Church Union Presidential Address 2025

Each year in my Presidential address I try to speak about an issue which is towards the forefront of current Catholic dialogue. It is important that the Church Union continues to make what contribution it can towards advancing the cause of the Catholic movement within our church. It is, though, equally important that we have some grasp of where things are developing ecumenically especially in Anglican dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. This year marks the centenary of the Malines Conversations which were largely brought about by the first Lord Halifax, perhaps the greatest of our former presidents. I want then, to offer some comments on a topic which has now increasingly come more to the foreground within the context of Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue, namely that of subsidiarity.

A useful definition of subsidiarity is given in Walking Together on the Way, the 2017 Agreed Statement of ARCIC III:

The principle of subsidiarity……..maintains that decisions should be determined at the lowest appropriate level. Proper authority is supportive authority such that if a local body, or lower-level authority, is in need then the wider body, or higher level authority, will assist.

The ARCIC definition also adds a sentence from Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’ 2016 Post-Synodical Exhortation on Love in the Family, where he states:

Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs.

This concept of decisions being taken at the lowest level possible had a strong advocate in Lord Acton, the distinguished English liberal lay Roman Catholic thinker of the Nineteenth Century. Most of us will be familiar with his famous statement made in a letter to Randell Creighton in April 1883:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority. Still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

Acton was, in fact, concerned about subsidiarity in secular matters. It is not difficult, though, to understand why Cardinal Manning and the Roman Catholic hierarchy of the time found Acton at times a somewhat uncomfortable companion in the Faith. Acton, for instance, was a supporter of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. He judged that matters such as either endorsing or abolishing slavery should be within the power of each individual state and not that of the Union. Even the saintly Cardinal Newman supported him in this judgement, claiming that slavery was not of itself intrinsically evil. As an aside I wonder if Saint John Henry Newman, in his reflections on the development of doctrine, ever envisaged what Roman Catholic moral theologians would now make of someone advancing such an viewpoint.

Another Englishman to write on the subject of subsidiarity was Father Neville Figgis CR. Father Figgis well deserves a paper devoted entirely to his thinking on the subject. Suffice it to note today that in his book Churches in the Modern State published in 1913, Father Figgis applied the principle of subsidiarity not only to civil society but also to the practice of various churches. For Father Figgis all subsidiary bodies have an inherent authority which does not depend on prior centralist government. A very prescient scholar, as early as1913, Father Figgis already was warning of the future Fascism emerging in Italy, Spain and Germany.

Subsidiarity emerged as a major papal concern in 1931 when Pius XI criticised Fascism in his encyclical Quodragesimo Anno. Thirty years later John XXIII returned to the theme in his encyclical Mater et Magistra, defending the autonomy of subsidiary and corporate bodies. While, almost certainly, those two popes were unaware that they were building on the thought of someone like Father Neville Figgis, it is notable that both of them only applied the theme of subsidiarity to civic affairs. Vatican II would go even further in its document Gaudium et Spes. That pastoral constitution, as it was designated, contained a warning that centralising global finance in well meaning and often beneficial projects, aimed at stimulating much needed development, could, at the same time, result in subjecting local economies to the whims of a centralised world bank. Such a development would be to undermine the subsidiarity of individual nations.

It is not then especially surprising that Adrian Hastings, writing some forty years after Vatican II, commented that:

It is noticeable that the Roman authorities have never suggested that the principle should be applied as well to the Catholic Church, whose administration has grown ever more centralised. Like other things, subsidiarity is easier for those in power to preach than to apply.

Was, though, Hastings being completely fair? He could not, of course foretell the developments in subsidiarity which were to take place under the late Pope Francis. Even at Vatican II, however, it is possible to argue that some of the seeds were being sewn of what later was to follow. To offer a simple example, the Council’s pronouncement on the Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium insists on the preservation of the use Latin. In almost the next breath, though, it goes on to recognise that use of vernacular may often be of great advantage to local churches. Whether this should happen in any local church and, if so, to what extent, should be left to the discretion of local bishops. It is true that such decisions had then to be ratified by Rome. The first steps in subsidiarity, nevertheless, had been taken. By the end of Pope Francis’ pontificate even the restrictions on the choice of appropriate translations of Scripture were placed in in the hands of local bishops’ conferences. No longer were the various nations using the English language required to use the same Biblical texts even if they were adjoining as is the case regarding England and Scotland.

The late Pope Francis authorised the informal blessing of those joined in what the Church regarded as irregular unions. Perhaps not surprisingly, this led to strong dissent in some parts of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly where the Church ministered in an Islamic context. There was little or no attempt from Rome to compel those who disagreed. Local Bishops’ Conferences were left free as to decide whether or not the provision should be used within their members’ jurisdictions. There was a similar response to the German bishops’ permission for divorced and remarried couples, under certain conditions, to receive Holy Communion. Pope Francis was accepting of the local church’s decision.

This account of the increasing acceptance of the principle of subsidiarity within the Roman Catholic Church could be substantially more detailed. There is no time, for instance, to touch on the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue recognising both the regional and patriarchal emphasis within Orthodoxy.
It is apposite, though, to make add one further observation. Readers of The Tablet may have noticed some while back letters from two retired English Roman Catholic bishops expressing their support for the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood. The appearance of such letters was something that would have been unheard of in earlier years given the strictures on publicly discussing such a subject voiced by Saint John Paul II or Benedict XVI. What those two bishops also emphasised in their letters, however, was that they did not view the as decision as to whether or not to ordain women to the priesthood was one to be taken by any local church. On the contrary such a decision might well have to be the result of a decision taken by a General Council. The great Catholic ecumenist, Cardinal Kasper has also tellingly cautioned that, given the experience of the Anglican Communion, any unilateralist move towards such ordinations could well lead to schism.

There are, then, three lessons that we might learn, as members of the Church Union, from a reflection on subsidiarity.

We can firstly note that subsidiarity is becoming increasingly accepted and practised within the Roman Catholic Church. ARCIC III, Walking Together, has as its subtitle Learning to Be the Church – Local, Regional, Universal. A true understanding of subsidiarity can be not only a useful but also an essential tool in enabling the ecumenical journey to move further forward.

We Catholic Anglicans, secondly, have to be particularly careful of an ‘anything goes’ mentality. The pride we Anglicans have taken in the local has arguably led to provincial structures which make us increasingly resemble different denominations rather than a Communion of Churches. There are, too, ecclesial difficulties underlying the Five Principles by which we now seek to live within the Church of England. Such difficulties or ‘necessary anomalies’, as they might well be called, serve to remind us of the consequences of making fundamental changes in church order which lack the consent of the Church Universal.

A third and final cause for our reflection is much more parochial in nature. It is, though, important both to members of the Church Union and also to our other Catholic Societies. Many of us are enthusiastic for the present work being done to bring our Catholic Societies together as a family under the umbrella of the Society of Saints Wilfrid and Hilda. At the same time our work as individual societies is to be treasured for the particular tasks that each undertakes. There must be, too, a realisation that what each society undertakes, together with how it conducts it internal affairs, reflects upon the Society as a whole. Those exploring how such societies as ours might happily and beneficially be formally linked into the Society are quite aware that such a link is to stem from a ‘light touch’ approach. The Society of Saints Wilfrid and Hilda is wisely seeking, together with the various Catholic societies, to establish an appropriate expression of subsidiarity within our own part of the Catholic Church. We should be keen to play our part.