Will the last vicar please lock the door?

When Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester, converted to Catholicism in 2021, that came as a shock.

I knew Bishop Michael, as he then was, and he once even kindly wrote the preface to one of my books. What surprised me about his conversion was that he was on the evangelical, practically Calvinist, end of the Anglican church.

Most converts to Catholicism tend to come from the High Church, Anglo-Catholic end, a tendency that goes back to the Oxford Movement of Victorian times. One of its founders, John Henry Newman, later became a cardinal and a prominent Catholic theologian.

For him, however, the path to Rome was much shorter than for Bishop, now Monsignor, Michael. Yet even he found the confinement of the Church of England too suffocating.

Nazir-Ali was one of the several Anglican bishops who converted that year, but the C of E has been haemorrhaging priests ever since 1992, when it decided to ordain women. This is a case of not just post hoc but definitely also propter hoc – in fact, more than a third of all Catholic ordinations since 1992 have been of former Anglican priests.

The vote of the General Synod to ordain women pushed the button for a mass exodus of Anglican priests and laity, but things have got much worse since then. The C of E has been doing its level best to keep up with every secular perversion going, at a cost to traditional liturgy and doctrine.

Its two great texts, the Prayer Book and the King James Version, the mainstays not only of scriptural worship but also of the English language, have fallen by the wayside, to be found now only in a handful of churches. In fact, I’d venture a guess that there are more Latin Mass Catholic churches in London than 1662 Anglican ones.

The problem has been not only with the ordination of women as such, but specifically with the ordination of woke, Left-wing women, which describes every female priest I know of. This emphatically includes Dame Sarah Mullaly, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

According to Dame Sarah, her “eyes have been opened to the harm we have done LGBT+ people.” Her eyes no longer shut, she is prepared to bless same-sex marriages, something some other Anglican bishops have been doing since 2023.

Meanwhile, younger female priests are unhappy with the baggy clerical vestments concealing their womanly charms. That demand has created its own supply, with designers appearing who specialise in making more than 2,000 female priests look more alluring.

“Today more than ever women in ministry are complaining about the boxy, shapeless shirts on offer,” commented one such designer, Camelle Daley. She didn’t say whether she’d go as far as slitting cassock skirts to the hip, but my guess is she would.

Such desperate clinging on to the coattails of woke modernity convinces many conservative vicars in both wings of the C of E that it’s no longer a branch of the true Church. They are leaving it in droves, as are many individual communicants and even whole parishes.

One such Anglican priest led 72 of his parishioners to Rome, lamenting that the C of E is now “holed under the waterline because it is beholden to the state, and the state no longer likes Christianity”.

However, the very concept of an established church presupposes its being “beholden to the state”, which is a serious problem regardless of how the state feels about Christianity. The demise of the English Church started not in 1992, but in 1534, when Henry VIII declared that he, not the Pope, was the head of the Church of England.

Though by all accounts Henry remained a Catholic to his death, he did his realm a bad turn by ushering in the Protestant heresy and pushing the Church on the road towards servitude to the state. Much blood was spilled along the way, and militant Protestantism was inscribed on Roundhead banners during the English Civil war (1642–1651).

It was at that time that Thomas Hobbes wrote a death note to English Catholicism in his Leviathan. Obviously shaken by that “war of all against all”, he nationalised religion by coming up with the concept of a commonwealth in which the nation and the church are fused together by some mysterious contract.

By eliminating the open, universal structure of the Christian ecclesia, Hobbes deviated as far as was conceivable from Christ’s teaching about the hierarchy of realms. “My kingdom is not of this world,” said Jesus, meaning that his realm was not only different from worldly kingdoms, but superior to them.

Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty was centred on the state as the “Mortal God” on whom mankind must rely for peace and security. The commonwealth becomes a closed entity within which the state, ideally absolutist but at a pinch also parliamentary, has dominion not only over political life, but also over the people’s mind and spirit. It’s the state that decides not only what the people should do but also what they should think, say and worship. The church acts within the commonwealth, serving its needs.

That put to the sword the Pauline concept of the sacrum imperium, later developed by Aquinas into the notion of the hierarchical ecclesia, an entity that possessed a universal personality in which the spiritual realm was higher than the temporal one. Hobbes’s church was no longer the impersonation of Christianity, and its claim to spiritual superiority was invalid.

According to him, that divine personality belonged not to the church but to the commonwealth, effectively a tribe. If to Paul, the ecclesia was the body of which king, political institutions, clergy and their flock were parts, to Hobbes the ecclesia didn’t really exist as an overarching supranational institution.

In addition to venting Hobbes’s rabid hatred of Catholicism, Leviathan laid the philosophical foundation for a church “beholden to the state”, one at the mercy of the state’s feelings about Christianity. When a state and a church hug, there is always a kiss of death implicit in that embrace – and it’s the church that becomes moribund or, even worse, corrupted.

Anglican priests, real ones that is, want to preach God’s truth, not fly-by-night woke superstitions. However, our non-Christian, increasingly anti-Christian state, whose head is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, has subsumed the church, turning it into a conduit of assorted woke heresies. The priests become despondent, and their mood isn’t improved by the sight of empty pews.

People don’t need churches to be exposed to transient fads – they need them for keeping in touch with transcendent truths, and they feel betrayed by the C of E. At the same time, London’s Catholic churches are bursting at the seams every Mass, and even disestablished churches in communion with the C of E in other countries are doing much better.

In the five centuries that have passed since English Christianity decided to go it alone, the Anglican Church has woven itself into the fabric of English culture, language – of Englishness. Anyone who loves England, whatever confession he belongs to or none, must feel sad seeing the church destroyed.

Yet that egg was laid by Henry VIII, and the chickens have now come home to roost. In addition to the general secularisation of life, the C of E suffers from its congenital flaws, and the combined effect is devastating.

So yes, will the last Anglican to leave please lock the door and turn off the lights. We don’t want those wind farms to start working overtime.