Are we in cloud cuckoo land? Could this really come about? Surely we are overstating things!
I want to remind you of a few facts. There have been Christ-centred, Bible-believing, Gospel-driven, Catholic-minded Anglicans ever since the split in the 1530s who have prayed and worked for the reunion of all Christians (including the Church of England) with the Holy See of St Peter. These “papalist Anglicans” have been hated and despised by just about everyone simultaneously (including, strange as it may seem, other Anglo-Catholics). But through the centuries they prayed, and prayed and prayed.
In the early 20th Century these Anglicans played a major role in significant ecumenical discussion, and, indeed, with Abbé Paul Couturier, the establishment of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, believing such unity to be the will of Jesus for his Church. Following Vatican II it seemed that their prayers were being answered as the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) began to produce agreed statements as part of the journey to the reunion of Rome and Canterbury. Most Anglicans - even those who didn't really approve - were coming to accept that reunion was inevitable.
Then various member Churches of the Anglican Communion began to create NEW obstacles to unity. No longer content to accept the authority of Holy Scripture, or the Faith and Order of Catholic Christendom to which historic Anglican formularies had committed us, bishops around the world began to play fast and loose with just about every Christian doctrine, from the divinity of Christ to the Gospel itself, to Christian marriage, to the Holy Spirit's role in Confirmation.
With the purported ordination of women to the priesthood - and in some places the episcopate - arose the need for all clergy who were true Anglican Catholics to insulate themselves ecclesially, ensuring that they and their people were in receipt of valid sacraments.
Most recently, same-sex marriage has come to the fore as the issue most likely to end the Anglican Communion as we have known it.
Throughout this process, first world Anglicans desiring to proclaim the Gospel and maintain the Catholic Faith have had to regroup. Wherever possible this has been “just inside” existing Anglican structures (the use of “flying bishops” in England, and the adoption of parishes in the USA by “offshore” third world bishops). In many places, however, because of the intransigence and cruelty of liberal bishops, orthodox Anglican Catholics have had to regroup “just outside” existing Anglican structures into “continuing” Anglican Churches. At the international level the Traditional Anglican Communion is the largest of these bodies.
For 13 years, leaders of the TAC have expressed a desire to establish a relationship with Rome with a view to being “united but not absorbed” (Pope Paul VI's vision), believing that what became impossible for the Anglican Communion as a whole could be achieved by those Anglicans who remained demonstrably orthodox.
We have been encouraged by the response of many Roman Catholic leaders at various levels.
But on both the Anglican side and the Roman Catholic side there are others who are extremely unkind towards us. Nowhere is this more hurtful than when liberal Anglican and liberal Roman Catholic authorities collude to discredit us, presumably to try and maintain the Anglican status quo at all cost!
It will obviously take time and patience for the TAC as a community (together with other Anglican groups who might become part of the process) to make what John Paul II called the “arduous journey” to Christian unity. But because we are Catholic Christians who believe in the Petrine unity of the Church, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, we will gently and prayerfully persist, determined to overcome the obstacles before us.
Father Joseph Wilson, a Roman Catholic Priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn, USA, and a keen observer of Anglican affairs, has written about these things. I conclude with his reflections as published in The Messenger.
“. . . Ecumenical dialogue [i.e. between Rome and Anglicanism] is entering a more realistic phase. As the two churches diverged more and more, the “official dialogue” proceeded and issued optimistic statements; if the official communiques were to be believed, it seemed as though the two churches were growing steadily closer as doctrinal and moral differences between them multiplied.
“Successive Archbishops of Canterbury and Presiding Bishops of the USA were ceremonially received by the Pope in Rome, all the while the official Anglican establishment in Britain and North America was getting loonier and loonier.
“Meanwhile, within the Episcopal Church of the USA and the Church of England, faithful traditionalist Anglicans were struggling to preserve their heritage, and continuing Anglicans, having left the official Anglican Communion to form their own bodies, were persevering against immense odds. With all of these, the Holy See certainly had more in common than with the Anglican Communion establishment with which it was dialoguing.
“But things have slowly been changing in the past few years. Bishops of continuing Anglican churches have been cordially received at Rome, and conversations quietly begun; and when those conversations encountered obstacles among some in the Roman Curia, those obstacles were overcome. Forward in Faith/UK, the traditionalist group in Britain, has been engaged in serious, cordial conversations with Rome.
“And Rome itself has said that it will no longer feel obligated to channel all of its Anglican conversations through the official channels of the Anglican Communion.
“And now there is reason to hope that we return to the Lord Jesus, who is, after all, the Point of it all. We return to the Lord Jesus, who prayed that we might be one. We return to the Lord Jesus and to his Gospel, remembering that the one thing needful is that we be faithful to him.
“. . . it seems that, after so long, there's not just a future to hope in, but to be optimistic about as well. Great things are about to happen, great things done by the Lord.”
This “. . . is a dialogue Anglicans began in good faith 39 years ago, and it is a dialogue that we [the TAC] are bound to continue, ‘that', as our Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘they may be one, even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me.' [St John 17:22b, 23]”
- The Rt Rev'd Peter Wilkinson, Diocesan Bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church in Canada.
Bishop David Chislett in The Messenger, Feb 10, 2006