A Catholic-Anglican bond

A  special ecumenical vocation was born when a French priest met an Anglican aristocrat on a Portuguese island.

Fernand Portal was born in 1855 in France. At 25 he became a Vincentian priest, with the intention of going to China as missionary. For reasons of health he was rather retained to teach in a major seminary.

A bout of tuberculosis in 1890 brought him to the island of Madeira, where he met Charles Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax,  president of the English Church Union, a society dedicated to the promotion of Catholic principles and practices within the Church of England.

Their friendship, rooted in mutual understanding and respect, would soon foster dialogue, giving birth to the desire to work towards union between the Catholic and the Anglican Churches.

Bishop Jean Calvet, who was a seminarian at Cahors when Abbé Portal was superior, testified:

“We were absolutely amazed…when we saw [Lord Halifax] in the chapel…following the liturgy with a missal — Roman, obviously — kneeling down and making the sign of the cross. This got our brains working feverishly. After all, this man was a heretic! … He was attending Mass with obvious fervour; he therefore believed in the Mass!”

Abbé Portal and Lord Halifax organised debates between Catholics and Anglicans on the question of Anglican orders as means of bringing the hierarchies of the two Churches together.

Indeed, there was excitement when a pontifical commission met in Rome with the aim of studying the Anglican Orders in greater depth. Lord Halifax and other Anglicans were hopeful that with Pope Leo XIII as bishop of Rome there would be a happy outcome. But the result was a kick in their teeth.

The pope concluded: “Therefore adhering entirely to the decrees of the pontiffs, our predecessors on this subject, and fully ratifying and renewing them by our authority, on our own initiative and with certain knowledge, we pronounce and declare that ordinations performed according to the Anglican rite have been and are completely null and void” (Apostolicae Curae 36).

Needless to say, the Anglicans were deeply disappointed. Abbé Portal, no less disenchanted, soothed Halifax with these words: “The future is with the peaceful. What you and your group have done for the reunion of Christianity will be to the eternal glory of the Anglican Church. You have shown perfect loyalty and generosity.”

Then he added confidently, this time with a tinge of prophecy: “In nature nothing gets lost; this is even more true in the realm of the supernatural.  A single act of love is more effective in producing infinite reverberations than the displacement of an atom. How many acts of love towards Our Lord and the Holy Church have not you and your friends made. Sooner or later the entire Church will be shaken. Let us not get discouraged, my dear friend.”

 

A man with an open spirit such as Abbé Portal just could not yield to discouragement. He quickly attracted Catholics and non-Catholic into a study circle that treated various issues. He also founded the journal La Revue Catholique des Eglises in which he published the works of the study circle.

But another dampener was forthcoming, this time from Pope Leo’s successor, Pius X.  Accused of modernism, Abbé Portal was taken out of the seminary and definitively banned from publishing or speaking in public.

Despite all setbacks, Abbé Portal and Lord Halifax were determined to forge ahead.

Through the help of Cardinal Mercier, archbishop of Malines, the two managed to obtain the approval of Rome to organise meetings of Anglican and Catholic theologians in Malines, giving rise to the “Malines Conversations”.  Thus dialogue was re-established, but before it could bear fruit tragedy struck.

Their sponsor Cardinal Mercier died on January 23, 1926, and in June that year Abbé Portal died also.

The ecumenical flame was dimmed. It would take several years before Vatican II, the meetings between Pope Paul VI and the Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury, as well as Pope John Paul II’s visit to England in 1982, to revive the vision of Abbé Portal and Lord Halifax.

For Abbé Portal and Lord Halifax, who died in 1934 at 95, the Church is universal with no fixed borders; its borders must constantly be pushed further out in order to embrace new members. Both saw One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church that rises above the distortion of the denominational divisions.

Abbé Portal leaves us with this legacy: “The union of the Churches cannot, in fact, be achieved except by real apostles, in other words men of faith using spiritual means first of all: prayer, which is the source of grace; charity, which gives understanding of persons, even those from whom we are separated; humility, which leads us to accept our defects and our faults.

“There, it seems to me, we have the essential elements of all action in favour of union.”

This month the US bishops formally endorsed the sainthood cause of Fr Wattson.