European-American University™

Arnold Harris Mathew Center for the Study of the Independent Sacramental Movement

The University's Arnold Harris Mathew Center for the Study of the Independent Sacramental Movement (CSISM) is the first university center anywhere in the world to be devoted to the study of the independent sacramental movement originating within Catholicism and widely prevalent today. It disseminates rare archive material online, principally photographs and documents, and conducts research into the historic and contemporary independent sacramental movement. The Center is directed by the University President, John Kersey, who is a minister in the Liberal Catholic tradition within the Liberal Catholic Apostolic Church, the Apostolic Episcopal Church, the Independent Liberal Catholic Fellowship and The Sophia Circle, in addition to the Society for Humanistic Potential.

Thank you for your welcome today. My name is John Kersey and I am a bishop in the Liberal Catholic tradition. My denomination is called The Liberal Rite and it is a member of the worldwide Independent Liberal Catholic Fellowship, which currently encompasses around twenty clergy and several thousand lay followers. As a small church, we are largely a house church organization, although we do have several chapels and other buildings for worship.

When most people hear the word “Catholic”, they think of the Roman Catholic Church. We Liberal Catholics descend from the Roman Catholic Church and share their Apostolic Succession, the laying on of hands of each bishop from the Apostles to today which Catholic doctrine holds is essential for sacramental validity. However, we are not a part of the Roman Catholic Church and do not come under the authority of the Pope.

How do we differ from Roman Catholics? Chiefly we differ in terms of liberty. In 1916, the founders of the Liberal Catholic movement, Bishop James Ingall Wedgwood and Charles Webster Leadbeater, both of whom were former Anglican priests, conceived of a church of liberty that would free Christianity from the dogmatic approach which in their view had taken the Roman church away from the pre-Constantinian free and decentralised model that characterized the earliest Christians.

Liberal Catholics are Catholic in that we celebrate the traditional sacraments, including the Tridentine Mass that predates the reforms of Vatican II. But we allow adherents freedom of conscience and faith to interpret the beliefs of Christianity as they see fit. There are no points at which the church dictates compulsory or dogmatic  interpretation as happens in the Roman Catholic Church. Instead of placing power with the church, it is instead with the people. We are open to mystic and esoteric experience, and also to the insights of other faiths. Many Liberal Catholics – but not all – were and are Theosophists, which is a system of faith that encompasses cross-faith insights, especially from Buddhism.

As a church of liberty, we ordain men and women regardless of issues such as sexuality. The first woman bishop in the Liberal Catholic movement, Mother Elizabeth Stuart, was incardinated in 2006, and is herself a leading writer on queer theology. All our clergy serve without salary and support themselves, usually through a secular career. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds and beliefs and undergo training for ordination through our own teaching institutions. Our related religious society The Society for Humanistic Potential also sponsors its own private online university, European-American University, which teaches not only theology but also business and the humanities.

Liberal Catholicism is not a passive approach to religion. Because it lays emphasis on individual conscience, it forces its adherents to think deeply about spiritual matters and also to test what they believe in the light of experience. As those beliefs change, their church can generally accommodate them. In addition, the church is open to the insights of science and does not seek to deny rational or empirical processes.

Some Liberal Catholics, such as myself, are also Process Theologians. Process Theology was developed principally by Teilhard de Chardin and Alfred North Whitehead and holds that the principal activity of faith is to develop conscience, since the chief interactivity between God and man is through persuasion. This development then rests on an inner process of attunement and the fulfilment of potential. Process Theology holds that change is fundamental to the nature of the universe, and that this self-determination occurs through an experiential process, but is necessarily non-coercive. This non-coercive principle of individual growth is the foundation of Process Theology and also forms the basis for many of my own understandings of moral principle.

The majority of those who are involved in churches of various kinds, are accepting of the inherent authoritarianism and hierarchy that characterizes most churches, which sees membership in the same way as tribal loyalty with a consequent emphasis on either obedience to the group leaders or passivity in the face of their actions. This leads directly either to socialism itself or to a deeply authoritarian conservatism. As a libertarian, I take a different view from these perspectives.

Some of you will be familiar with the writings of Gary North, who is a contributor to LewRockwell.com. Gary North subscribes to a very different theology from mine, being a Biblical literalist, but we are agreed on one particular point; that insofar as the Bible mandates an economic system, that system is free market capitalism. North has published a verse-by-verse exigesis online in which he makes a powerful case for this.

Likewise, in the fundamental commandments of Jesus Christ we see the principles of liberty laid out. We are told to do two things: to love God and to love our neighbour as ourself. The second of these commandments is a call to equality and to support systems of equality; not systems that prop up a ruling class or that privilege one group above another. In short, it is a call to organize our society on libertarian lines and to manage our economy according to the principles of the free market. Key to this is, again, the concept of non-coercion.

One important aspect in which faith can also help us is in the management of risk. In today’s world, we are confronted both by a Pharisaical Christian caucus that is self-denying through its adherence to socialism and by an aggressively secular socialist state. These two sources are both active in producing the nanny state, which itself is the antithesis of liberty.

Faith is a strong guide to us in our attitudes to risk. The American conservative commentator Ann Coulter produced what has been referred to as a jaw-dropping moment when she said in a lecture “I don’t care about anything else: Christ died for my sins and nothing else matters.” This does not mean that faith gives a license to be unnecessarily reckless, but rather that an understanding of our place in the universe and our destiny places events and risk in proportion.

Not only this, but faith is also a powerful weapon against the State. Peter Hitchens has written, “The whole point about Christianity is that it encourages the development of the individual conscience - which makes surveillance and totalitarian government not just unnecessary but absurd - which is why Totalitarian governments regard Christian belief as a threat, and punish and persecute it like anything. They want to take the decisions themselves, which means we must not be allowed to make them.”

It is because of these qualities that those of us who wish to bring about a classical liberal society would do well to look to Christian principle as a moral basis for that society. Christianity compels us to challenge injustice and to fight for principle. Whether or not you are yourself a subscriber to Christian beliefs, one worthwhile thing that you can take from them is the necessity of challenging the established order where necessary and of fighting for the values that underpin Western civilization itself.

For those who may contest this last statement, I cannot do better than to quote the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, himself a pupil of Adorno and Horkheimer and immersed as far as can be imagined in that intellectual tradition, “Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in the light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”

In conclusion, may I wish all of you a very happy Christmas and, in the immortal words of the late Dave Allen, whichever God you support, may He go with you.