The issues of liberal and conservative religion have not changed in a quarter century, and hence some of the essays in this 270-page book might be worth re-reading, especially those by Schall, Niemeyer, Kirk, and Tonsor, the catholic (or, in the case of Niemeyer, soon-to-become-Catholic) contributors. On the other hand, as I note in the review, the essays by Anglicans seemed trivial; they only wanted their pastors to leave them alone. That was a sign pointing to the ultimate futility of the "traditionalist Anglican" position.
Yet the book was an Anglican project, instigated by a conservative attorney named Quintard Joyner (1897-1992) whose father was an Episcopal priest named Nevill Joyner and who was probably named after Bishop Quintard, the "chaplain of the Confederacy" who rebuilt the University of the South after the War Between the States. (Clerical families are the mainstay of the Episcopal Church, and Southerners live for their traditions anyway.) I believe that Joyner subsidized publication by Regnery. I assume that the Rev. Ted McConnell did most of the work, and that the inclusion of Rt. Rev. Stanley Atkins, retired Episcopal Bishop of Eau Claire as co-editor was honorary. Bishop Atkins was one of the Evangelical and Catholic Mission's conscientious objectors to female ordination.
The review opens with Father Schall's observation that the Christian witness of the Catholic Church in the 1980's was so confused and obscured by leftist political obsessions that young Protestants seeking the True Church could not discern it in the Holy See. Looking again, I notice Russell Kirk's references to the founding of "A Call to Action" in Detroit... the Detroit of Dearden and Gumbleton.
Needless to say, I would make no argument today for the consistency or credibility of "classical Anglicanism." There are traditionalist partisans in every Protestant sect who try to define its proper essence through some kind of founding myth or golden age and who deprecate their sect's modern leaders for, in effect, breaking a covenant or social compact; meanwhile, the leaders believe, like corporate C.E.O.'s, that constitutional due process, however brutally manipulated by them, trumps any and all tradition. Newman's position as an Anglican was similar—and resulted in the problem, after his conversion, of literary residue. He had published voluminous defenses and definitions of a classical Anglicanism (the "via media"); after conversion he found himself having to sift these voluminous works again in order to show that he believed what he believed when he believed it and that he had not been a Papist mole all along. My review evinces that I had no rosy view of the Catholic Church as it was in 1986, and that I would eventually need to say of it: corruptio optimi pessima... just as I had had to say this when joining the Episcopal Church, with my eyes open, in its decadence. (My motto, as an Episcopalian, was the line from St Jerome, non omnes episcopi episcopi. Such were the mental gymnastics necessary to justify membership in a fundamentally apostate denomination.)
