This morning brought significant news from the Vatican in terms of ecumenism – a document detailing how Anglicans can be welcomed into the Catholic Church, even while maintaining distinct traditions such as married priests.
Anglican groups – the foremost in everyone’s mind being the international, 400,000-member Traditional Anglican Communion – who wish to come into communion with the Catholic Church would be organized into personal ordinariates. These structures would operate much like a diocese without geographical boundaries – like the United States’ Archdiocese for the Military Services – presided over by a bishop and with its own priests. (On the subject of priests: under the Vatican instruction, former Anglican clergy who are married will be allowed to be ordained Catholic priests. However, following the tradition of both the Catholic and Orthodox Church, no married man will be ordained a bishop).
“The provision of this new structure is consistent with the commitment to ecumenical dialogue, which continues to be a priority for the Catholic Church,” said Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Cardinal Levada added that the initiative came “from a number of different groups of Anglicans” who “declared that they share the same common Catholic faith as it is expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and accept the Petrine ministry as something Christ willed for the Church.”
“For them, the time has come to express this implicit unity in the visible form of full communion,” he said.
A growing segment of Anglicans have voiced their disaffection with their church in recent years, from its leadership’s acceptance of the ordination of women as priests and bishops, to blessings of same-sex unions. Various camps within the Anglican Communion – and, in the United States, the Episcopal Church – have argued the merits and drawbacks of breaking away versus trying to affect reform from within.
This week in South Carolina, for example, the state’s Episcopal diocese will discuss how to remain in the church body but distance itself from what Bishop Mark Lawrence described as “a common pattern in how the core doctrines of our faith are being systematically deconstructed.”
One diocesan official likened the proposed resolution to a wife moving to a room down the hall.
“The point is it’s intended to save the marriage, and she is still in the marriage and she is still in the house,” he said. “You’re trying to do something that is inherently contradictory in order to be heard.”
Overall, I’m reminded of an interview I conducted last year with Dr. Jeffrey Steenson, former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande and now a Catholic priest.
Father Steenson is a man who clearly loves the Anglican tradition, yet he surprised me with his candid observations of its troubled and “hopelessly divided” state.
“(The) capacity to be renewed and resurrected, to come back stronger and more confident and reconnected to the apostolic foundations, this is the great thing (about the Catholic Church),” he said. “I’m not sure that this is possible for Anglicanism in its modern forms. Something essential has been lost, and I don’t see how it can be recovered, once the Tradition has been lost.”
Happily, Father Steenson’s honest search for continuity in that Tradition led him to the Catholic Church, but other members of the Anglican Communion will have to work out for themselves the decision to stay or leave.
On Rome’s side, meanwhile, the doors just opened wider.
-- Elizabeth Hansen, Headline Bistro editor
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