Whose Property?

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7923

[Virtue Online] 17 Mar 2008--A few miles up the road from my Cheltenham parish in the English Diocese of Gloucester, stood Prinknash Abbey, occupying the 12th-century manor house of the former abbots of Gloucester.

It seemed an ideal place for Cursillistas from Dallas and Fort Worth to help us hold our first English Cursillo. Our diocesan bishop, John Yates, heartily agreed. "If," he said, "the monks hesitate allowing you to use their Roman Catholic abbey for an Anglican Cursillo, just remind them that they need my permission to use their abbey chapel."

It seems that after the Reformation the abbey buildings had fallen into secular hands and were only donated to a group of Benedictine monks in the 1920s. At that time the original chapel was turned into the monastic choir and a new sanctuary added at the east end, but one could only use the sanctuary by going through the choir, and that, being medieval, was the property of the Anglican diocese of Gloucester.

At the time this struck me as just another of those quaint English anachronisms, somewhat amusing but hardly relevant to today's world.

Then I began thinking about all those Anglican cathedrals and ancient parish churches stretched across the land, to say nothing of those medieval bequests that are still being used to pay the clergy of the Church of England. When the Church of England originally dissociated from the Church of Rome, Parliament simply passed a law saying that "no foreign bishop shall have jurisdiction in this land."

It was a purely legal matter, a question of who runs whom and what owns what. In the future the English Church was to govern herself and become the independent Church of England. She was to continue to own all the property her people had built and sustained throughout the ages. It made obvious sense and no one objected.

The only exception I have ever come across was an article in a 1948 issue of a Benedictine magazine published in Oxford, "the city of lost causes," in which the author accuses the Church of England of having grasped the medieval property of the Roman Catholic Church.