Merrily On High

by Colin Stephenson

Widely regarded as one of the most amusing ecclesiastical memoirs of the 20th century, Colin Stephenson's autobiography is an Anglo-Catholic classic, embodying a great love for people and a relish for their eccentricities and foibles. The heady peaks of Tractarian glories between the wars decidedly shaped Colin Stephenson's preferences. Young and impressionable, he revelled in the rich ceremonial of continental Catholicism in all its triumphal self-assurance. As an inexperienced naval chaplain in the Second World War, he set about installing baroque altars on warships, despite the 'violent firmness' with which certain admirals and captains reacted.Such encounters delighted him and many episodes are stories told against himself. After the war, and despite serious injury, he returned to Oxford and created the 'highest church in the city', before succeeding Alfred Hope Patten as Guardian of the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, where he found plenty to satisfy his appetite for the oddities of high Anglicanism. 'It may be a trivial record', he writes,' but I hope it is illuminated by love and I think I have made myself as ridiculous as anyone.'

Genres: Religion, Biography, Christianity

192 pages, Hardcover

First published October 2, 1972

Reviews

[Jack Mullins]

This was so good and so fun. A time capsule of pre-Vatican II Anglo-Catholicism. I aptly read it in England, just before visiting the Shrine at Walsingham of which Fr Stephenson was Administrator for a time and where he is interred.

[Ben McCabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun journey through a world totally alien to me (a glossary would have been useful!)

[George McCombe · Rating 5 out of 5]

For somebody looking from the outside, Anglo-Catholicism must have the appearance of utter eccentricity. It always has done, and no doubt this counter-cultural feel has provided a strong pull for the many who have been drawn to it over the last century. It certainly has never been easy to be an Anglo-Catholic. Viewed with suspicion and often outright hostility by both the Protestant establishment and the Roman Catholics whose practices they strove to adopt, it is no surprise that to be Anglo-Catholic required both a passionate belief in the Faith, but also the ability to find humour within it. This is certainly the approach taken by Father Colin Stephenson, as he gives an extremely light-hearted account of a life entrenched in the passions, beauties and absurdities of the Anglo-Catholic movement. Colin Stephenson was certainly the right man to write such a memoir. His life seems to have been a constant search for the pinnacle high of Tractarianism, from a youth exploring incense-wreathed monasteries to constructing eastward facing Altars on Navy ships as a chaplain during the war. One has no hesitation in believing him as he tells of his conflicts with low-church bishops, bemused middle-of-the roaders and intense competition with other High-Church clerics in creating the brightest shrines to English Catholicism. Little wonder that he was finally appointed as Guardian of Walsingham.

At one point in his memoir, Colin Stephenson offers the description of a number of priests as being within the Church of England but spending their lives as if they were not. In that sense, nothing has changed for a particular type of Anglo-Catholic, despite the adoption of candles, smells, and bells, into the mainstream. It's easy to suppose how Fr Stephenson would have viewed the contemporary bishops in the Church of England, who may now say nice things about traditionalist Anglo-Catholics but clearly view them as a nuisance at best, but what would he, who spent his life desiring corporate union with Rome, have made of the olive-branch offered with Anglicanorum Coetibus? I suppose we can only guess.

Is Merrily on High simply nostalgia for the glory days of Anglo-Catholicism? It awaits to be seen what the future holds for those who remain with Canterbury and for those who have submitted to Rome. One can only hope that the joyful faith, devotion and colourful drama found within these pages will continue to inspire into the future

[Mark Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've just begun this but it is such fun, I can hardly put it down. Brilliantly written with delightful self-depreciating English humor.