THE
P RTAL
June 2018
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Lux ab oriente
Newman, Ma
Xiangbo and the
Royal Wedding
The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan puts it all together
T ry explaining
the various flavours of Anglicanism to two Filipinos, one Portuguese, one
Macanese and three Chinese seminarians over breakfast in the New Seminary of St Joseph in Macau,
on the morning after the wedding of Their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex: believe me,
it wasn’t easy.
I had gone to stay with a priest friend of mine who
shares an interest in Blessed John Henry Newman – his
doctoral work compares Newman’s theology with his
near contemporary Chinese theologian Ma Xiangbo.
It seemed to me to be fortuitous timing that meant I
would be 6,000 miles away at the time of the Royal
Wedding.
screens the decorous aspects of Anglican Patrimony.
Indeed, they are fortunate to know Felix Yeung,
Ordinariate member (received into the Church at
Warwick Street) and Music Director both of the
Anglican Cathedral in Hong Kong and of a Choir
in their own Catholic Cathedral in Macau, and so
expected the extraordinarily high quality of the music.
They could even grasp something of the “civic
religion”, which so distinguishes any Anglican service
at which royalty are present, but what they couldn’t
“get”, as one of them said, was how a church of God
save the Queen and Herbert Howells’ Psalm Preludes
could also contain not only the style but the theology
I went to Orvieto in 1997 to avoid the funeral of (if that is not too grand a word for it) of Bishop Michael
Diana, Princess of Wales (may she rest in peace – if Curry’s extraordinary performance.
only the Daily Express would let her). On the day of
I explained to them that the Episcopal Church in
the obsequies, I found myself in a small trattoria in
Panicale overlooking the Trasimene Lake, only to have the US was not the same thing as the CofE, albeit
my tranquility interrupted by the owner putting on the that it is – just about – part of the same communion.
television, where RAIUno’s coverage was even more Inculturation is not alien to them and so they could
breathlessly hysterical than I would have experienced understand that but they detected a problem when
had I saved myself the airfare and settled down to variety of expression veils a variety of belief that
encompasses radically different, incompatible, even
whatever the BBC served up.
contradictory theologies.
Similarly, half a world and seven time zones away,
“Ah”, said one of them, “is that what Newman meant
in a former Portuguese territory on the south coast of
China, there was no escaping the Harry and Megan when he spoke of the Liberalism in Religion as the
show. For the seminarians – men who, because of the anti-dogmatic principle in which truth is really just a
conversation between Fr Cyril and myself, had some matter of opinion?” Yes, I thought: they understand:
notion of the Anglicanism of Newman – the whole they “get” it.
occasion was bewildering.
It isn’t that I don’t approve, or even enjoy these
occasions, but that I can’t cope with paroxysms of
enthusiastic celebrity-worship that overtake the entire
nation – seemingly every conversation beginning with
a virtue-signalling statement about the whole thing.
They had recognised in what they saw on their