Comprehensibility

COMPREHENSIBILITY. - A characteristic of the Anglican Church, consisting in "comprehending" among its members faithful of different religious doctrines. The official Church of England outwardly displays a certain unity that can be misleading. In fact, there appears in it that outward unity which results from its being the Church of the State, without whose approval it cannot change either the doctrines, or the prayers, or the rites of the official book; moreover, it also seems to form a single united block through its use of one and the same book, the Book of Common Prayer, through the common bond of the same 39 Articles of Religion, and also through the existence of an episcopate, recognized throughout the entire Anglican communion, which every decade gives evidence of unity in the Lambeth Conferences, presided over by the primate of the Anglican Church. But if one examines the matter carefully, one discovers that the reality is quite different, since there swarms in the Anglican Church such a variety of doctrines, often contradictory, as perhaps does not exist in any other Protestant Church or sect.

This phenomenon, called c., is not only recognized, confessed and accepted by Anglicans, but almost, one might say, is incorporated into the Church itself as an essential element for its existence. The Anglican Church "comprehends" indifferently in its bosom faithful to whom it leaves freedom to profess contradictory doctrines, or to doubt fundamental truths. There remain therefore within the Anglican Church, and are considered good Anglicans, those who believe or who deny the virginal birth of Jesus Christ, those who accept or reject the miracles of the Gospel, those who profess or who doubt the historicity of the fourth Gospel, those who admit that Jesus Christ erred in his doctrines or prophecies and those who believe in the truth of all that he said. Comprehensiveness is nothing other than the natural consequence of Anglican principles, that is, of the denial of any infallible doctrinal authority, and of the free interpretation of the Bible. The same 39 Articles of Religion are drafted in such a way that they can be interpreted differently, and there is no authority whatsoever that can determine what their authentic meaning is. Powerless therefore to decide a controversy arising over some point of revealed doctrine, Anglicanism attempts to mask this powerlessness with the convenient theory of comprehensiveness, which in practice means leaving to the faithful the faculty of determining their own Creed, or, as the Anglican bishop Knox said, "of teaching what I believe to be false, provided that I may also teach what others believe not to be true"; in other words, the Church of England is called comprehensive because it embraces errors and truths, and being unable to decide which is the error and which is the truth, it "comprehends" both of them.

Camillo Crivelli