A Personal View of Anglican Uniatism

Anglican Use Society ^ | 6 May 2005 | Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P.

[gbcdoj]

Biographical introduction

I’m very grateful for the opportunity of speaking at this Conference because it’s also an opportunity to set in order my own thoughts, and recent experiences, on the important subject that engages us, particularly in my own country, England, but not only there. ...

The question of an Anglican Uniate church

The question of an Anglican Uniate church is the question of whether all this – or most of it, or, at any rate, a significant part of it, could be preserved in a union, nonetheless, with Rome – not through absorption by the modern Latin-rite church in England or elsewhere but in union with the Petrine office whose continued steadfast guardianship of classical Catholic Christian doctrine in faith and morals remains remarkably unshaken among the squalls of the contemporary world.

The 1992 Synod decision to ordain women to the priesthood induced a crisis in historic Anglo-Catholicism – by which I mean the Anglo-Catholic movement once its modernising ‘Affirming Catholicism’ element is left out of the count. This put my question on the agenda in an urgent fashion for the first time. And in one sense England turned out to be not the most helpful place to be when thinking through what such a union might involve. Speaking very generally, in England Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics are too close for comfort. Owing to geographical proximity in a relatively small and culturally fairly homogenous country, Roman Catholics think they naturally understand Anglicanism. But they by no means necessarily do. An added problem is the temper of the Latin episcopate in England, at least at the time of the Synod vote. As William Oddie’s The Roman Option shows, the Latin-rite bishops, Cardinal Basil Hume alone excepted, were implacably opposed to a Uniate jurisdiction for former Anglicans. ...

[gbcdoj]

The remaining bishops, Westminster excepted, were equally opposed, one gathers, on quite opposite grounds – namely, that these were aggressive doctrinaire conservatives who would swell the ranks of traditionalist Catholics already found irksome at their diocesan pastoral meetings or by their letters to the Catholic press.

[Kolokotronis]

Well worth the read and a ping to your Trad Anglican List.

[Kolokotronis]

I must say I agree with virtually everthing this Dominican has written insofar as it relates to a subset of the Anglicans and Anglicanism in general. Thanks for the post.

[Theophane]

As a member of the Anglican Usage parish in Houston, I am so happy to see Fr. Nichols' paper here. He has been called, as you all probably know, the greatest living theologian writing in English (pace to Cardinal Dulles). I am one of those hwo is hoping and praying for the reumnion of the Traditional Anglican Communion with Rome in a "uniate" church model, which we who are already "in" may then accede to. It would solve many of our current problems, which include lack of receptivity of the AU by the local Catholic bishops, and lack of trained pastors prepared to succeed the founding AU parish church pastors, most of whom are near retirement age if not past it.

We have much too beautiful and reverent a liturgy for it to be a good thing if our little AU communities were to be simply absorbed into the great melange of novus ordo mediocrity. Thus we hope for the arrival of a much larger and better organized group of like-minded folks.

Those latin-rite folks who things should all be done the same way should certainly read Fr. Nichols' paper, for something of a correction. Variety can be good, if done properly.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

How long O Lord?

[Siobhan]

Good points. The other problem is that there are Episcopalian priests who leave ecclesia Anglicana for the Catholic Church and encounter strange obstacles in the diocese where they enter. I know of a very fine Episcopalian priest who became a Catholic priest who first had to renounce any interest present or future in the Anglican Use before the Archbishop would talk to him. That sort of nonsense is revolting and underlines why an Anglican Rite in the Catholic Church is needed.