Abstract

In the wake of Benedict XVI’s call for the preservation of the Anglican Patrimony in full Catholic communion through the Ordinariates, this paper attempts to begin a ressourcement focused on Anglican vocational culture. Vocational culture includes the following. First, approaches to the choice of committing to a stable state of life, including perceptions of how to conform to God’s will in those choices. Second, institutions that guide or received the faithful in committing to a fixed state of life. Third, approaches to living out the duties of one’s state, conceived “vocationally,” that is, according to a sense of a particular divine calling or according to distinctions among states of life. Whereas liturgical texts tend to have official ecclesiastical standing, such “spiritual and pastoral traditions” are more easily lost if not preserved and enacted as part of a living culture. If there is “treasure to be shared” in Anglican vocational culture, we must discern its sources and how they could be made known to new generations within and beyond the Ordinariates. In 2018, the Synod of Bishops noted the need for renewal in Catholic vocational culture, citing imbalanced emphases, which this article contextualizes as rooted in seventeenth-century pastoral rigorism. Hence, a ressourcement in the Anglican Patrimony could be one means of wider renewal, in addition to serving the needs of Ordinariate members. A further challenge, however, lay in the fact that, for much of the post-Reformation period, most Anglicans seem to have followed Continental Protestantism in rejecting intentional celibacy and religious vows, thus preventing the growth of a systematic culture of vocational discernment. The solution lay partly in taking a wide view of Anglican patrimony that includes the early and medieval Church in England. Furthermore, lacking institutional spaces for the whole spectrum of states of life, some post-Reformation Anglicans developed creative ways to think and live vocationally, often drawing on their own medieval traditions and often borrowing judiciously from Roman sources, without overly systematizing their vocational culture in the manner of Catholic rigorists. Over the long-term, these efforts bore fruit in texts, institutions, and ways of living that are of value in full Catholic communion.