Senior Anglican Bishop Reveals He Is Ready To Convert To Roman Catholicism

The Rt Rev John Hind, the Bishop of Chichester, has announced he is considering becoming a Roman Catholic in a move that could spark an exodus of clergy.

Bishop Hind said he would be "happy" to be reordained as a Catholic priest and said that divisions in Anglicanism could make it impossible to stay in the church. He is the most senior Anglican to admit that he is prepared to accept the offer from the Pope, who shocked the Church of England last week when he paved the way for clergy to convert to Catholicism in large numbers.

In a further blow to the Archbishop of Canterbury's hopes of preventing the Anglican Communion from disintegrating, other bishops have cast doubt over its survival. The Rt Rev John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Fulham, even claimed that "the Anglican experiment is over". He said it has been shown to be powerless to cope with the crises over gays and women bishops.

In one of the most significant developments since the Reformation, the Pope last week announced that a new structure would be set up to allow disaffected Anglicans to enter full communion with Rome, while maintaining parts of their Protestant heritage.

The move comes after secret talks between the Vatican and a group of senior Anglican bishops. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was not informed of the meetings and his advisers even denied that they had taken place when the Sunday Telegraph broke the story last year.

Now Bishop Hind, the most senior traditionalist in the Church of England, has confirmed that he is willing to sacrifice his salary and palace residence to defect to the Catholic Church.

I did my thesis on the English Catholic kinship network between 1535 and 1820 and the subsequent move of a portion of that network to America and the founding of the English-speaking Church in America. The Catholic Church would have died in England had it not been for this very courageous group of families.

The "Anglican" Church was forced on a very unwilling faithful. Elizabeth I could only pull the people so far, and that is why the Anglican Church appears so Catholic. Much to the chagrin of the Calvinists.

It is nice to finally see a reconciliation in the works.

IMHO the wwAC as we once knew it is over. The roots of its blowup are different from those that sparked the Reformation, but no less divisive, and will no doubt split the Anglican church along its age-old catholic and protestant divisions.

You're prolly right ... but here's the interesting thing:

The failure of the Anglican Communion stems in very large part from a lack of central authority: we have no Pope or similar authority who can enforce orthodoxy if required. In short, we're in trouble because we lack what the Reformation fought against.

(And, it must be said, that same lack will help to explain the impending failure of many mainstream, Reformation-derived denominations, who are fighting over the very same issues.)

Pope Benedict has made the right offer at the right time. The remnant worth saving of Anglicanism will be saved, and the rest will disintegrate even faster without the traditionalists to slow them down. Very soon it will be the Anglican Catholics, and the wiccans. How long the wiccans last is determined by how much church property they will keep to live off of.

I hate to say this, Vince, because you and I are undoubtedly in strong agreement on most of this stuff .... but the fact is that in a lot of ways, "the traditonalists" are the villains in this story, and it's time we figured that out.

First off, "the traditionalists" are the ones who gave the store away in the first place, in a lot of different ways. "The traditionalists" are also the ones who don't even understand the battle we're in, much less how to fight it -- and that's why things seem to get worse, the harder we try to fight the battle.

And I have to tell you: "the traditionalists" are the ones whose approach to those with whom they disagree, is generally far uglier than anything the liberals are saying or doing (the credulous and often dishonest David Virtue being a sterling example). This is especially obvious when you hear about our battles from people on the outside looking in. If you read or hear what "the traditionalists" are saying ... it's often angry and unpleasant. What sort of seeker (other than one who is already angry) would want to go someplace like that?

It's easy to blame "the wiccans." But really, as Jesus noted, we've got a big log in our own eyes that needs to be addressed first.

I haven't seen any reaction of this offer from African Anglicans, who are far more traditional than the British.

Weelllll.... I think you need to be careful about that word, "traditional." It's an easy word to toss around, but I think you'll find that a lot of what you think of as "traditional," the Africans don't do at all. And what they do ... you might be hard-pressed to call traditonal in the Anglican sense. For example, I don't believe that casting out demons is among the Anglican traditions to which you are accustomed. The point I'm trying to make is that a lot of what the Africans are doing, is necessarily geared toward African cultures, just as a lot of what we do is (necessarily) Americanized.

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