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Our Heritage of Witness |
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Revolutionary Beauty |
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"As the Anglo-Catholic slum priests brought the slum dwellers and the working class a taste of the beauty and the holiness of the kingdom of God in the midst of their squalor, and brought it out into the streets, liturgically and practically, they were posing a sacramental challenge to the ugliest expressions of industrialisation and capitalism. And in this, they restored a social conscience to Anglicanism."
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The Anglo Catholic Witness
"The worship of God in which they joined was, by the violent contrast to all else in their lives, at once a vindication of the other-worldliness of their faith and an implicit condemnation of the filthy environment amid which the social sin of an acquisitive and complacent ruling class had condemned them to live.
So regarded, the ritual, which mainly centered round the Presence of our Lord amid surroundings more hostile than those of his very Nativity itself, was not 'empty' but full of a profound significance; not 'meaningless' but clamouring for an interpretation even more far-reaching than most of those who practised it knew how to provide."
Maurice Reckitt on the 'ritualism' of the Anglo-Catholic slum churches | |
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+ Fr Radclyffe Dolling
"It is the enduring of hardness, it is sharing the life as far as possible, the very food, the understanding of the thoughts, the realising of the difficulties, the carrying away out of sight poverty which degrades men and women made in the image of God, a discontent with luxury, the "needed comfort" as it is called of modern life, that will create among the educated classes a true enthusiasm for the righting of wrongs that cry out continually into the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth, for which, if we do not repent of them, England's Church, at any rate, because she has not dared to speak out the truth, must expect her punishment."
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+ The "Red Mass" of the Catholic Crusade
"O God, whose glory the heavens declare and whose handiwork the firmament sheweth, grant, we beseech Thee, that all the workers of the world may be emancipated from the dominion of mammon and that all labour and craftsmanship may be established in justice and become a work, of ministry in Thy Kingdom of grace; through Jesus Christ. Thy Son, our Lord who, liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen."
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+ The 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress
"We have to save souls from the world, the flesh, and the devil, and it is not for nothing that the world comes first, because it is through the world that the flesh and the devil make their main attack. The flesh and the devil change not, but the world is ever changing, and in these latter days it has changed rapidly, and has become a patchwork quilt, a tragic and terrible patchwork quilt, stained here and there with blood and tears. It has become an infinitely complex environment which tears and divides human souls. That is ever its way of attack -- it divides, and so destroys. It damns by division." read it all here... |
Report of the Anglo-Catholic Congress of 1923 by Fr G.A. Studdert-Kennedy
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| The Witness of Faith |
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The Story of Jonathan Myrick Daniels
Here are two links with elements of the story of seminarian and martyr Jonathan Myrick Daniels. His is a powerful witness of transformation and commitment to living the Magnificat.
"They recalled that long-ago hot Alabama day. Sales, a student at Tuskegee Institute, Daniels, the seminarian, and Morrisroe, a Catholic priest from Chicago, along with another young black student, Joyce Bailey, had been released after six days in Hayneville Prison. They were jailed for opposing slavery's legacy, racial discrimination, in Lowndes County.
The little group was about 100 yards from the jail, on their way to the Cash Store for a Coca-Cola, when, as Ruby Sales recalls, Tom Coleman "called me a black bitch,' aimed his shotgun and Jon pulled me back. The gun was absolutely aimed at me." Daniels died instantly." | |
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Fr George Houghton...
Angry mobs trying to get at those who had found sanctuary within the church twice thronged the gates of the churchyard.
George Houghton lifted the processional cross from its place in the church, walked out to face the rioters, held it before them, and said, "Stand back, you white devils; in the name of Christ, stand back!"
Bp Frank Weston
"You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums." |
Fr. Frederic H. Smyth, Ph.D.
The Catholic Church and Her Environment
"The Catholic revival in the Anglican communion has carried the Faith to the slums, to the poor and underprivileged, and to the outcasts of our industrial system.
More than this, we cannot overlook the facts that individuals and groups of individuals, organized for special objects, have denounced the structure of a social organization which seems to make poverty, unemployment, and class antagonisms, together with exaggerated nationalisms which lead to war, inevitable characteristics of its very being."
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Vida Dutton Scudder
"The failure of the Church seems patent to-day when one looks at the spectacle of the world. Over in Europe, they say, many crosses have been spared in the general devastation,--so strangely spared that whispers of miracle pass about. On the roads over which move grim processions marching to kill, sad processions retreating to suffer, the Christ looks down:
His sad face on the Cross sees only this,
After the passion of two thousand years."
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How dare you, in the face of that Baptismal sign of the sprinkled water, keep God's children exposed to filth, brutality, and temptation, which festers in your courts and alleys, making cleanliness impossible, drunkenness all but excusable, prostitution all but natural, self-respect and decency unknown? In that Font is a witness for education and for sanitary reform, which will conquer with the might of an archangel, when every other argument has failed to prove that the masses are after all not mere machines, or 'hands' to be used up in the production of a wealth of which they never taste, with their numbers as far as possible kept down by economical and prudent rulers, to the market-demand for members of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. |
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Fr Charles Kingsley, "The Message of the Church to Labouring Men" |
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the Rt Rev'd G.A. Selwyn |
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
"The sin of blood-guiltiness was upon England. In every country which we had occupied the voice of the brother's blood cried unto God from the ground. Could we be the true children of Abraham, the fosterfathers of many nations, when we had carried with us only the fire and the knife, but not the Lamb? I know of no human power by which this torrent of evil was arrested in its course, but the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel." read more here...
"If you want to help African women, go and live in the villages and share their life. The European must become an African to win Africans."
the Rt Rev'd Chauncy Maples
"We look forward to an African civilization which...will be no mere imitation of what is European, but in a real sense a product of the genius of Africa, giving permanent form to what is valuable in African life and thought and recognized by the African as their own"
the Rev'd Canon G. W. Broomfield, 1938
"To be a catholic, one must be missionary-minded"
the Rt Rev'd W. L. Vyvayan, 1920 |
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