, a.1.

“Thy kingdom come”: France, Britain, and the need of Christ’s Sovereignty

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By the Archbishop of Selsey

When Our Lord told the sons of Zebedee, “You know not what you ask,”¹ He revealed that kingship in His Kingdom bears no likeness to the ambitions of men. For He reigns not by command but by sacrifice; not through armies, but through love. The throne of Christ is the Cross, and His crown is of thorns. Every other throne, every other crown, is legitimate only insofar as it reflects that mystery.

This is the heart of the doctrine proclaimed by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas: that Christ’s kingship is not confined to the sanctuary or the soul, but extends over nations, laws, and rulers—that “He must reign,” not merely in private hearts, but in social and political order.² The Social Reign of Christ the King is no abstraction; it is the blueprint of reality restored to grace. Without it, every state eventually becomes its own idol.

The Bourbon Appeal and the Crisis of France
It is striking that, a century after Quas Primas, these truths should echo once again through the words of a French prince. Earlier this month, Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou and head of the historic House of Bourbon, declared: “The situation has never been so serious; the Fifth Republic is on the verge of collapse. My family has served France for centuries, and if France calls upon me, I will be at its service. The indispensable condition is that France desires the return of the monarchy—a monarchy above parties, unifying.”³

His words were not anachronistic but prophetic. They arose from a nation whose political structures have lost moral direction, whose secularism has bled into cynicism, and whose people hunger for meaning. The Fifth Republic endures in form but not in faith. The prince’s offer of service—“above parties, unifying”—speaks to the deeper truth that sovereignty without sanctity cannot save a nation.

France was once the Eldest Daughter of the Church, baptised with the tears of St. Remigius and consecrated by Clovis. Her kings, for all their failings, were anointed as lieutenants of Christ the King—vicars of divine order within the temporal realm. The glory of St. Louis IX, who built Sainte-Chapelle to enshrine the Crown of Thorns, was not that he ruled, but that he ruled in obedience to Christ. When Louis XVI forgave his executioners, he did so as one who knew that true kingship is cruciform. In them both, we see the image of Christ’s reign—authority purified by sacrifice.

From Christendom to the Republic of Man
When France severed the bond between altar and throne in 1789, she inaugurated not liberty, but a new servitude: the worship of man in the place of God. As Joseph de Maistre warned, “Every nation has the government it deserves, for it has the religion it confesses.”⁴ Having expelled God from public life, modern states have enthroned the will of man as absolute. The result is instability, fragmentation, and despair. The secular republic has produced not unity but emptiness, not enlightenment but exhaustion.

Louis de Bourbon’s appeal is not nostalgia—it is a reminder that the Social Kingship of Christ is the only true foundation of freedom. The monarchy he envisions, “above parties,” is one that points beyond politics to Providence, one that restores the vertical order between heaven and earth. Such a vision is not antiquated; it is urgently prophetic.

The Hollow Crown of Britain
Across the Channel, the same truth confronts us in inverse form. The British monarchy endures, but without the faith that once gave it meaning. The Coronation of King Charles III in 2023 was grand but spiritually impoverished. The words “defender of the Faith” have been replaced with “defender of faiths.”⁵ In striving to honour all, the Crown affirms none. What was once a covenant between monarch and God has become a contract between monarch and media.

The Coronation’s sacred oil still flowed, yet the divine Kingship it symbolised was no longer confessed. A Crown that once promised fidelity to the “laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel” now guards a civil creed of inclusivity—a religion of tolerance without truth. Britain’s monarchy, in so far as it mirrors the world rather than Christ, has ceased to image kingship; it has become merely decorative. The “Defender of Faith” has become custodian of relativism.

Here lies the tragedy: a Crown wedded to politics loses its soul, while a Crown consecrated to Christ becomes the conscience of the nation. When rulers cease to kneel before the altar, they eventually kneel before opinion.

The Social Reign and the Restoration of Order
The kingship of Christ is no private devotion. As Pius XI wrote, “When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.”⁶ The Church’s mission, therefore, is not to retreat from the world but to reclaim it for its rightful King.

Louis de Bourbon’s words remind us that temporal authority, when rightly ordered, can serve as a visible sacrament of that greater Kingdom. The monarch anointed under God serves as father to his people precisely because he himself is subject to the Father of all. This is the model of hierarchy redeemed by humility—the antithesis of modern power politics.

The world calls this reactionary; the Church calls it reality. The throne, like the altar, must once again become a place of offering.

Britain, France, and the Two Temptations
Both nations illustrate opposite temptations: France’s rejection of monarchy in the name of liberty, and Britain’s retention of monarchy at the cost of truth. The first killed the king; the second forgets the King of Kings. Yet both demonstrate that without the social reign of Christ, human authority collapses into either revolution or ritualism.

The renewal of monarchy, if it is to come, must therefore be Eucharistic—a renewal of sacrifice, not spectacle. To restore the crown is not to revive aristocracy, but to restore sanctity. The ruler must once again be a servant of Christ’s law, not of public mood. The same is true of every priest, politician, and parent. For all authority shares one source: “All power in heaven and on earth is given unto Me.”⁷

The Kingdom and Its Prayer
When we pray Adveniat regnum tuum—“Thy Kingdom come”—we invoke not only the Second Coming but the sanctification of our present age. This prayer is the charter of Christendom. It proclaims that the laws of nations must conform to the moral law; that peace without justice is false; that liberty without truth is slavery. The reign of Christ is social because His redemption is universal.

The call for “Monarchy and God Again” is, in essence, a call for the restoration of the Social Kingship of Christ—for the re-evangelisation of culture through the conversion of rulers and the sanctification of law. France, once baptised by saints, and England, once consecrated as Our Lady’s dowry, must both rediscover that their national vocation lies in serving the divine.

The kingdoms of this world will pass away. The republics of men will crumble. But the Kingdom of Christ endures, because it is built not upon compromise but upon the Cross. The world awaits not the return of kings, but the return of Christ the King in public life, in conscience, in culture, and in law. Only then will liberty be true, and order be just.

Let every sceptre, every crown, and every constitution confess what the Church still dares to sing:
Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

¹ Gospel according to St. Mark 10:38.
² Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas (Encyclical on the Kingship of Christ), 11 December 1925, §§18–19.
³ “Louis de Bourbon prêt à servir la France si elle veut le retour de la monarchie,” Le Figaro, 10 October 2025.
⁴ Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France (1797), ch. II.
⁵ The Coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla, Official Liturgy (London: Church House Publishing, 2023), pp. 10–14.
⁶ Quas Primas, §19.
⁷ Gospel according to St. Matthew 28:18.

The Empty Chair: A Reflection on the Royal Visit to Rome

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By the Archbishop of Selsey

A gesture without conversion
Tomorrow, in the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls, His Majesty King Charles III — Supreme Governor of the Church of England — will kneel beside the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. He will be received as Royal Confrater of that venerable Benedictine basilica, where the Apostle to the Gentiles lies beneath the ancient words Ut unum sint — “that they may be one.”

A chair has been made for the occasion, carved in English oak and adorned with the royal arms. Its purpose, we are told, is to symbolise the friendship between Canterbury and Rome. Yet this is not friendship born of faith, nor unity grounded in truth. It is a gesture of diplomacy, not a sign of conversion — a symbol of goodwill without repentance, and of courtesy without confession.

The denial of the Sacrifice
For the monarch being honoured is not returning to the faith of his forebears, but stands as the constitutional head of a communion that long ago repudiated the Apostolic See, denied the Sacrifice of the Mass, and enthroned Parliament above the altar of God. The Church of England’s own doctrinal formularies remain explicit: “The sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said that the priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits.”¹ In one sentence, the very heart of Catholic worship is rejected — the doctrine of the Holy Sacrifice that unites heaven and earth.

An irregular honour
Even more disquieting is the personal irregularity that accompanies this royal recognition. The King is twice married, having for years lived in public adultery with his present consort — who herself was married in a Catholic ceremony to Andrew Parker Bowles, a union that, as public record confirms, was never annulled by the Church.² Thus, while her first marriage remains sacramentally binding, she is now styled Queen and received in papal circles with honour. The incongruity speaks for itself: an ecumenical gesture extended to those whose very marriage contradicts the indissolubility of the Sacrament.

The end of dialogue
Meanwhile, the Church of England, over which the King presides, has confirmed the appointment of a woman to the See of Canterbury — a decisive act of apostasy that seals the final rupture with apostolic tradition and renders null any serious hope of reunion.³

Whatever promise once flickered in the ARCIC process — the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, established jointly by Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey in 1967 to seek doctrinal convergence — has now been extinguished.⁴ The ARCIC I Final Report (1981) expressed cautious optimism, affirming that “the Eucharist is a sacrifice because it is the memorial of Christ’s one sacrifice” and that “ordained ministry is a gift of God to his people.”⁵ Later ARCIC statements — The Gift of Authority (1999), Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005), and Walking Together on the Way (2017) — attempted to sustain this tone of progress, yet none restored doctrinal unity.⁶

Rome’s official responses, though courteous, have been clear: substantial agreement has not been achieved, and full communion remains impossible while the Anglican Communion persists in errors regarding Orders, moral theology, and sacramental discipline.⁷ Thus, by placing a woman in Augustine’s chair, Canterbury has extinguished any remaining theological credibility for reunion. The door, long narrowing through innovation, has now been slammed shut from within.

The creedless humanitarianism of our age
But the greater tragedy lies not merely in the hollowness of this gesture, but in the ideological spirit that animates it. For both monarch and pontiff are shaped by the same pluralist creed — the modern superstition that truth must bow to inclusivity. The King, long an advocate of “faiths” in the plural, publicly stated that he wished to be known as “Defender of Faith” rather than “Defender of the Faith,” to signify his belief in the equal validity of all religions.⁸ Pope Leo XIV, for his part, has continued the post-conciliar trajectory of pluralist diplomacy: emphasising fraternity among religions and global harmony above the conversion of souls. His addresses on “the unity of humanity,” his renewal of the Document on Human Fraternity signed by his predecessor, and his insistence that the Church must “learn to listen to other paths of truth”⁹ reveal a conception of unity far removed from the missionary mandate of Christ.

What unites them is not creed, but a creedless humanitarianism — the gospel of coexistence, where religion is reduced to symbol and morality to sentiment. The meeting of King and Pope thus becomes the liturgy of modernity itself: a ceremony for a world that believes in everything and therefore in nothing.

The betrayal of witness
Yet what does this spectacle mean for the faithful — for the descendants of England’s recusants, and for Catholics who still revere the martyrs who shed their blood for the Mass now dismissed as a “blasphemous fable”? What are they to make of such an “act of charity” emptied of the charity of truth? Those who hid priests in their homes, who whispered the Rosary under threat of death, who saw their families ruined for refusing the Oath of Supremacy — they did not endure so that popes might flatter kings or trade the Cross for concord. The men who died on Tyburn Tree, the women who perished in prison for harbouring a priest, did so out of love for the very faith now diluted into diplomacy.

To those English Catholics who still hold that faith, this event can only appear as betrayal — not of politics, but of the Gospel itself. For charity divorced from truth is not love but indulgence, and unity without conversion is not reconciliation but surrender. The Church’s mission is not to make all faiths comfortable, but to make all souls holy. When Peter’s successor forgets that, he ceases to confirm his brethren and begins to confuse them.

A call to prayer and witness
This “empty chair” in St Paul’s, carved and gilded for a monarch who does not believe as the Church believes, stands as a parable of modern ecumenism itself: beautifully made, ceremoniously placed, and spiritually hollow. It asks to be filled — not with a king, nor with applause, but with truth, repentance, and the fire of faith.

If this gesture stirs anything, may it be the conscience of England. For unity cannot be staged; it must be sanctified. The only path to reunion remains the same now as in the days of Campion and More: conversion to the truth of Christ in His one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.

Let every faithful Catholic, then, take this moment not as cause for despair but as a summons to renewal. The collapse of visible unity is not the end of the Church’s mission but a reminder of it. We must become witnesses of authentic charity — rooted in truth, animated by prayer, and expressed through holiness of life. If false unity is made through ceremony, true unity will come only through sanctity.

Pray, then, for our nation — for her King, her people, and her clergy. Pray for the conversion of hearts, for courage in the face of compromise, and for the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary over indifference and unbelief. Let every home become again a small chapel of fidelity; let every Catholic life be a quiet act of reparation for the betrayal of truth.

For the unity Our Lord prayed for — that they may be one — will not be achieved through diplomacy or synodality, but through the Cross. The path to unity is the path of Calvary: truth preached, grace embraced, and love purified in sacrifice. Until that day dawns, the empty chair in the basilica of St Paul Outside the Wall’s will stand as both a rebuke and a promise — that unity without Christ is void, but unity in Christ will one day restore all things.

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, cuius Unigenitus Filius, Iesus Christus Pastor Bonus, dixit: “Et alias oves habeo, quae non sunt ex hoc ovili; et illas oportet me adducere, et vocem meam audient, et fiet unum ovile et unus pastor”; effunde, quaesumus, divitias benedictionum tuarum super Apostolatum Vetus Romanum, ut ad hoc serviat consilio tuo, oves perditas et errantes colligendo. Illumina, sanctifica, et vivifica illud per inhabitationem Spiritus Sancti, ut suspiciones et praeiudicia tollantur, ac reliquae oves, vocem veri Pastoris audientes et agnoscentes, ad unam ovilis tui unitatem perficiendam adducantur, in una sancta Ecclesia Catholica tua, sub sapienti ac amanti custodia Vicarii tui.
Per eundem Iesum Christum, Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate eiusdem Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Almighty and everlasting God, Whose only begotten Son, Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd, has said, “Other sheep I have that are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd”; let Thy rich and abundant blessing rest upon the Old Roman Apostolate, to the end that it may serve Thy purpose by gathering in the lost and straying sheep. Enlighten, sanctify, and quicken it by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, that suspicions and prejudices may be disarmed, and the other sheep being brought to hear and to know the voice of their true Shepherd thereby, all may be brought into full and perfect unity in the one fold of Thy Holy Catholic Church, under the wise and loving keeping of Thy Vicar, through the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who with Thee and the Holy Ghost, liveth and reigneth God, world without end. Amen.

More background information and analysis at Nuntiatoria

Footnotes
¹ Articles of Religion, Article XXXI, The Book of Common Prayer (1662): “Of the one Oblation of Christ finished upon the Cross.”
² Aleteia, “Is Camilla Parker Bowles a Catholic?” 12 Feb 2022; Catholic Herald archives, “Camilla’s Marriage and Canon Law: Why No Annulment Was Granted,” 9 Apr 2005.
³ Associated Press, “Sarah Mullally Appointed First Woman Archbishop of Canterbury in Historic Move,” 18 Oct 2025.
⁴ Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, “Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC): Background,” http://www.christianunity.va.
⁵ ARCIC I Final Report (1981), §§ 5, 13–17, “Eucharistic Doctrine” and “Ministry and Ordination.”
⁶ ARCIC II documents: The Gift of Authority (1999), Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005); ARCIC III: Walking Together on the Way (2017); see anglicancommunion.org.
⁷ Official Response of the Holy See to ARCIC I Final Report (1991); Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Press Statement on ARCIC III (2017).
⁸ Charles, Prince of Wales, interview with BBC Panorama, “Defender of Faith,” 29 June 1994; Time Magazine, “Charles and the Faiths,” 3 Nov 2008.
⁹ Pope Leo XIV, “Address to the Ambassadors of the World Faith Forum,” 5 March 2025; L’Osservatore Romano, “Pope Leo Renews Commitment to the Abu Dhabi Human Fraternity Charter,” 7 March 2025.

The Orphaned Altar: On the Crisis of Episcopal Fatherhood

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By the Archbishop of Selsey

A Silent Crisis Beneath the Surface
There are moments in the Church’s history when the gravest crises are not those proclaimed in thunder from the pulpits or the decrees of Rome, but those suffered in silence by her sons. Such is the case today, when many priests—those who once came to the altar aflame with the love of God—now minister beneath the shadow of a wounded fatherhood. Their suffering is seldom spoken of; yet it gnaws at the heart of the Church. It is the hidden trial of a generation of priests orphaned not by heresy or persecution, but by the cold neglect of their spiritual fathers.

The crisis of fatherhood—so visible in society, where fathers have abdicated responsibility for their children—has entered the sanctuary. Bishops, once spiritual patriarchs who guided their clergy as sons, have become administrators, functionaries, and managers of decline. Their governance too often resembles the bureaucracy of a corporation rather than the heart of a father. The result is an orphaned presbyterate: weary, mistrustful, and fearful. What begins as administrative efficiency ends as spiritual sterility.

The Fatherhood that Gives Life
The priesthood, by its nature, is relational. Every priest must stand both in persona Christi and sub episcopo, in filial obedience to his bishop as to a father in Christ. The bishop’s ring signifies not only governance but spousal fidelity to the Church and paternal love for his priests. St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote, “Where the bishop is, there is the Church”¹—yet he also meant that where the bishop is not father, the Church withers into institution.

In the golden age of the Fathers, bishops were shepherds whose charity bound together the presbyterate and flock in a single spirit. St. Gregory the Great described the bishop as “a watchman set upon the walls of Israel”², one who guards both the purity of doctrine and the souls of those under his care. The bishop’s first duty was not strategy but sanctity. He was to pour himself out for his priests, that they might pour themselves out for their people.

But today, that supernatural fatherhood is often eclipsed by managerial pragmatism. Meetings replace mentorship; compliance replaces counsel; fear replaces fraternity. Many priests now dread a summons to the chancery more than the final judgment. They no longer expect paternal concern, only procedural rebuke. In such a climate, holiness becomes private heroism rather than shared pursuit.

The Withering of Fraternal Communion
The health of the Church depends not on policies but on love. When bishops cease to love their priests, when priests no longer feel the warmth of fatherly affection, the supernatural life of the Church begins to bleed away. The priest, deprived of affirmation and guidance, turns inward. Some grow cautious, preaching only what offends no one. Others grow hardened, their zeal dulled by cynicism. Still others, desiring escape, fill their lives with distractions and comforts.

In earlier centuries, the bishop’s household was a school of holiness. Priests were formed by the example of their prelate’s prayer, fasting, and simplicity. But in many dioceses today, bishops live in splendid isolation, surrounded not by brothers but by lawyers, secretaries, and consultants. The house of prayer has become an office; the mitre, a badge of status. The faithful look on, bewildered, while the priests beneath such leadership struggle to remember why they first left all to follow Christ.

The Holy Curé of Ars laboured eighteen hours a day, hearing confessions and offering the Holy Sacrifice with tears. His sanctity rebuilt a nation scarred by revolution. Yet he would be dismissed in many modern dioceses as “too pious,” “too rigid,” or “insufficiently pastoral.” His zeal is out of fashion because the supernatural has been eclipsed by the sociological. Bishops speak of accompaniment but rarely of conversion; of mercy but seldom of repentance. They wish to smell like the sheep, yet too often smell only of politics.

Bureaucracy and the Eclipse of the Supernatural
One of the great deceptions of our time is to confuse activity with vitality. Endless consultations, synodal reports, and policy documents give the illusion of motion while the soul of the Church languishes. The very structures designed to support priests have become labyrinths of paperwork. The priest who once found solace in his bishop’s blessing now finds himself mired in compliance forms and risk assessments.

It is not administration that kills, but the substitution of administration for fatherhood. When the shepherd delegates the care of souls to committees, his priests are left to fend for themselves. “Feed my sheep,” said the Lord to Peter³—not “survey them,” nor “appoint a task force.” Yet many priests live as though their father has forgotten those words. The Church cannot be governed as a corporation without ceasing to be a family.

The Psychological and Spiritual Toll
Behind the statistics of declining vocations lies a deeper tragedy. Priests today are among the loneliest men in society. Studies show widespread distrust between clergy and bishops⁴; many confess to isolation, anxiety, and fear of reprisal. The priest who preaches the moral law risks complaint; the one who maintains reverence in the liturgy risks accusation of rigidity. In such conditions, virtue becomes suspect and mediocrity safe.

Some priests respond with stoic endurance; others withdraw into a safe professionalism that avoids controversy but also avoids conversion. A few, deprived of spiritual fatherhood, lose themselves to the very world they were ordained to sanctify. Thus the bishop’s failure to father becomes the devil’s victory twice over—first by silencing truth, then by corrupting its messenger.

A Mirror of the World’s Fatherlessness
The collapse of paternal identity among bishops mirrors the world’s wider loss of fatherhood. The same cultural forces that have made earthly fathers absent, fearful, or effeminate have also weakened spiritual fathers. Many bishops, trained in the post-conciliar decades of experimentation and ambiguity, have never known genuine paternal formation themselves. They were not taught to command with love, nor to love with authority. They are products of a therapeutic age that mistrusts both discipline and sacrifice.

And yet the Church can no more survive without fathers than a family can. When bishops cease to be fathers, priests become orphans, and the faithful—children of those priests—grow rootless. The contagion of fatherlessness spreads from chancery to rectory, from rectory to home, until the very idea of authority is despised. The devil, who hates the name “Father,” rejoices in such a hierarchy.

The Patristic Measure of True Shepherds
The Fathers of the Church would scarcely recognize many of today’s episcopal priorities. St. Cyprian taught that a bishop must be “united in heart with his priests, sharing their labours, their tears, and their dangers”⁵. St. John Chrysostom warned that the bishop who neglects his clergy commits a sin against the Body of Christ. St. Gregory Nazianzen resigned his see rather than become a mere functionary, declaring that “to lead others, one must first be purified oneself.”

This is the pattern of episcopal life the Church once held up as ideal: ascetical, paternal, prophetic. The bishop was not an administrator of budgets but a man of prayer, whose tears could baptize a diocese. When such men led, their priests followed willingly—even unto martyrdom. The vitality of the early Church sprang not from programs but from the living transmission of holiness.

The Roots of Renewal
The renewal of the priesthood will not begin in offices or conferences. It will begin when bishops again become fathers, and priests sons. True fatherhood does not flatter; it corrects, encourages, and forgives. It does not isolate; it draws near. It does not fear holiness in its sons; it rejoices in it. Bishops who imitate Christ the Good Shepherd will attract vocations even in desolate times, because love always begets life.

What can the faithful do in the meantime? First, pray and fast for priests and bishops. The Rosary is no longer optional in this war for souls. Offer reparation for the sins of shepherds, but also for their wounds. Many bishops act as they do because they have forgotten that they, too, were once priests trembling at the altar. Pray that they may recover the simplicity of their first Mass.

Second, give your priests the warmth of genuine friendship. Invite them into your homes. Encourage them when they preach the truth. Write to them when they are maligned. Many have never heard a layman say, “Father, your priesthood has changed my life.” Such words can rekindle hope more powerfully than any policy.

Finally, resist the temptation to despair. The priesthood belongs to Christ, not to bureaucrats. The same Lord who called Peter from his nets can still raise up saints from the ruins of clericalism. When the hierarchy forgets the Cross, God raises prophets from the laity. The Church’s renewal will come not from strategy but from sanctity.

The Model of the Crucified Father
Christ on the Cross is the image of every true bishop: arms outstretched, heart pierced, blood spent for his children. In Him, authority and love are one. The world can imitate compassion, but it cannot imitate Calvary. It is there that spiritual fatherhood finds its meaning—not in power, but in sacrifice. The bishop who forgets this becomes an official; the priest who forgets it becomes a hireling.

When bishops once again weep for their priests, and priests once again lay down their lives for their flocks, the Church will bloom even in the desert. Until then, we live in the long Lent of ecclesial fatherlessness. Yet even now, grace is not absent. Among the ruins, there are still fathers who love and sons who obey, still altars where the Lamb is offered in purity and faith. In that hidden fidelity, the Church endures.

A Call to Courage and Contrition
Every bishop should kneel before his priests and ask himself: “Do they see in me the face of Christ? Do they hear in my words the voice of a father?” If the answer is uncertain, repentance is the only path forward. The episcopal palace must again become a house of prayer. The miter must be exchanged for the towel of the servant. The shepherd must rediscover the smell not only of the sheep but of the Cross.

The world’s night grows darker, and the Church must shine the brighter. Our age does not need bishops who blend into the world’s noise, but men who bear within themselves the stillness of Gethsemane. Priests will find their courage again when they see courage on the cathedra; they will become holy when holiness is enthroned above them.

Conclusion: Hope Through Paternal Renewal
The renewal of the Church will not come from the top down, nor from the bottom up, but from heart to heart—from father to son. When bishops once more speak to their priests as fathers, when priests rediscover in their bishop the image of Christ, the channels of grace will open again. And from that grace will flow the courage to confront the world’s darkness with divine charity.

Let us therefore pray not for new strategies but for new hearts: hearts of fathers, hearts of sons, hearts conformed to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who is both Priest and Victim, Shepherd and Lamb. Then the orphaned priests of our time will cease to wander, and the Church will once more be known not for her structures, but for her sanctity.

  1. St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 8:1.
  2. St. Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis (Book II, ch. 4).
  3. John 21:17.
  4. The Catholic Project, Catholic University of America, Survey of American Catholic Priests (2022).
  5. St. Cyprian of Carthage, De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate, 5.

From Ruin to Restoration: The Story of Catholic England

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By the Archbishop of Selsey

On the feast of St Michael, 29 September 1850, Pope Pius IX restored diocesan bishops to England and Wales. Nicholas Wiseman, made Archbishop of Westminster, cried out with joy that Catholic England was “restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament.”¹ That orbit had been broken for nearly three centuries. The Church in England had lived in eclipse. It had been stripped of its altars, mocked by its enemies, betrayed by its rulers, and sustained only by the blood of martyrs and the courage of recusants. What was restored in 1850 had first been shattered in 1559, when Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy and Act of Uniformity outlawed the ancient Mass.²

The parish altar, once the heart of every village, was torn down. Chalices were hidden in cupboards, vestments ripped for rags, bishops thrown into prison, priests exiled or compelled to conform. Families were dragged to court, fined into ruin for missing the new services. By the 1580s, a Catholic who refused to attend owed £20 each month, a fine calculated to destroy.³ In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in the bull Regnans in Excelsis.⁴ To Catholics, it was a defence of truth; to the Crown, it was proof of treason. Parliament tightened the law still further. In 1585, the Act against Jesuits and Seminary Priests decreed that any priest ordained abroad who returned home should die as a traitor, and any layman who gave him shelter could share his fate.⁵ From that moment, the presence of a Catholic priest on English soil was a hanging crime.

Yet priests came anyway. Edmund Campion, Oxford’s golden boy, traded honours for a disguise and a chalice. He moved by night, heard confessions in barns, preached Christ in attics. Caught, racked in the Tower, he went to Tyburn in 1581 and told his judges they condemned their own ancestors. He died with calm defiance.⁶ Margaret Clitherow, the butcher’s wife of York, opened her home to fugitives. When arrested, she refused to plead, knowing that a trial would force her children to betray her. For this she was crushed to death beneath stones in 1586, thirty-three years old, pregnant, praying for her killers.⁷ Nicholas Owen, a Jesuit carpenter, turned wood and stone into weapons of survival. He built priest-holes so cunning that many remain hidden even now. He saved countless priests, then died under torture in 1606.⁸ More than three hundred Catholics were executed under Elizabeth and James, many for nothing more than saying Mass.⁹

For those who lived, recusancy meant a slow martyrdom. Fines ruined estates, laws excluded children from schools, informers prowled villages. Whole communities gathered at midnight for a furtive Mass, watchmen posted on the lanes. Rosaries were fingered in whispers, catechisms taught in secret, faith lived under constant threat. The Armada of 1588 convinced Protestants that Catholics were Spain’s agents. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the folly of a few, stained the entire community with treason. Bonfires and sermons each November renewed the suspicion. Later, Titus Oates’s fabricated Popish Plot in 1678 sent innocent men to the gallows.¹⁰ In 1780, the Gordon Riots set chapels aflame and mobs howled “No Popery!” in the streets.¹¹

Rome did not abandon England. In 1623, Pope Gregory XV appointed William Bishop as Vicar Apostolic, the first of a line of bishops without dioceses, shepherds of shadows who confirmed children in barns and ordained priests abroad.¹² And in London, Richard Challoner sustained the hidden faithful with his revision of the Douai-Rheims Bible and his Garden of the Soul (1740), a book of prayers that became the catechism of generations who had no parish or procession but carried the Church in their hearts.¹³

By the late eighteenth century the storm began to lift. The Relief Act of 1778 permitted Catholics to inherit land, though it provoked the Gordon Riots. The Act of 1791 allowed registered chapels and schools, still under scrutiny.¹⁴ At last the great Relief Act of 1829 swept away most remaining restrictions. Catholics could sit in Parliament, hold office, live as citizens.¹⁵ The long night of penal times was ending.

But the missionary structure of vicariates could no longer suffice. Catholics were multiplying, parishes thriving, schools spreading. In 1850, Pius IX restored the hierarchy by Universalis Ecclesiae. Thirteen dioceses were created, with Westminster as metropolitan. Wiseman, newly made cardinal, was appointed archbishop.¹⁶ Protestant England fumed. Lord John Russell railed against papal aggression in his “Durham Letter.”¹⁷ Effigies of the Pope were burned, and Parliament passed the Ecclesiastical Titles Act forbidding Catholic bishops to use Anglican titles.¹⁸ But the storm passed, and the hierarchy endured.

Catholic England was visible once more. Parishes multiplied, schools flourished, orders revived, Irish immigration filled churches, and converts like John Henry Newman gave prestige. Westminster Cathedral rose in 1895 as a sign of permanence.¹⁹ Through two world wars Catholics fought, served, and suffered alongside their countrymen. Chaplains brought the sacraments to the trenches, parishes endured the Blitz. By mid-century, Catholics were no longer outsiders. The old stigma of recusancy was gone.

But even as the Church grew strong in public, new storms rose from within. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) sought renewal but brought upheaval. The traditional Latin Mass, the anchor through centuries of persecution, was replaced. Vocations fell. Catechesis faltered.²⁰ The faith that had survived rope and rack now waned in an age of comfort. Meanwhile Britain itself drifted into secularism, with laws liberalising abortion and divorce, reshaping family life, and eroding Christian morality. Later decades exalted ideologies hostile to Catholic truth. Attendance dwindled, parishes closed, vocations dried up. The diocesan structure restored in 1850 still stands, but the Church it governs is weakened.

And yet the story is not finished. The martyrs still speak. Campion from the scaffold, Clitherow from beneath the stones, Owen from the hidden chamber, Challoner from the secret chapel. They endured not only for their own age but for ours. Their sacrifice is our summons. The England that once outlawed the Mass now shrugs at it. Indifference has replaced hostility. But the demand remains the same: fidelity to Christ, whatever the cost.

If Catholic England was restored to its orbit in 1850, it must not drift into eclipse today. The Church that survived rope and rack must not surrender to compromise. Catholic England will be truly restored only if her children reclaim the fidelity of the martyrs, the patience of the confessors, the courage of the recusants. The dawn broke once before. It can break again. But only if the faith that endured the darkness burns as brightly in our own time.

  1. Nicholas Wiseman, Pastoral Letter from out of the Flaminian Gate (1850).
  2. Statutes of the Realm: 1 Eliz. I, c.1–2 (1559).
  3. 23 Eliz. I, c.1 (1581).
  4. Regnans in Excelsis (Pius V), 25 February 1570.
  5. 27 Eliz. I, c.2 (1585).
  6. Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion (1935).
  7. John Mush, A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow (1586).
  8. Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (2006).
  9. John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (1975).
  10. John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (1972).
  11. Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (1999).
  12. Catholic Encyclopedia, “England (Ecclesiastical History).”
  13. Richard Challoner, The Garden of the Soul (1740).
  14. 18 Geo. III, c.60 (1778); 31 Geo. III, c.32 (1791).
  15. 10 Geo. IV, c.7 (1829).
  16. Universalis Ecclesiae (Pius IX), 29 Sept. 1850.
  17. Lord John Russell, “Durham Letter,” Hansard (1850).
  18. 14 & 15 Vict., c.60 (1851).
  19. Owen Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement (1990).
  20. Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (2004).