Benedict XVI’s most tangible legacy

Pope Benedict XVI and Dr Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, embrace during Evening Prayer at Westminster Abbey on 17 September, 2010, in the course of the Papal Visit to the UK.

I don’t know that I ever met a practising Catholic before I went to university. A friend at school had an Irish surname and his parents, I learned, went to Mass. But growing up in an Anglican family and attending Anglican schools, my knowledge of Catholicism before then was nil. A single experience came during a trip to Rome. We were there for a few days, and a handful of us decided to try to see the Pope.

We got hold of General Audience tickets, and on a dull Wednesday morning stood in the Paul VI audience hall as John Paul II, by then quite elderly and unwell, passed us down the aisle. I took a photo of the ailing pontiff, and remember showing it when I got home as one of many sights from the trip, alongside the Pantheon, the Forum, and the pizza we’d had on the final night.

By this time my own faith, conversely, was growing. I benefitted from a solid Anglican foundation: good country parish, cathedral choir and dedicated school chaplain. But Catholicism was not on my radar. I held no animosity toward it – at least no more than any schoolboy whose history master seemed not to have caught up with Eamon Duffy’s writings – I simply held no strong view on it at all.

This changed when I became exposed to Anglo-Catholicism. I began to appreciate Catholic ritual and ceremony in worship, and through that began to ask where it came from and why it was important. This led in turn to a discovery of the faith that this distinctive worship sought to demonstrate, and pretty soon I became a convinced Anglo-Papalist, albeit one who could never entirely shirk a love for the load-bearing arms of a quire stall on Sunday afternoon, nor the convincing rhythm of Anglican chant. 

This amble toward the Catholic Church took on a more definite direction when I was accepted for ministry in the Church of England. At theological college in Oxford I began to flesh out with theological reasoning what I had already embraced through instinct. The Fathers were important, but so were the writings of later popes and of the Second Vatican Council. These were presented as, and became clear as, coherent and reliable sources of doctrine that – at the time, at least – simply conveniently affirmed existing views.

The Church of England of the early 2000s was not a congenial place to draw these conclusions. The row over women priests a decade earlier had not died down, and a new storm was brewing with plans to ordain women to the episcopate. This was an issue about which I had sought strenuously to avoid having a firm opinion. But my equivocation came to an end as the orders that I aspired to receive drew closer and closer. To me, at least, the integrity of what we did in church, of what we said we believed, and of the sources we claimed for both, only made sense – only had integrity – if we were “all in”. This, of course, led to a path clearer still.

Into this liminality stepped Benedict XVI. Already convinced of the truths of the Catholic faith but acutely conscious of being outside her visible bounds, I stood “on Babylon’s strand” with little sense of where to turn. Into this confusion came a Bavarian pope who immediately seemed to understand exactly how we perceived our Christian lives, exactly how we’d got into the ecclesial mess we were in, and (importantly) exactly how we viewed worship not as mere duty, but as the highest and most vivifying expression of life in Jesus Christ. More striking still, this figure – who, coincidentally, many people seemed not to like – wanted us to bring all of that into the Catholic Church, and even thereby to enrich its own life.

As I’ve already said, I held no animosity toward the Catholic Church before this moment. It simply seemed irrelevant. In Pope Benedict, though, I saw not only a church leader who offered all that our meandering Anglican hearts sought, but who did so not in the isolation that had become our norm, but as Supreme Pastor of the Universal Church. In short: I saw in him, and for the first time, the papacy of the first millennium that I had seen in the Fathers, and thus instinctively trusted him when he showed how this institution was still to be found in the papacy today.

The embodiment of this personal journey, which I have always seen as growing from a personal bond with Pope Benedict, came in Anglicanorum coetibus in 2010. The personal ordinariates are the most tangible legacy of Benedict’s pontificate, permanently establishing in structures his liturgical and ecclesiological vision. This is of course why his loss is for us at once a cause for sadness and gratitude.

We will miss him immensely, and we mourn his passing, but we also know that the richness of his thought and his convictions continue in our communities, in our worship, and in the lives of thousands of former Anglicans who now rejoice in the full communion and peace of what St John Henry Newman calls “the one fold of the Redeemer”.

The Revd Dr James Bradley is Assistant Professor in Canon Law at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and a priest of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Photo: RICHARD POHLE/AFP via Getty Images

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