Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, Priest

Today is the Year's Mind, as we say within the Anglican Patrimony, of Fr Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton. He died in 1959.

Father was, for decades, a leader ... no; the leader ... of the 'papalist' part of the Church of England. Papalist Anglicans were people who believed in the whole Catholic Faith, including the decrees of Vatican I on the Primacy and Infallibility of the Successor of S Peter. They remained in communion with the See of Canterbury because they believed that, just as the schism of 1559 had been corporate, so the renewal of full communion should also be corporate: after all, the corporate schism of 1533/4 had been corporately absolved by Cardinal Pole on S Andrew's Day in 1554. (It is our view that the erection of our Ordinariate did in fact fulfil the same striving for corporate unity which animated the whole life of Fr FC and of so many like him.)

There is much that one could say about him; not least about his foundation of the Catholic League, which still continues, now as a society for both Anglicans and Roman Catholics. And about his role in the restoration of the [Anglican] Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham. But I will pluck from the record (The Anglican Papalist: A Personal Portrait of Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, A T John Slater, Anglo-Catholic History Society, 2012) his role in the 1933 Centenary Manifesto, put out to honour the centenary of the 'Oxford Movement', the Catholic Revival in the Church of England.

This anniversary happened at a time when many 'Catholic' externals had bedded down in the Church of England, but there were worrying signs of doctrinal modernism and of an accommodation to the Spirit of the Age in matters of sexual morality. The Manifesto stood out against disorders such as 'modernistic teaching', a 'novel comprehensiveness and mutual toleration of opposed teaching', 'the recent readiness to compromise on unpopular doctrines and moral standards'; its authors 'utterly reject[ed] Modernism and reprobate[d] all theories and accommodations of a modernistic character which impugn or innovate upon the Faith ... '. It wholly rejected departures from 'Catholic standards in faith, practice or morals. As a grave instance of the last-named, it is incumbent upon us to reprobate the toleration and even positive support ... of the immoral sanction of artificial contraception given by many Bishops at Lambeth'. Does any of this strike you as resembling any modern goings-on in the Catholic Church?

I put it to you that in this Manifesto we find the authentic tones of S Pius X (Pascendi Dominici gregis) and of the affirmation of Christian sexual mores by Pius XI (Casti connubii) and Paul VI (Humanae vitae), not to mention S John Paul II (Veritatis splendor and Familiaris consortio).

I was received as a teenager into the Catholic League by Father Fynes-Clinton in the 1950s. Recently, as I subscribed to the Correctio filialis, I did so in a vivid awareness that I was partaking in yet another skirmish in that same great conflict which in 1933 had elicited the Centenary Manifesto. Same War, same Enemy, same methods.


Eius animae propitietur Deus.