No one minds a bit of Latin now and then; or, if they do, I can only say with Myles na Gopaleen, odi odi profanum vulgus. So when the Bishop of Chichester, the Rt Reverend John Hind, opened his speech to the Forward in Faith Assembly at the weekend with three sentences of Latin quotation from a 19th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, that was just about OK; after all Archbishop Temple was replying to an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, itself in Latin. The pope might not have understood him if he had used English, unless he shouted very loudly.
What got my goat was the translation of this Latin, footnoted in the text of the Bishop of Chichester's talk, which was sent me to prove that he hadn't said he was about to cross over to Rome:
It is the fortune of our office that often, when we would fain write about the common salvation, an occasion arises for debating some controverted question which cannot be postponed to another time.
We would fain
This already was pompous and archaic when it was written 112 years ago. It's merely ludicrous now. I think it shows exactly why the rest of the world has a hard time taking the papalist Anglo-Catholics seriously. The bishop does know that this is the case. How could he not?
"The present choice still feels a little bleak: between being a religious movement within the Roman Catholic church and being a religious movement within the Church of England." He writes. But what is to me completely incomprehensible is that he thinks it could be otherwise. As one reads through the bishop's talk, it slowly becomes apparent that he is still bargaining to see whether the Church of England or the church of Rome will take more seriously the belief that the Anglo-Catholics, or as they think of themselves, the church are not "an afterthought to the gospel, but the heart of the gospel itself. This is the community which even now in this fallen world is the foretaste of the kingdom."
I'm sorry, but if years of reporting the General Synod taught me anything, it is that a heaven full of self-important Anglicans is insufficiently distinguishable from the other place.
