"What's the difference between your Church and the Catholic Church? Are you Catholics or Protestants?"

These questions are perhaps some of the the most asked of Anglican clergy. Often the questions are accompanied by the request that they should be answered briefly, as the inquirer doesn't really have the time for a complicated answer.  First, we need to make a few distinctions. In our common use here in America, when most of us use the word "Catholic," we mean by it the Roman Catholic Church. That use is more sociological than religious; it comes from a time when we used to divide people up into categories such as Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. A little investigation will reveal to us, though, that the word "Catholic" is much more than a sociological distinction. It comes from two Greek words: kath holon, which means

The Reformation

Through the Middle Ages and into the period of the Renaissance more and more ecclesiastical power came to be centered in Rome; with the centralization of power it was inevitable that abuses would arise. While these abuses are often exaggerated, they did provoke a crisis. People began to lose faith in the Church as an institution, and the result was the convulsion we know as the Reformation. The Reformers, men like Martin Luther and John Calvin, protested against abuses in the Church. But each of them soon developed a vision of his own of what the Church should be, and soon the Reformers could find little unity among themselves except that they disagreed with the Church in Rome. Individually they came to be called after their founders, Lutherans, or Calvinists, or after their more particular doctrines, Anabaptists, Adventists and so on. Collectively they came to be called Protestants, that is, those protesting against Rome. The Reformation affected all of Europe in the 16th century, and England was no exception. King Henry VIII, a lecherous and ambitious man, severed the ties that bound the Church of England to Rome. But Henry was, for all his self-centeredness, a conservative. He didn't like unnecessary change. As a result, aside from breaking the connections between the English Church and the Roman Church, he insisted that the Faith and Practice of the Church of England remain unchanged. Henry got his way. He burned up those who disagreed with him, loyal Romans on the one side, dedicated Protestants on the other.

Not long after King Henry died and went to whatever awaits him eternally , his daughter Elizabeth succeeded to the English throne. Under Elizabeth, the Church of England understood itself as both Catholic and Protestant: Catholic in holding the fulness of the ancient Faith, Protestant in rejecting the abuses and growing power (worldly and religious) of the Renaissance Popes. Elizabeth referred to the religion of the English Church as "Reformed Catholicism."

As we've seen, all "Protestantism" has in common is its rejection of Roman Catholicism. This is hardly a good way to define anything; it's like a farmer giving his vocation as "not a banker." Anglicans don't refer to themselves as Protestants because our understanding of Catholicism is not sociological but religious.

The Holy Scriptures

Anglicans hold the Bible, the Apostolic Succession, the Sacraments, and the Creeds as essential signs of the Catholic Faith.  We differ with our Protestant friends in that we believe Jesus Himself founded the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, with its Scriptures, Sacraments, Creeds and Holy Orders as essential to the salvation of mankind. The Church, we believe, is not a human institution. We didn't make it. Jesus founded it and we believe His Holy Spirit lives within it. As it belongs to Him, we are not free to change it in any essential way. We receive it as a precious gift and, God willing, we pass it on to others. For this reason Tradition (which comes from the Latin word meaning "to hand over") is very important to us. The Holy Spirit works through the Church's Tradition to ensure that the Faith is passed on it all its power, the power to make men and women fresh and new and alive in Christ. We want to be sure we hand on the Faith to those who come after us in all its fulness, all its Catholicity.

The Historic Creeds

The Creed teaches us the Lord Jesus founded One Church. That Church is not the Anglican Church or the Roman Catholic Church or any of the Protestant bodies coming out of the Reformation. The Creed teaches us that the Church is the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church. The Book of Common Prayer (echoing Scripture and Tradition) teaches us that the Church is "the Body of which Jesus Christ is the Head, and all baptized people are members." Sadly these baptized people have fragmented themselves into all sorts of groups with all sorts of names. But, thank God, we cannot destroy what God has created. The Church is one, as our Lord Himself said, because God is One. Let us pray that the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost will hasten the day that the visible unity of His Church will be restored: the day there will be no more Protestants, or Roman Catholics, or Anglicans, but only Catholics united in the unbreakable bonds of charity.