Word: witcutt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Searching Look. Armed with his newfound theology, Father Witcutt was sent to a slum parish in Birmingham. For a while all went well. Then in a lecture on the Reformation .to the Catholic Evidence Guild he bore down too heavily on the corruption of the medieval Catholic clergy. "I was summoned to interview the Vicar-General, who told me, with a searching look, that I was being transferred to 'the farthest outpost of the diocese...
...parish priest in the villages of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, Father Witcutt drew nearer and nearer to the God that seemed to lie just behind the veil of nature and farther and farther away from the Abstract Idea and the Beatific Vision. He found that "The God of Scholasticism was unworshipable. Nor do Roman Catholics worship Him. They cannot. They worship the Sacred Heart, the Virgin, and the Saints . . . To me Roman Catholicism seemed one of two things: either a set of dry philosophical formulae or else a range of plaster-cast statues . . . What I wanted was no vision...
...Spiritual Iron Curtain." Roman Catholicism, says Father Witcutt, conflicts with philosophy ("It does not allow for any advance in philosophy made since the 13th century"), with physical science ("by insisting upon the now indefensible Aristotelian doctrine" that qualities, such as color, are objective instead of being in our senses) and with history. Back in the Anglican fold, he holds that the Bishop of Rome became pre-eminent in the church only because the Mohammedans "over whelmed the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, isolated him of Constantinople, and left only the Patri arch of Rome in his former authority...
...last six years Father Witcutt has been a high-church Anglican curate in London's run-down suburb of East Ham. The freedom of the Church of England is a relief to him. "More and more the Latin liturgy had become an annoyance to me," he writes, and "I had grown to detest the spiritual Iron Curtain which divides Roman Catholics from their fellow countrymen ... I am sorry to say that the Roman Catholic, and particularly the priest, despises the Church of England. He does not consider its clergy to be true priests, and he despises...
...these empty pews optimistic Anglican Witcutt notes that the unchurched English are "not bitter anticlericals and atheists, as they would be in a Continental country. They are members of the Church who are at present asleep, and one day someone's voice will wake them...