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PETER GREEN’S CLAIM TO BE AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC

An extract from his Artifex column for 23rd August 1922 in the Manchester Guardian reads:

THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC CONGRESS

“I should define Anglo-Catholicism as Christianity as it appeals to the nation. That no presentation at the moment appeals to all sections of the nation merely shows that we have not yet succeeded in the working out a perfect Catholicism which shall contain all that is needed by all sections of a very wonderful complex national character.”

An extract from his Artifex column for 8th February 1933 reads:

THE PUSEYITES

“The Oxford Movement is about the only historical subject which I have studied with some thoroughness at first hand and in the original. I have read everything I could – biographies, histories, sermons, theological treatises and tracts. But my connection with the movement is something more than that of mere study. I was brought up in a Puseyite household. My father was of good old fashioned High Church stock of the Clapton sect. My mother, as a girl, would slip away to the centre of early ritualism, St Barnabas, Pimlico.

What then does the Oxford Movement stand for in my own experience? First of all it stands for reality in religion. The Book of Common Prayer has its rules for fasting and abstinence, its round of feasts and festivals. Whatever the case may be now, in my young days the Oxford Movement stood for “putting the Prayer Book into practice.” The next thing I owe to the Oxford Movement is something very different. It is my love of poetry. The poem before the verses for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany in The Christian Year beginning, “I marked a rainbow in the rain”, is the first I remember learning. But most of all the Oxford Movement has always stood for me for the connection between morality and religion and for a certain asceticism in religion.

What it preached it showed forth in Pusey and Keble and Hurrell Froude, in Isaac Williams and Charles Marriott and in that martyr of the second generation of the movement A.H. Mackonochie. It is, I suppose, a natural infirmity of human nature not to be able to understand how anyone can fail to share the hero worship of one’s youthful days.”

An extract from his book Old Age and the Life to Come¹ says: “Some of my friends will complain that I repeat things which I have said before. That is inevitable. The Catholic Faith does not consist of a number of separate and unrelated statements. It is a closely articulated system and philosophy of life.”

¹ PG: Old Age & the Life to Come, (A.R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd., London, 1950), p7.