Yesterday I took one of my semi-regular tours of web-sites in the community. The diversity within the community only goes to show how we are collectively striving towards God, striving to be faithful to a calling to be Christ in the World. Some sites were utterly inspired, others were simply tragic. But across the board, in one after another, one refrain constanly appears, which is mind-bogglingly bizarre to me; “Rome considers us valid.” Web site after web site finds some way to insert the idea, the phrase, “Rome considers us valid”. I personally don’t understand this. To my mind it suggests that we are somehow embarrassed or ashamed of our faith, and our heritage. I’ll grant you that our history has some pretty colourful characters in it – but I challenge you to find any faith community that does not!

Some communities have even resorted to citing (incorrectly) Vatican documents like Domeni Iesu to show that even the Pope validates their claim to authenticity. This is yet another example of our community seeking validation from the big-tent churches, when in fact it is not needed. Rome is not the arbiter of authentic catholicism. If it were then all of the Eastern Christian churches would trace their apostolic heritage to Rome – NONE DO! A careful reading of Domeni Iesu reveals that in fact what the document ACTUALLY asserts – in not so many words – is that the ONLY church that is truly authentic is the ROMAN CATHOLIC church, and that all others are in some way aberrant or invalid. Moreover, the document says that ultimately a truely authentic church must necessarily submit to the authority of Rome – BECAUSE IT IS THE WILL OF GOD! This is so antithetical to everything our community stands for that I cannot imagine why anyone would want to cit the document – even out of context!

I don’t care if Rome considers us valid. I don’t care if Canterbury, or Constantinople does either. I know we are ostensibly valid. But it begs the very important question – what do we mean when we say “valid,” because here too I find that many of our co-religionists have “assumed” that validity comes expressly with a valid puppy pedigree, and thats all that is required. This is something I think most readers would, nay SHOULD find alarming.

While it is a little tangent, it is one worth exploring since the insistence by some of our co-religionists of validating us via Rome is indeed linked in some way to an anxiety over our collective Apostolic heritage. This attitude of the Apostolic Talisman raises another set of questions regarding our communal understanding of what exactly Apostolic Succession deposits within the life of our community that makes it so important to us, that so many of our co-religionists wave it around like Americans wave their flag on national holidays. On so many sites you find it in the title, the menu bar, the first lines of the opening paragraph, entire pages are dedicated to reproducing the puppy pedigree – yet funnily enough most of us have the exact same “pedigree”, its everywhere! But what you don’t find, or perhaps more correctly what you rarely uncover, is a developed argument of what exactly this pedigree means to a particular community. Why? If it is so important, if it is touted as the silver bullet of validity, a reasonable person would expect to find some discussion of exactly why it is that this puppy pedigree does what it does.

This little aside leads us nicely back to the original point. If validation by Rome is so important that it sometimes is tauted on page one, or even has its own dedicated section of a web site, does this not also raise a raft of questions? Why are you not Romans then, is the first one that comes to my mind. If validation by Rome is so important, why is this validation then not developed. Why is it dropped on the reader’s lap like a lead brick with no explanation? In short, why is “validation” by Rome the silver bullet of validity? Personally I think it is a noose which will eventually come to haunt you

The consequence of constantly using Rome to validate our parking, rather than developing our own understandings, our own theological voices, our own valid action, is that we are seen as a bunch of bitter reactionaries – indeed for some communities within the movement this is indeed the case, and we should not air brush them out of the picture – but for the rest of us it is not, rather we chose this path in good conscience, in good faith.

In addition, the many web sites that promote our validity, do not develop the idea. It is treated as something static, almost like a talisman to keep away the accusation of fraud. Earlier I suggested that “validity” and “apostolic succession” raise a series of questions about life and ministry in the OC/IC community. Here’s an opportunity for us to push beyond mere “validity” and forge ahead with voicing our identity in the here and now. Here is an opportunity to usher in a new phase in the history of the OC/IC movement – to step over the threshold of the 19th century, and develop theologies, imagery, and action that reflects the full range of possibilities of “validity” and “apostolic succession” without looking over our shoulder at the looming spectre of Rome.