Call me “Father”


The Episcopal Church USA is different from other Provinces in the Anglican
Communion in various ways and some of them have become notorious – e.g., its
adoption of a modern sexual agenda and innovations in liturgies for same-sex
partnerships.

It is also different from other Provinces in the use of the one word
“Father” with regard to addressing those males who are ordained as
presbyters/priests.

In England, and other parts of the Anglican Family of Churches, the use of
the word “Father” to address a priest is generally but not absolutely
confined to those who are in what may be called the anglo-catholic, the
liberal catholic and the high church schools of churchmanship. It would be
rare indeed to hear an evangelical or latitudinarian priest being called
“Father” by his flock and friends, or using the term of himself.

Yet in the Episcopal Church of the USA, as also in the Continuing Anglican
Jurisdictions that have their origins in schism from it, the use of the word
“Father” to address a male priest is very generally used whatever be the
churchmanship or preference of the person concerned. The departments of the
central offices of the ECUSA (“the National Church”) tend to call all male
clergy “Father” in writing to them as do most diocesan bishops.

So it is very strange at first for clergy visitors to the ECUSA from say the
Diocese of Sydney in Australia or the Diocese of Singapore in S E Asia or
the diocese of Chester in England to hear their supposed fellow
evangelicals in the ECUSA both using the expression “Father” and being
called “Father” by their parishioners.

In my last parish in England in the Diocese of Durham, where the parish
church went back to the 9th century, the parishioners called me by my office
of “Rector” or by my earned title “Dr” or by the common title, “Mr.”, or if
they felt they knew me well and were older than am I they called me “Peter.”
This approach – with more emphasis on first names recently – is still common
throughout the Church of England. Only those of a Catholic tradition,
liberal or conservative, consistently call clergy “Father.”

So various questions arise such as – from where does the title “Father’ for
the priest come from? And, why is it used so universally in the ECUSA?

Where from?

I have not done any research on this question and so I rely upon
Dictionaries.

The title was applied to bishops not parish priests in medieval Europe and
this tradition continued in the reformed Church of England for in the
Ordinal (1550) the Bishop is addressed as “Reverend Father in God.”
Apparently also in the medieval Church confessors (those to whom one made
one’s confession) were called “ghostly fathers,” and Mendicant Friars (but
not monks and canons regular) were also called “Father.”

In the Church of England, while Bishops were infrequently called “Father in
God” through the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, some, but not all,
priests chose to be called “Father” in the late 19th century.

In using this title, Anglo-Catholics specifically imitated the custom of the
Roman Catholic Church which, from the second half of the 19th century, began
to call all clergy in Britain, whether regular or secular, “Father.” This
custom entered the Roman Church in England from Ireland and was probably a
way of distinguishing Roman clergy from the clergy of the established
[Protestant] Church of England. For Anglo-Catholics it became a way of
claiming that their clergy were truly priests of the one, holy, catholic
Church as were the R C priests.

From English Anglo-Catholicism the custom spread to other parts of the
Anglican Communion and thus entered into the Protestant Episcopal Church by
the beginning of the 20th century. In general this title was universally
resisted by Evangelicals who saw it as being a direct contradiction of the
clear command of Jesus – see Matthew 23:9.

Why used so universally in the ECUSA?

The reasons why the title “Father” is universal currency in the modern ECUSA
for male clergy and not simply the currency of Anglo-Catholicism belong to
the general influence of Anglo-Catholicism & Liberal [Anglo-] Catholicism
on the former Protestant Episcopal Church and now Episcopal Church of the
USA.

The adjective “Protestant” was dropped in the 1970s from the name of the
Church in order to distinguish the historic Anglican Church of the USA from
the many forms of Protestantism in the American supermarket of religions,
and also to make it easier in central and Latin America in mission work to
identify the nature of Anglicanism.

With the dropping of “Protestant” from the name of the Church came the
emphasis that its clergy were ordained into the historic ministry (like the
catholic priests) and so they should be called “Father” to indicate their
status and difference from protestant ministers.

So the word “Father” spread like wildfire (as the word “altar” for the
Communion Table had done) to help with an identity crisis for American
Anglicanism [which had lost a third of its membership between 1968 and 1975]
and it did so because by the 1970s there was no active and informed
evangelical school in the now ECUSA to resist its spread. Thus by 1980 to
hear a priest called “the Rev’d Mr.” was rare and by 1990 exceedingly rare.

However, the triumph of terminology did not in any way mean the triumph of
traditional Anglo-Catholicism; it meant rather the triumph of a liberal
Catholicism, which kept some of the ceremonial and trappings and names but
changed the basic doctrines of the (as the 1979 prayer book and subsequent
Rites from the Standing Liturgical Commission so clearly reveal).

Now while all male priests in the ECUSA are “Fathers” there is no clear
agreement as to what the growing number of female priests, much favored by
liberal Catholicism, are to be called? “Mother” or even “Father” or what?

In this general situation both inside and outside the ECUSA, male priests
who claim to be orthodox, but evangelical rather than anglo-catholic, have
to decide whether or not they want to be known as “Father” or whether they
will use other titles – “Pastor” or “Rector” for example. Male Evangelicals
who are bishops have no problem for by reason of their office they are
“Fathers in God” to their flock even as was Paul to his converts. But
evangelical lady bishops, if there are any, have yet to tell us how they
are to be addressed!

The Rev’d Dr. Peter Toon June 14, 2001