via John Derbyshire at The Corner

A well-known (I guess) Anglican intellectual will leap the Tiber, but not before some parting shots

“My new book is not actually a criticism of the Church of England,” says Canon Edward Norman, chancellor of York Minster, choosing his words with donnish precision.

Is he serious? Two minutes later, he declares: “There is a big hole at the centre of Anglicanism – its authority. I don’t think it’s a Church; it’s more of a religious society.” This is the most hurtful criticism that one can make of any Church: to say that it is not a Church.

In fact, his book, Anglican Difficulties: A New Syllabus of Errors, is one of the most ferocious assaults ever launched on the Church of England. It is all the more deadly because its author is not a traditionalist quote-merchant, but a leading Church intellectual.

A former Reith lecturer and Dean of Peterhouse, Canon Norman is an ecclesiastical historian with the long face and high cheekbones of a Tudor churchman. He speaks fast and quietly, polishing his dry words as he speaks, so that his prose and conversation are almost indistinguishable. He commits thoughts to paper that colleagues might let slip only in the senior common room after dinner.

In Anglican Difficulties, Norman blazes away impartially at all the Church’s factions. About the General Synod, he writes: “Every disagreement, in seemingly every board or committee, proceeds by avoidance of principled debate. Ordinary moral cowardice is represented as wise judgment; equivocation in the construction of compromise formulae is second nature to leaders.”

Evangelical bishops who trumpet their adherence to Biblical orthodoxy are accused of selling their principles in return for preferment. “Discreetly, behind the twitching curtains of the evangelical bishops’ houses, the playing pieces are being set out on the board,” writes Norman.

So how can someone who believes that the Church of England is collapsing belong to it?

The answer is that Edward Norman will leave the Church of England when he retires as a member of York Minster’s chapter in May. Later this year, he will be received into the Roman Catholic Church by a Cambridge contemporary, Fr Dermot Fenlon, at the Birmingham Oratory. He has started attending Mass in Catholic churches, unobserved in collar and tie.

Update: Via Fr. Wilson, this Beliefnet article from a couple of years ago. Well.

A radical rethink of Church teaching on homosexuality that declares it to be “divinely ordered” is revealed this week in a catechism commissioned by the Archbishop of York.

…Written by Canon Edward Norman, canon and treasurer of York Minster, the catechism seeks to define Anglicanism for the first time since Thomas Cranmer wrote The Book of Common Prayer in 1662.

…In the section on sexuality, he contradicts official teaching and the views of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey.

“Homosexuality,” says the catechism, “may well not be a condition to be regretted but to have divinely ordered and positive qualities.”

“Homosexual Christian believers,” it continues, “should be encouraged to find in their sexual preferences such elements of moral beauty as may enhance their general understanding of Christ’s calling.”