CONGREGATIO DIVINUM CARITAS

By Dr Paul Kitchenham

A few days ago I found a copy of a rather pretentious card which I had had printed and sent out to my friends to announce that on the Feast of the Transfiguration 1993 I would be conditionally baptised and received into the Roman Catholic Church at St Cuthbert’s Chapel Sacriston, County Durham. What struck my attention was the verse from the Epistle to the Hebrews which I had chosen to go on this card - talking of Abraham’s faith and how it had caused him to leave his home & go to an unfamiliar land, the author of the Epistle wRites “For he looked for a city that hath foundations: whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10). How apt a quotation to describe my journey to Old Roman Catholicism & St Cuthman’s Mission!

From my school days I have been looking for that city, seeking it first in Biblical Anglicanism, then in Anglo-Catholicism, before discovering the Traditional Catholic community in County Durham whilst I was studying at the University there - the greatest gift Dr Glover & his little congregation imparted to me before & after my reception was a love for the traditional Rite of Mass, the glories of the Triduum ceremonies and the beauty of plainsong and polyphony. Mass on Sundays and Holy Days was supplemented by singing Vespers in the Norman Chapel at Durham Castle under the direction of the late Dr Jerome Roche. Dr Glover’s version of traditional Catholicism was down-to-earth, intellectually grounded and (there is no other word for it) stylish. For all those things I am grateful and will always pray for my former co-religionists there both living and those now departed.

Why then am I no longer a Traditional Roman Catholic? Human sin & immaturity undoubtedly come into the answer, and I make no bones about the fact that my spiritual journey can appear a succession of mistakes and blind alleys - I have handed that over to God in whose love and mercies I have trusted throughout my journey. But the isolated, unique position of St Cuthbert’s Traditional Catholic Association came to an end with Dr Glover’s retirement and the handing over of the Mission to the Society of Saint Pius X. For me, with 16 years hindsight, this points to the fundamental contradiction in holding a full Vatican I doctrine of Papal authority whilst rejecting that same authority in practice by avoiding (in Dr Glover’s case) all liturgical developments since the 1950s. At the time, it also introduced me to the fact that the SSPX priests had different priorities to those which had attracted me to the Catholicism available in the little cellar chapel in the appropriately named village of Sacriston - I found the refusal to engage with the modern world and the ceaseless sermons on immodesty in dress, abortion, apparitions and so on, tedious and unfulfilling.

In my spiritual wanderings thereafter, I spent time with the conciliar Roman Catholic Church in its most attractive incarnation at the London Oratory, returned to Anglo-Catholicism, spending also a few years away from Church attendance completely. Many places of worship satisfied for a while, but these were oases along the way, and eventually I had to move on from each - sometimes for good reasons, sometimes less so. I also trained as a Religious Education teacher during those years and found it stimulating and thought-provoking to explore the teachings and ceremonies of other religions. All this time consciously or unconsciously I still sought for that city, whose builder and maker is God.

Sometimes God works in our lives through our circumstances and in His grace gives us the push we need to find the right direction. In the last year I have experienced this grace, with sudden and unmistakable call out of the two Anglican Churches where I was involved. I’m no Abraham, but I was being asked to leave what had passed for a spiritual home and seek more strongly for the city with foundations. Unlike Abraham I can say with all honesty that the places which I have passed through are clearly doing a work for God, but I could see that He was saying to me one by one, “not here, not here”.

So in Septuagesimatide this year I found myself without a spiritual home, and also having to take time off work for stress - this time has been a real opportunity for reassessment and rediscovery of who I am, and whom I am called to be. None of us can do a greater thing for God’s glory than to be fully ourselves, His beloved and unique creation. How then did I find myself at Mass at St Cuthman’s Mission on Palm Sunday? I decided very early on in my period of retreat into myself that the future for me would lie outside the “mainstream” - I had known various representatives of independent Catholicism through my academic interests but had always thoughtlessly considered it to be an area of Roman Catholics manques. It was my recent hobby of collecting old neo-Gallican liturgical books - the Missals, Antiphonaires, Breviaries, Rituals and so on used by the different French dioceses until their abandonment in the 19th century wave of ultramontanism - that led me to see that the fundamental dislocation within Roman Catholic Traditionalism was a result of an overblown and misplaced understanding of the Petrine Primacy. I was seeking for a more traditional ecclesiology than the innovations of the 19th century - rather than trying to be an Anglican and shutting my eyes to everything outside my parish, or trying to be a Roman Catholic and shutting my eyes to everything more or less, the city that has foundations was the Old Roman Catholic position, shared with Orthodoxy, recognising the ministry of the Pope among the Churches, but valuing the local, the specific and centred on organic tradition - the discovery of St Cuthman’s Mission within driving distance of my home followed shortly thereafter, thanks to the website and I have come home.

Much of my journey may be very individual to myself - I would never claim that Old Roman Catholicism is for everyone, but I have found at St Cuthman’s a glimpse of the only city that truly has foundations, which is that heavenly Jerusalem to which God’s love calls each and every one of us. I can do no better than to pray for God’s blessing on you the reader on your spiritual journey, and can give no better advice than to think with your heart, to listen to God’s word to you in prayer and meditation, and to know that it is His will that you should be the person He created you to be: that city which has foundations is within each of us, and we are all living stones called to build up that heavenly Jerusalem to all eternity.