What can Anglo Catholics expect to find in the Orthodox Church?

First, a lot of familiar things: vestments, candles, incense, icons, priests addressed as father, confessions, devotion to Our Lady and veneration of the saints and martyrs of the church. Pilgrimage too, to Walsingham, and other much loved places. But those aspects of Anglo Catholic devotion that have been specifically borrowed from Rome are not there. Orthodoxy does not endorse the dogmas of Original Sin, nor the Immaculate Conception.

The Rosary is absent but perhaps in its place is the Jesus Prayer, which is as dear to Orthodox as the Rosary is to many Anglo Catholics. It is a good exchange, and many Catholic Anglicans will already be familiar with this prayer. Perhaps more problematic for Anglo Catholics is an absence of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament; Orthodox believe firmly in the Real Presence, although this is not explained through the Roman dogma of Transubstantiation. Some differences may be regarded as incidental, if not superficial. For example, Orthodox Christians generally stand for prayer, rather than kneel; they do not generally bow or kneel at the mention of the Incarnation in the Nicene Creed; they make a metanoia (a deep bow from the waist in which the fingers of the right hand touch the ground) rather than genuflect.

What is more to the point is that those who feel marginalized in a church that is becoming increasingly liberal and secular in its outlook, and is steadily departing both from Catholic Faith and the historic formularies of Anglicanism will find in Orthodoxy a spiritual home. Not only that. Orthodoxy offers a spiritual way that is both demanding and intensely satisfying to those who seek to follow Christ without conforming themselves to the world.

It is a way rooted in the faith and practice of the early church and, a welcome surprise perhaps for catholic Anglicans, a way that is thoroughly Biblical and Patristic, that is to say that it takes as a serious reference point the faith and witness of the Fathers of the church. This is in contrast to a contemporary pre-occupation with secular liberalism, perhaps the primary cause of decline and apostasy in the church today.

Worship is at the heart of Orthodoxy, though in some Eastern congregations it may be a little less polished than Anglicans might expect. Fasting too is important, and demanding, though failure here is regarded more as an encouragement to do better next time than as a matter for excommunication. Anglo Catholics have nothing to lose and everything to gain through becoming Orthodox, and those who suggest otherwise do not have your best interests at heart.

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