Orthodixy; it's Patrimonial

In the glorious days when that very considerable Pontiff, Kenneth Escott Kirk, saintly and learned, ruled the Anglican Diocese of Oxford ... he was a close friend of Dom Gregory Dix; it was a very 'Catholic' diocese in those days ... the following ditty just emerged ex nihilo ... acheiropoieton, as you Byzantines might say.

How blessed are those Oxford flocks
How free from heretics
Their clergy all so orthodox
Their Bishop orthoDix.      (Tune: O God our help in ages past ...)

Half a century later, none of those propositions is still valid. How swiftly the waters have come flooding in.

Dix is often best remembered for his quip that the heraldic symbol of a Bishop was a Crook, and, of an Archbishop, a Double Cross. I do not know that he ever offered an exegesis of Papal Heraldry.

And recently there have been stories in the Meejah about Catholic bishops in Yankie Doodle Land who have been persecuting clergy ... no ... not for using the Old Mass, but just for facing East or using incense. Just as Proddo Anglican bishops and Mr Kensit's lads used to do!!! Patrimonials will remember how Bishop King denied the authority of the Privy Council to forbid him from celebrating ad Orientem, and that the then Archbishop of Canterbury backed him up. Those were happier days ...

Dix, at a time when some bishops in the Church of England were doing their best to prevent their clergy from reserving the Blessed Sacrament in a Tabernacle on the High Altar, observed
" ... the historian grows accustomed to the idea that even the best and most energetic of bishops will one day have rest from his labours and that the lance of his successor often delivers the diocese from the menace of some quite different windmill."

The Anglican Patrimony does have a modest contrbution, still, to make.

You see, we've seen it all before. We were here several decades ago.

We know these people, whether they call themselves Anglicans or Catholics.