European-American University™

by John Kersey

We live in exciting times for Liberal Catholics, and that excitement brings both welcome developments and challenges. Now a decade away from the centenary of the foundation of the Liberal Catholic Church, the movement that is today's Liberal Catholicism has taken some interesting twists and turns in the intervening years.

One interesting aspect to these developments is that to some extent they have mirrored the classic positions within the Church of England of high, low and broad churches respectively, except that none of those positions truly negates the broad church view at least as far as externals are concerned. The most substantial distinction is between the fundamental position of compulsoriness in Theosophy, vegetarianism and articles of belief, and the position of free choice in all these matters.

The foundation of the Liberal Catholic Church was based on the most free expression of conscience within a Christian context. Here was a church which, in the witty phrase of one of its descendant communities, had no "you haftas" in respect of its faith. Where for some that liberation meant the realisation of a slightly anarchic utopia for the spiritual seeker, for others its lack of defined limits represented a threat - how could they "be church" without looking and behaving like the church models of their time? An answer to this might well be that Liberal Catholicism was in fact an idea well ahead of its time, and one which actually owed as much to both the independent movement that gave it birth and the contemporary Christian Unitarian movement that was coming to the same conclusions from within a non-Apostolic setting. Those conclusions were of church as both a community embracing profound differences of faith, yet not losing its identity as being constituted precisely in that diversity, and of individual relationships with God as the arbiters of faith. There could be no greater challenge to the established ecclesial order, nor a greater opportunity to reach out beyond the boundaries to a real and lived faith experience in personal conviction and exploration.

The prospect of being a mystic church is one that few communities have managed to achieve successfully, without collapsing under the weight of personal revelation and false prophets. There is a danger that in taking Theosophy as an act of faith rather than one of many valid paths to enlightenment, we elevate its leading figures to positions that they themselves would have been quick to caution us against, and the events of their spiritual pathways cease to assume their proper perspectives when taken as our "new gospels". In short, fundamentalism is as flawed within the Liberal Catholic tradition as within wider Christianity. That does not mean that we should not take the spiritual teachings of Theosophy seriously; rather that we should consider carefully whether Theosophy is (to paraphrase C.W.L.) "the path that opens up before us" or simply one of several paths, that will perhaps form in the end a journey up the mountain of enlightenment that is wholly of our own, and as individually syncretic as Theosophy is communally syncretic.

There is a need among many people to see religious belief as a matter of certainty and security. Credos are a substitute for that inner knowing that only comes through the knowledge of faith and a lived experience of the divine. Those who walk in the Light do not ask more of its source than it is prepared to divulge; they know that there are both known unknowns and unknown unknowns that we will not penetrate in this life. We should be open to insight from both within and outside our conception of faith, but not be overtaken by personal or communal interpretations, whether historic or contemporary, at the point where we stand alone with God. To do otherwise is to limit ourselves and our faith.

If we take away the spurious comfort of Roman Catholic or Protestant dogma, and resist the temptation to substitute for it the teachings of the founders of the Liberal Catholic Church in a dogmatic manner, we are left with something utterly unique and extremely beautiful. We have a church where commonality of experience replaces commonality of faith; we make our own common denominator, rather than being pulled down to the lowest (we also, however, risk not ascending to the highest unless we are spiritually open). Our community exists in tolerance of diversity and in the privileging of individual liberty of faith and interpretation. And at the heart of that community is sacramental celebration in its most elegant and powerful form. We have a church as an anarchic community, but the anarchy is born of the individual humanity that unites us as brothers and sisters under divine parenthood. We have a church that is universal, that will not reject us, and whose structure should, if born of small groups, be able to unite without the need to be overly hierarchical or bureaucratic.

One difficulty has been that the perception of "being church" from a conservative perspective, has involved embracing precisely the same rigidity of structure and authoritarianism as those mainstream denominations to which the LibCath movement sought to create an alternative. Where much could have been gained is in the embracing of a much looser episcopal polity, whereby each community retains theological and structural independence under the leadership of a bishop or senior priest and is then united in a General Conference of equal parishes, rather as the Unitarian Conference does for its communities. This divorces the church from power and money. It means that communities become the main unit of the church, and it gives them power over themselves rather than absolving that power to a centralised hierarchy. What it also means is that the church is not defined by its relationship to the Establishment.

Some consider the LibCath movement to be a haven for the occult and the arcane. True Liberal Catholicism has nothing to do with the occult as that phrase is commonly used today. It understands the Spirit to be moving among us, and it accepts with alacrity those of its gifts that were sacred to the earliest Christians as well as practices from other religious traditions such as meditation and prayer rituals. But it understands the Eucharist to be akin to magical ritual only in the sense that it is a path towards profound transcendence, spiritual growth and world peace, aspects which are absent from most if not all occult practice, which is frequently concerned with invocation as an aid to the power of the individual over others. Likewise, in placing reliance on individual experience rather than the common experience and rulings of the Roman Catholic Church, at whatever point these are departed from if at all, it does not accord to individuals power over the church as a whole - to do so would be to be open to false prophecy. Rather, it allows individual experience to be a guide to each one of us on our spiritual paths, while not imposing that experience on others.

Ultimately, all this means embracing the fact that true LibCath communities will look and be very different from one another according to the particular gifts of the individuals involved within them. Some may form a predominantly conservative polity, others predominantly liberal. However, because the nature of the church is all-inclusive and the church is defined by its openness, this means that whatever the convictions and faith of an individual may be, they are separate from the question of what the faith is or how it can be perceived in terms of the church. This is far from the reported statement of the late Presiding Bishop Dr. Eric Taylor of the L.C.C., "The Liberal Catholic Church is a theocracy, and I am the church." No one individual, whatever their spiritual gifts, can act as "the church", since that concept is defined by its very openness, not by an attempt to deny its true nature in order to impose fundamentalism, conservatism or, worse, autocracy.

That is what stops the LibCath movement from becoming merely another independent Catholic sect. The embrace of universalism and syncretism to their fullest extent leads to a community where unity is secured because all who seek the spiritual path and who accept the Mastership of Jesus the Christ are accepted without the need for intrusion upon their personal faith.