Two Anglican Bishops to seek communion with Rome

The Telegraph, U.K. ^ | July 8, 2008 | Damian Thompson

[CTrent1564]

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Rev Andrew Burnham, is to lead his fellow Anglo-Catholics from the Church of England into the Roman Catholic Church, the Catholic Herald will reveal this week.

Bishop Burnham, one of two "flying bishops" in the province of Canterbury, has made a statement asking Pope Benedict XVI and the English Catholic bishops for "magnanimous gestures" that will allow traditionalists to become Catholics en masse.

He is confident that this will happen, following talks in Rome with Cardinal Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Kasper, the Vatican's head of ecumenism. He was accompanied on his visit by the Rt Rev Keith Newton, Bishop of Richborough, the other Canterbury "flying bishop", who is expected to follow his example.

[dangus]

>> I would guess not as Anglican bishops are allowed to marry. <<

You guess wrong. The celibate priesthood is a discipline, not doctrine. Married Anglican priests have already been welcomed into the Catholic church. Non-Latin rite Catholic churches also have married priests.

>> Au contraire’! It was the Church of Rome which first deviated from St. Peter’s direction. <<

Tee-hee. YOu keep telling yourself that.

[Religion Moderator]

Again discuss the issues all you want, but do NOT make it personal. If you cannot or will not comply, stay on the prayer, devotional, caucus or ecumenical threads.

[kosta50]

I thought I'd read here on the forum that at one point (some decades, or perhaps a century or so ago), the Orthodox were considering some sort of union or intercommunion with the Anglicans. Did I read wrong?

Ecumenical Patriarch (1921 to 1923) Meletius IV Metaxakis , a suspected Freemason, who introduced schism of sorts in the Orthodox world with the uncanonical "New Calendar," actually also proclaimed "union" with the Anglicans after personally recognizing their orders.

Of course, no one in the Orthodox world followed this lunatic and this particular insane idea.

[MarkBsnr]

***I guess they will have to change some “minor” habits. Here, from a site that calls itself “Anglo-Ctholic”, a woman “bishop” speaking to the congregration! ***

A female bishop; why not a transvestite deacon, a four year old cardinal, and an equine pope?

Well, as we know, kosta, what passes as labels does not necessarily describe the contents. Look at an ‘orthodox’ presbyterian that we have both encountered.

Is an Anglo ‘Catholic’ conceptually much different in this circumstance? There are traditional Anglo Catholics that are more Catholic than Catholic - I’ve met a couple. But not in this case (shudder).

[MarkBsnr]

***I would also suggest that if Rome decides it will be accepting married Anglican bishops as bishops, there really isn’t anything more we Orthodox have to say to Rome.***

Of course not. Rome would be in tremendous error.

[MarkBsnr]

*** They may have the vestments and they even celebrate Mass versus populi!, but they have altar girls and women incensers.***

My first wife spent much of her time incensed (mostly at me).

[sockmonkey]

Source for that claim, please.

My bad, rereading the Documents from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith-July 22, 1980, it states:
3) Discipline: (a) To married Episcopalian priests who may be ordained Catholic priests, the following stipulations will apply: they may not become bishops; and they may not remarry in case of widowhood. (b) Future candidates for the priesthood must follow the discipline of celibacy. (c) Special care must be taken on the pastoral level to avoid any misunderstanding regarding the Church’s discipline of celibacy.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I thought they couldn't be Bishops because they had wives, but you are correct, they can never be Bishops.

[sockmonkey]

If you’re interested the document is at:
http://www.atonementonline.com/resource001.html

[sitetest]

Dear Kolokotronis,

After posting to you and kosta, I did a little googling.

Apparently, there have been any number of occasions when the Orthodox considered the question of some sort of intercommunion with the Anglicans.

Here's an example of what I found:

http://anglicanhistory.org/orthodoxy/emhardt_historical1920.html

Here's another:

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/6947_9598_ENG_HTM.htm

In that the Anglicans have always has married bishops, and in that you rather emphatically made your statement regarding the possible acceptance of married bishops by the Catholic Church, I'm rather surprised at how many times Orthodox hierarchs approached this question, often quite favorably.

Certainly these hierarchs knew that the bishops of the Church of England could, and often were married?

Even in the short-lived experiment of the bishop whom you cite, Bishop Raphael Hawaweeny, surely he must have known that he was dealing with folks with married bishops.

As well, the bishop, in his letter abrogating the permission to limited intercommunion with the Anglicans, cites many problems with Anglicanism, but doesn't ever cite the problem of as being a bar to intercommunion married bishops.

sitetest

[sockmonkey]

He is confident that this will happen, following talks in Rome with Cardinal Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,

Back in 1980 when Cardinal Seper of the CDF determined the "rules" for the Pastoral Provision, his secretary was Msgr. William Levada. I think it's interesting that Levada now heads the CDF.

[A.A. Cunningham]

I’m very familiar with both the Pastoral Provision for Anglicans and the dispensation from the discipline of celibacy that has been granted to other protestant ministers who have converted and then been ordained to the Priesthood. However, thanks for providing the link.

[Huber]

Not to mention that I would have been a truly royal pain in an RCIA class . . . . not only because I am a pedant and read the Church Fathers for medieval history, but also because High Anglicans never even acknowledged the existence of Vatican Council II.

The local RC clergy avoids me; I ask too many uncomfortable questions, especially when they vary from their own doctrine. :-)

[Kolokotronis]

" In that the Anglicans have always has married bishops, and in that you rather emphatically made your statement regarding the possible acceptance of married bishops by the Catholic Church, I'm rather surprised at how many times Orthodox hierarchs approached this question, often quite favorably.

Certainly these hierarchs knew that the bishops of the Church of England could, and often were married?

Even in the short-lived experiment of the bishop whom you cite, Bishop Raphael Hawaweeny, surely he must have known that he was dealing with folks with married bishops.

As well, the bishop, in his letter abrogating the permission to limited intercommunion with the Anglicans, cites many problems with Anglicanism, but doesn't ever cite the problem of as being a bar to intercommunion married bishops."

You are surprised that Orthodoxy speaks and spoke with Anglicanism? That's more than a little disingenuous isn't it, coming from a Latin and given who Rome sits down with and even allows to worship in her churches?

I am sure the hierarchs who spoke with the Anglicans knew full well that their bishops were married. I note however that none of the discussions with the Anglicans had to do with mass conversion of the Anglicans to Orthodoxy.

The actions of Pat. Melitios, a lunatic as Kosta pointed out, were wrong. The actions of +Raphael of Brooklyn, an Orthodox saint by the way, were wrong. Thankfully, Orthodoxy completely rejects and condemns the notion that infallibility resides even in saints, let alone in hierarchs of any order.

The discussions between Orthodoxy and Anglicanism up to probably Vatican II demonstrate a flanking move on the part of Orthodoxy vis a vis Rome which was viewed as a great and heretical enemy of Orthodox Christianity, with good reason in my opinion. The theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend is particularly current in the East. That, well, hatred, is pretty much gone now, in great measure because of men like the EP and +BXVI and +JPII. But there is still deep suspicion of Rome among Orthodox hierarchs, clergy and especially laity, much of which seems rooted in the total inability of Latins to understand how the Orthodox think, even in something a simple as not "worshiping" our, or your, hierarchy and accepting whatever they say as "gospel". The sooner Rome and its hierarchs and clergy and laity accept that the Orthodox laity in the end will decide on reunion, not Patriarchs, the more likely a model for reunion will be found. And right now, there is very, very little enthusiasm for reunion among the laity and of course the Russian Church has made a point of expressing its serious reservations, the stirring images of the Pope and the EP together in Rome or Constantinople to the contrary notwithstanding.

So, I should have said that if Rome accepts married bishops, there will be no more reunion discussions. Theological discussions per se, would likely continue.

Still surprised?

[meandog]

You are delusional and a quite incompetent student of actual history.

Yeah right! Keep telling yourself that you're superior, you insulting jackass...then try telling me that Queen Mary I, Charles I and James II weren't all RCs after Henry VIII or that the Church of Rome didn't require payment in exchange for salvation during Martin Luther's time. So, which is more in line with heresy, divorcing the wife of your brother or a priest requiring a payment to bless your soul to heaven?

[AnAmericanMother]

Oh, golly, we should have done RCIA together then. I was a ROYAL pain in our class at the very liberal parish where we joined. Speaking the Truth, I called it.

LOL! We would have reached critical mass and the church would have vanished in a puff of logic.

Our parish is quite orthodox, so I'm sure RCIA wouldn't have been so bad. I would have been, though . . . .

[AnAmericanMother]

You do not have an accurate grasp of the English Church controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries.

My undergraduate degree was in history and I was fortunate enough to take a number of classes with Prof. Lawrence Stone, a somewhat controversial prof but an expert in this area, so I am very familiar with this question.

You might enjoy one of his books on this issue.

[meandog]

Not disputing your credentials, I minored in history and studied a bit about the Protestant Reformation too. And, an Episcopalian, I do not believe the Church of England to be engaged in “heresy” from its beginning or practicing it today.

[AnAmericanMother]

I was a sixth-generation Anglican on my father's side (if you don't count one Methodist in the chain). My mother was a Presbyterian before she married.

We were "high church" Episcopalians, so of course I had a particular interest in the English Reformation and the subsequent controversies.

The split began not only with Henry's amours, but with his desire to pillage the Church in order to solve his economic problems (it didn't work). He was a golden child who turned into a brutal tyrant -- and unfortunately too many of his subjects were willing to support him for what they could get out of it. This set in motion the religious ping-pong effect that continued until Elizabeth imposed an external and artifical settlement to stop the killing.

But the Settlement only drove the existing conflicts underground, where they continued to ferment right up into the Victorian age -- the Anglican church carried the seeds of its own destruction almost from the beginning. The fruit has just become quite apparent at this point.

[meandog]

I'm not disputing Henry's shortcomings but there were other reasons for the establishment of protestantism in England and Western civilization: Mainly the abuses of the Church of Rome on its faithful adherents's to Christ's message of hope and peace. These abuses took the form of payments for salvation and the reliance on a church instead of a Bible.

Now I am into bashing the Roman Catholic Church's entire history for, indeed, I regard it as the Mother Church of Christianity (No RC, No Christianity--despite the fact of Eastern churches founded by St. Paul because they would have all died out, IMO, without the influence of catholicism on Western civilization.) But there are apparent distinctions to point out in its history as well: The fact that there was no requirement for priestly celibacy until St. Gregory the Great came to the papacy, the fact that Marian philosophy wasn't practiced until late in the Church's history, the fact that an inquisition occurred and that it took a toll on science and the pursuit of God's gift of inquiry to the human spirit.

[meandog]

I’m into bashing=I’m not into bashing