Address to Society of the Holy Cross, 2 August 2024
“‘Th’ abridgement of Christ’s Story’: Passion & Incarnation”
Address to the St. John Vianney Chapter of the SSC,
Province of Our Lady of Sorrows
Fr. David Curry, SSC
“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me” (John 12. 32)
We met for low mass commemorating St. John Vianney in the great romantic Gothic ‘barn’ of a building that is Christ Church, a building that embodies the spiritual emphasis of the Oxford Movement architecturally and liturgically. In a way, the whole building seeks what Jesus says in John’s Gospel about his being lifted up and our being drawn to him. His words capture the centrality of the Cross in the understanding of human redemption. They look back to the pattern of events of the Exodus and ahead to the shaping of the life of the Christian Church. The shadows of the Cross look backwards and forwards. Here Jesus looks back to a scene in The Book of Numbers where the people of Israel complained against God and Moses in the wilderness and were afflicted by God with venomous serpents. Moses intercedes and is directed by God to make a bronze serpent and to raise it up. Whoever looks upon it is saved. The logic is clear: in the bronze serpent raised up the sin of Israel is made explicit to them. They see their sin made visible and in seeing are saved. Sin and grace.
This informs the logic of the Passion. “They shall look on him whom they pierced,” John says about the Crucifixion quoting Zechariah. In our looking is our restoration; human redemption. The Passion and the Incarnation are inseparable terms: the one is unthinkable apart from the other. Such, too, is the meaning of the SSC as a society of catholic priests. “We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is our salvation, our life and our resurrection, through him we are saved and made free.” And yet this has somehow to be seen that “through the saving power of the Cross, + impressed inwardly upon our lives and revealed – expressed – outwardly in our work, may others come to know your love and your truth; through Christ our Lord.” Sacrifice and service are intertwined and belong to the mission.
The Society was established in 1855 just ten years after the “parting of friends” in Newman’s departure for Rome, largely owing to a view of doctrinal development influenced by the ideology of progress. Classical Anglican divinity was firmly opposed not to the development of doctrine but to any further development of essential doctrine; nothing to be added and nothing to be taken away from the essentials of the Faith. The ‘Newman crisis’ is part of the history and legacy of the SSC within the so-called Oxford Movement, of which the SSC is simply one aspect, and belongs more generally to the bricolage or fragmentations of thought of Victorian England in the various competing groups and intense divisions of feeling that are a significant feature of the 19th century. SSC is one of several forms of catholic revival such as the founding of Cuddesdon College (1853), Keble College (1870), and Pusey House (1884), and various other societies such as The Cambridge Camden Society (1839), subsequently The Cambridge Ecclesiological Society (1845), which had an enormous influence on Church architecture both in England and North America, the revival of monastic life, for example, SSJE or the Cowley Fathers (1866), and the promotion of retreats and pilgrimages such as to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.
Yet how to think through the bricolage of the period and its continuation into the 20th and 21st centuries towards a deeper understanding of spiritual unity and theological vision remains our challenge especially in the face of the growing hostility and animus towards all things Christian, exemplified, for instance, in the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics with a drag queen parody of the Eucharist. Such are some of the modern tendencies that we confront that parallel, in some way or another, as Fr. Hightower suggests, the struggles of the SSC in its early years.