THE
P RTAL
February 2012
Page 11
Our man to teach in Rome
Interview with The Revd Prof. Allen Brent, D.D (Cantab.)
Fr Allen Brent ,
married to Kathy, is an internationally acknowledged historian of Early
Christianity. A member of Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity, Fr Allen is also a visiting Professor at King’s
College, London and shortly at the Augustinianum, (Lateran University), Rome.
moved remorselessly by the logic
of his theological argument, to
Catholicism.”
His research and teaching in
Rome is part of a collaboration
between his two Universities in
Rome and London, exploring
iconographic and non-literary
sources as historical evidence.
Was it was right for us to come
as groups and not individuals?
“An individual in a separated
Christian group might go to a
Catholic Mass and say afterwards
‘I experienced a dimension to my
faith that I have never experienced
before... I must return here!’”
But the Holy Father addressed
‘congregations (coetibus) of
Anglicans’ because “we learned
our Catholicism in our Anglo-
catholic congregations, reflecting
on our own traditions and in the
light of their own logic sought to
recover their truncated Catholic
truth.”
authority
In perplexity at the crisis of
authority in Anglicanism, he
had long ago grasped the ARCIC
principle that was fundamental
to Church Unity: koinonia or
‘fellowship’ meant that we would
never do apart what we could do
together in fundamental matters
of faith and morals.
In the 1980s he had reacted
rather smugly to the role of the
bishop of Rome fostering the
unity of the episcopal college
‘in the city where Peter and Paul died’. His Anglican
church had not really needed Petrine authority to
bind the bishops, in their various, scattered dioceses,
together collegially: the bishops by their theological
education, the grace given them, etc. could do this by
themselves.
The Pope was an optional extra included as a sop to
the Romanists. But the contemporary explosion of the
crisis in the C of E that developed over 30 years proved
otherwise.
Papal authority was not some optional extra but “a
pastoral ministry of binding together churches under
their bishops that fostered an intercommunion of love
and fellowship, without which Christ’s prayer for the
unity of all Christians remained unrealised. The Holy
Father’s opened arms needed my response.”
John Henry Newman
Vatican II
“Vatican II saw in such groups, though outside the
visible Church, ‘elements of sanctification and truth’
moving us to seek unity, and the Holy Father too saw
this taking place. Vatican II was Newman’s Council,
and we can now see why.”
The Ordinariate, in Fr Allen’s view, is like a new
Religious Order struggling to be born. Money is
urgently required to fulfill our mission.
He echoed Mgr Keith Newton’s stress on
Evangelisation and Ecumenism as roles for the
Ordinariate. “The mission for the conversion of
England, that fallen Standard of the C of E, must now
be picked up by the Ordinariate.”
Fr Allen said, “Having fulfilled the aims of the
Oxford Movement, we now have ‘Catholic Evensong,’
and new, Catholic realisations of our Anglican heritage
will follow.”
“The Ordinariate is”, he claims, “An idea whose
time has come.” Our second patron, the Blessed
John Henry Newman, “was undoubtedly the leading
The Portal wishes well to Fr Allen and Kathy his
English religious thinker of the 19 th century, and wife, especially in Rome.