Robert Crouse inspired a generation of young scholars, laypersons, students, and priests to see in Anglicanism and the Prayer Book tradition a true catholicism. There was no doubt in the minds those who heard him preach or give his theological papers at the annual Atlantic Theological Conference he helped establish in 1981, that the Anglican way of life found in the Book of Common Prayer was thoroughly catholic. The task given to me is simply to highlight that teaching, and I am happy to do so.
But the Conference organizers seem to want more than this in that they have asked me to speak on Robert Crouse and 'Prayer Book Catholicism'. Thus, they suggest that I should address the question of whether Fr Crouse saw in the Prayer Book tradition a pure 'catholicism', or something not quite catholic, or at least a peculiar type of catholicism called 'Prayer Book Catholicism'.
Another way of putting the same concern might be to ask that if, as Fr Crouse insisted, the Anglican Church is accurately described as 'catholic and reformed' — or even a 'reformed catholicism' — does that 'reformed' bit compromise or water down the 'catholic' bit such that a true or pure catholicism must be looked for elsewhere.
Again, the question might take the form that not a few students over the years had put to Crouse in various ways, namely, 'Since your Patristic and Medieval scholarship, your doctrinal commitment, and your devotional piety all so clearly embrace the catholic faith, why do you not go all the way to the fullness of that catholic tradition and convert to Roman Catholicism?'
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