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Posted on 02/18/2007 5:09:43 PM PST by kalee
Radical proposals to reunite Anglicans with the Roman Catholic Church under the leadership of the Pope are to be published this year, The Times has learnt.
The proposals have been agreed by senior bishops of both churches.
In a 42-page statement prepared by an international commission of both churches, Anglicans and Roman Catholics are urged to explore how they might reunite under the Pope.
The statement, leaked to The Times, is being considered by the Vatican, where Catholic bishops are preparing a formal response.
It comes as the archbishops who lead the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion meet in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in an attempt to avoid schism over gay ordination and other liberal doctrines that have taken hold in parts of the Western Church.
The 36 primates at the gathering will be aware that the Pope, while still a cardinal, sent a message of support to the orthodox wing of the Episcopal Church of the US as it struggled to cope with the fallout after the ordination of the gay bishop Gene Robinson.
Were this week’s discussions to lead to a split between liberals and conservatives, many of the former objections in Rome to a reunion with Anglican conservatives would disappear. Many of those Anglicans who object most strongly to gay ordination also oppose the ordination of women priests.
Rome has already shown itself willing to be flexible on the subject of celibacywhen it received dozens of married priests from the Church of England into the Catholic priesthood after they left over the issue of women’s ordination.
There are about 78 million Anglicans, compared with a billion Roman Catholics, worldwide. In England and Wales, the Catholic Church is set to overtake Anglicanism as the predominant Christian denomination for the first time since the Reformation, thanks to immigration from Catholic countries.
As the Anglicans’ squabbles over the fundamentals of Christian doctrine continue — with seven of the conservative primates twice refusing to share Communion with the other Anglican leaders at their meeting in Tanzania — the Church’s credibility is being increasingly undermined in a world that is looking for strong witness from its international religious leaders.
The Anglicans will attempt to re-solve their differences today by publishing a new Anglican Covenant, an attempt to provide a doctrinal statement under which they can unite.
But many fear that the divisions have gone too far to be bridged and that, if they cannot even share Communion with each other, there is little hope that they will agree on a statement of common doctrine.
The latest Anglican-Catholic report could hardly come at a more sensitive time. It has been drawn up by the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission, which is chaired by the Right Rev David Beetge, an Anglican bishop from South Africa, and the Most Rev John Bathersby, the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, Australia.
The commission was set up in 2000 by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, and Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the president of the Vatican’s Council for Christian Unity. Its aim was to find a way of moving towards unity through “common life and mission”.
The document leaked to The Times is the commission’s first statement, Growing Together in Unity and Mission. The report acknowledges the “imperfect communion” between the two churches but says that there is enough common ground to make its “call for action” about the Pope and other issues.
In one significant passage the report notes: “The Roman Catholic Church teaches that the ministry of the Bishop of Rome [the Pope] as universal primate is in accordance with Christ’s will for the Church and an essential element of maintaining it in unity and truth.” Anglicans rejected the Bishop of Rome as universal primate in the 16th century. Today, however, some Anglicans are beginning to see the potential value of a ministry of universal primacy, which would be exercised by the Bishop of Rome, as a sign and focus of unity within a reunited Church.
In another paragraph the report goes even further: “We urge Anglicans and Roman Catholics to explore together how the ministry of the Bishop of Rome might be offered and received in order to assist our Communions to grow towards full, ecclesial communion.”
Other recommendations include inviting lay and ordained members of both denominations to attend each other’s synodical and collegial gatherings and conferences.
Anglican bishops could be invited to accompany Catholic ones on their regular visits to Rome.
The report adds that special “protocols” should also be drawn up to handle the movement of clergy from one Church to the other. Other proposals include common teaching resources for children in Sunday schoolsand attendance at each other’s services, pilgrimages and processions.
Anglicans are also urged to begin praying for the Pope during the intercessionary prayers in church services, and Catholics are asked also to pray publicly for the Archbishop of Canterbury.
In today’s Anglican Church, it is unlikely that a majority of parishioners would wish to heal the centuries-old rift and return to Rome.
However, the stance of the present Archbishop of Canterbury over the present dispute dividing his Church gives an indication of how priorities could be changing in light of the gospel imperative towards church unity.
Dr Rowan Williams, who as Primate of the Church of England is its “focus for unity”, has in the past supported a liberal interpretation of Scripture on the gay issue. But he has made it clear that church unity must come before provincial autonomy. A logical extension of that, once this crisis is overcome either by agreement or schism, would be to seek reunion with the Church of England's own mother Church.
The divide
The English Church broke from Rome in 1534 as part of the Reformation
The trigger in England was Henry VIII’s wish to remarry. The Pope had said that his marriage to Anne Boleyn was illegal
Henry had been a devout Catholic. But when he turned on the Catholic Church he seized its land and cash and destroyed its religious heritage in Britain
Centuries of suppression continued until Catholic emancipation and the restoration of the hierarchy in the 19th century
That must make the liberal ECUSA tremble in its boots.
Exactly the words my mother used.
wow. is it just me or does it feel like something is really happening in the times we live in.
The ELCA is the Lutheran synod who signed all the paperwork with the ECUSA. They are far from conservative, and would probably try to spin it all sorts of ways.
Henry VIII started turning in his grave when we started using English for the services, allowing married priests and distributing Communion in both kinds (innovations he did not allow while he was alive).
Of course the gay clergy probably have turned him into a contortionist.
You raise a good point. While Anglicanism is known to have plenty of Rome-aphiles, it also has plenty of Geneva-philes who, though they might be happy with the thought of stronger and more positive relations with Rome, would not be willing to give up their strong Reformed ideals of church governance.
Churches must grow together from the bottom up; they cannot be stitched together from the top down. The last 50 years has seen a lot of progress in this regard, and the last decade has seen unprecedented cooperation between Catholics, Orthodox and Evangelicals in confronting social issues. Still, many Catholics and Anglicans have been raised to see each other as sort of an enemy- that must be bred out first.
In the furtherance of the new ecumenical spirit, might I suggest that all living descendants of Henry VIII be rounded up and summarily executed, or at least incarcerated in the Tower of London. In the absence of the monarchy, the Roman Pontiff would then assume supreme power in the UK following a public declaration of obedience by Tony Blair. New Crusades should then be launched against Birmingham, Bradford, Leeds, the East End of London and other hotbeds of Islamic resistance.
Viva Christo Rei!! Viva il Papa!!!
I'm not discussing this with you. I don't like your tone or your questions.
This is why I don't bother going on the religious threads.
Please excuse the brief reply. (I am boarding a flight). Wikepedia has an article on the continuing Anglican Church(es) that will provide a reasonably good answer to your question. Sionnsar and I both belong to continuing churches (APKC and ACC are examples.) You can also search on the Anglican Catholic Church website which provides a good general history.
If S is near his computer, he may be able to add to this.
Edmund Campion is smiling in Heaven.
What exactly is a "Continuing Church"? I'm unfamiliar with the phrase.
But I do have to wonder about this: if a person gets a divorce and remarries, by that very fact isn't he or she saying that they didn't consider the first marriage binding?
And that's exactly what an annulment, if granted, would affirm: that the first marriage was, from a sacramental point of view, null, i.e. not binding.
So why would it be insulting for the Church to examine the circumstances and then agree with the divorced partners?
Not to worry. Over here in the Continuing churches we're keeping it alive. (The good one, that is -- the 1928.)
Just by being together a long time and producing children, people are not thereby married in a Sacramental sense. I think almost everyone understands this. If this were so, then every marriage (including non-Catholic, non-Christian, Mormon, Muslim, atheist, whatever) would be considered as having participated in a Catholic Sacrament, subject to Catholic canon law, which is obviously untrue.
An annulment is not a determination that a couple is not married "in any sense" --- just that their vows were not binding in a Sacramental sense. Almost everybody who goes through a church ceremony in this country is also married civilly, in the eyes of the State. So there is no question of their children's legitimacy; and in any case, "illegitimacy" does not exist as a Catholic concept; it is a secular concept.
Surely the RC Church has a right to define its own Sacraments; and the RCC holds that for a Sacramental marriage to exist, there must be valid, binding vows. If the vows were absent or defective in a serious sense (because of, e.g., immaturity, mental reservation, fraud, coercion, or ignorance of what the vows entail) then the vows are defective = null = not binding.
See also 56. That all seems reasonable to me.
I'm sorry. I don't agree with that at all.
For instance, if a man abandons his family and sues or divorce, it doesn't mean the woman had not considered the marriage binding. And to say so to satisfy the church is to be untruthful.
What are known as the Continuing churches were mostly formed in a mass departure from PECUSA in 1977, over several issues including (best-known) the ordination of women and the new prayer book. The founding document is The Affirmation of St. Louis, and you will see the term therein.
Most definitions of the Continuing churches somewhat incorrectly also include the Reformed Episcopal Church, a group that left PECUSA in the late 1800s -- yet that church and a "real" Continuing church, the APA, are in the process of merging.
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