Rebels without a church

Fr Calvin Robinson and the strange world of 'wandering' clergy

There are several different models of Christian priesthood - the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good is based on the idea that the priest is a living presence of Jesus Christ. A servant of their community: a pastor, teacher and friend.

The bad… is well known.

And then there is the ugly. For some, the priesthood means grandeur and status - dressing up in archaic clothing and assuming venerable titles. It is opportunity for small men (and they are usually men) to play at being something big in the world, or at least in their own minds.

You know the type, perhaps.

This article is about a particularly unimpressive subset of ‘ugly’ priests - those who try to access the supposed advantages of the priesthood without going through the selection process of an established church and without undertaking the years of theological study and pastoral experience that real candidates have to endure.

These inhabitants of the murkier part of the clerical underworld are known as vagantes, a Latin term that means ‘wandering’ (the singular form is vagans). Their eccentricity often goes beyond the ecclesiastical sphere. They may have a penchant for assuming dubious aristocratic titles. They may be a bit too into heraldry.

The antics of vagantes sometimes approach Star Trek cosplay. Absurd titles are not uncommon. One twentieth-century English vagans, Hugh Newman, called himself ‘His Sacred Beatitude Mar Georgius I, DD, DCL, Patriarch of Glastonbury, Caertroia and Mylapore, Successor of St Thomas, Apostolic Pontiff of Celtica and the Indies, Prince Catholicos of the West and of the United Orthodox Catholic Rite’, etc. The lack of actual resources at the disposal of these people sometimes gives rise to a certain bathos. They often have no congregation to speak of, nor any of the assets of even a small normal parish. As one source puts it, they ‘seem to have a tendency to call living room sanctuaries “cathedrals”’. But, seen from their point of view, this makes a certain kind of sense. After all, why be an Ewok if you can be Captain Kirk?

What gives these people a veneer of legitimacy is the traditional Christian doctrine of ordination. The older churches, including the Roman Catholic Church and a large chunk of the Anglican communion, tend to believe that a clerical ordination is valid - that is, sacramental power truly passes from God to the candidate being ordained - if fairly minimal conditions are satisfied. In principle, a bishop can put their hands on the head of a suitable candidate, speak a few special words, and bang - a new priest enters the world. The same is true as regards the powers of bishops to ordain (or ‘consecrate’) other bishops. So a vagans priest or bishop really is a priest or bishop provided that they have been ordained in the proper way (and provided that the person who ordained them was properly ordained, and so on back up the line).

Established churches generally don’t like the sacramental power of the priesthood ‘leaking’ out of the authorised body of clerics into unofficial candidates and schism groups. But - inevitably - it does sometimes happen.

Most present-day vagantes are descended from one of two ‘leaks’ from the Roman Catholic Church: a dispute involving the Dutch diocese of Utrecht in the 1720s; and the ordinations of an exiled Vietnamese archbishop called Ngo Dinh Thuc who began to behave erratically in the 1970s and 80s.

This article was prompted by the reappearance in public discourse of Father Calvin Robinson, who recently made a pretty shocking anti-immigration statement at the same time as announcing that he is moving to another country.

Robinson doesn’t quite fit into the category of the classic vagans. He is a priest of a real church, albeit a very small one. He apparently has a real congregation. This is located in Harlesden, which proves that nobody is beyond redemption. But he inhabits an ecclesiastical grey area which is outside the boundaries of normal church life, even if it is not quite in full-blown loonybins territory. He attended theological college but was refused ordination by the Church of England (conservatives suggested optimistically that he might calm down a bit once he took on the duties of parish life). His church, the Free Church of England, is a splinter group from the C of E. He was ordained by something called the Nordic Catholic Church, whose lineage goes back to the Utrecht dispute mentioned above (via some Polish-American schismatics).

Aside from the marginal nature of his church(es), Robinson broadly fits the vagans mould in other ways too. He likes his dressing-up. He sports unusual and archaic outfits. And he is very right-wing.

The vagans movement has a natural affinity with reactionary politics. This is, after all, a subculture in which status and lineage are highly prized - indeed, the vagans project arguably amounts to an attempt to preserve premodern hierarchies in a world which has moved on.

From this perspective, is it unsurprising that these guys are not usually Lib Dems, if I can put it that way.

Sometimes the silliness of vagantes can come into contact with the real world of geopolitics. The American esoteric writer Peter Levenda has recalled getting involved with a small schismatic group called the American Orthodox Church which seems to have ordained vagans clergy at the behest of the CIA. This was in New York in the 1960s, when the Eastern Orthodox Churches were associated with anti-communism.

(At this point, I have to make a qualification. When I posted about this subject on Twitter, I was upbraided - quite rightly - for ignoring the fact that some vagans clergy are highly progressive. Indeed, in some cases they are women who are shamefully banned from receiving orders within Catholicism and other mainstream churches. I am happy to provide this clarification.)

There is a twist, however.

If the vagans phenomenon is a regressive attempt to get premodern ranks and titles to sing again, it is also fundamentally modern. The clerical roles to which vagantes lay claim have been wholly detached from their original social and cultural context. A vagans bishop who pontificates in his living room in Wimbledon to a congregation of 2 is not a pillar of Christendom in the same way as the bishops of the historic Christian churches were. He is the product of a liberal, modernised world in which clerical status has become a traffickable commodity like everything else.

The Reverend Father Calvin Robinson himself, despite his polemic about transgender activism, belongs to a postmodern world in which identity is decentred and fluid, and self-ID is king.

Father is woke.