``We do not consider the practice of asking Mary and the saints to pray for us as communion dividing ... we believe that there is no continuing theological reason for ecclesiastical division on these matters.''
Ecumenical bump!
``We do not consider the practice of asking Mary and the saints to pray for us as communion dividing ... we believe that there is no continuing theological reason for ecclesiastical division on these matters.''
Ecumenical bump!
This should be interesting to watch.
In England and the U.S. (the only areas I am really familiar with) you have a wide range of customs and beliefs gathered under "one big umbrella" -- the church was designed this way by Elizabeth I, who was trying to bring the English religious wars to a peaceful end. She managed to include everybody but the extreme Puritans on the one hand, and the extreme Roman Catholics on the other.
The way this has developed in the U.S., you have two poles or lines of continuum within the church: (1) "high" versus "low" in belief - in other words more-Catholic-than-Rome on one end (with devotions to the Blessed Virgin and the saints, Eucharistic Adoration, etc.), and straight-arrow Protestant on the other, with Sola Scriptura and the XXXIX Articles' condemnation of anything that "smacks of Popery"; (2) "high" versus "low" in ritual - from lots of vestments, incense, bells, processions, etc. to a bare-bones Morning Prayer and Communion on the other end with "Virginia clericals" (business suit and a dog collar).
Like the X-Y graph political test you see on the internet, a church may be just about anywhere along these two lines -- there are churches that are very high in ritual but very Protestant in theology (the old "high and dry" of the pre-Oxford Movement English church), likewise there are very Catholic churches theologically that conduct a bare-bones service with very little in the way of vestments, music, etc. But I would say that most of the "low" churches are low in both ritual and belief, ditto most of the "high" churches.
The standout conservative holdouts in the ECUSA are mostly the "low" and evangelical churches. This doesn't leave much of a place for the "high" churches, whose Catholic ritual makes the evangelicals suspicious. They also don't approve of the ordination of women.
These two groups have made common cause in opposing the radical lib ECUSA leadership, but I don't think they can reconcile their differences sufficiently to maintain a new church body together.
Which means, I think, that the High Anglicans will split off and join the Catholics.
The origin of the Anglican church is not in any significant theological debate, but in the desire of a secular ruler to obtain a divorce, obtain Church lands and property, and to exercise direct ecclesiastical control.
Cardinal John Henry Newman, perhaps the greatest Anglican theologian, was familiar with such questions of authority when he helped start the Oxford Movement. Newman and a few of others started this movement to return the Anglican Church to its early roots.
Newman's attempts to link the modern Christian faith with the early Church affirmed many of the doctrines rejected in the Reformation. In the end, Newman was convinced that the first Christians professed the same beliefs practiced by the modern Catholic Church and that the Catholic Church taught with divine authority. Newman eventually concluded that the Church of England was in schism and that Rome was the only valid successor to the historical and ecclesiastical claims of the early Church.
The Catholics will first have to try to determine exactly WHO it is they are talking to when they talk to the Anglicans. That's not easy nowadays. The orthodox high-church people? The revisionist "Affirming" Catholics who love the high-church pagentry, but just don't want the theology that usually goes along with it? The low-church, but orthodox, 'evangelicals?' Right now, that whole question is unanswerable.