Benedictine influence

This article is educational and worth reading. It is consistent with something I wrote here long ago about Benedictine influence on our Book of Common Prayer tradition.

Written in 1980.

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Thus, the Anglican insists that if one wishes seriously to come to terms with Anglicanism, he is going to have to go back to its true roots and study Augustine, Ninian, Patrick, Aiden and Cuthbert (all of them monks), and especially that most Benedictine of these founding fathers, also 'that most typically Anglican of all ancient saints, the Venerable Bede.'

The Anglican theologian Anthony Hanson notes that there is nothing particularly, new about this insistence on Anglican continuity with the pre-Reform Church: 'Anglican apologists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constantly maintained that the Church of England was not a breakaway Church, like the Evangelical Church in Germany or the Reformed Church in France. It was the same continuous Catholic Church that had at the Reformation "washed its face."'

And the Roman Catholic scholar of Anglicanism George Tavard, citing Anglican theologians of the sixteenth century regarding the 'uninterrupted succession' of their sacraments, theology and faith, acknowledges that among the Anglican writers of that period 'this theme constantly recurs.'

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