Loading ...Breakaway Anglicans seek Vatican ties
flockwoodBy NICOLE WINFIELD
and ROHAN SULLIVAN
The Associated Press
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican is considering welcoming into the Roman Catholic Church a group of traditional Anglicans who broke away from the global Anglican Communion nearly two decades ago over women’s ordination and other issues, officials say.
Vatican officials stress that no decision has been made and no announcement is imminent. Still, Anglicans across the spectrum of belief are closely watching for any signs of movement.
Absorbing the breakaway Traditional Anglican Communion would be a small but notable victory for Pope Benedict XVI, who has made unifying Christians a goal of his papacy.
At the same time, any invitation by the Vatican is likely to upset leaders of the 77 million-member Anglican Communion and would hurt the Vatican’s decades-long efforts to strengthen ties with that fellowship of churches.
Anglicans split with Rome in 1534 when English King Henry VIII was refused a marriage annulment.
The Traditional Anglican Communion formed in 1990 as an association of orthodox Anglicans concerned about what they considered the liberal tilt in Anglican churches, including the ordination of women. Members of the group are generally Anglo-Catholic, emphasizing continuity with Catholic tradition and the importance of the sacraments. The fellowship says it has spread to 41 countries and has 400,000 members.
The traditional group aims to unify the Anglican and Catholic churches, according to Archbishop John Hepworth of Australia, who is the leader, or primate, of the Traditional Anglican Communion. They have accepted the ministry of the pope, but also want to maintain their Anglican traditions — one of several potential impediments to unification.
“We seek a communal and ecclesial way of being Anglican Catholics in communion with the Holy See,” the group wrote in a letter Hepworth presented two years ago to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The head of that Vatican office, Cardinal William Levada, wrote Hepworth in July 2008, saying he was giving “serious attention” to the Communion’s proposal. But he noted that the situation within the broader Anglican Communion, with which the Vatican has an official dialogue, had “become markedly more complex.” The Anglican Communion is on the brink of schism because of internal rifts over how it should respond to what the Bible says about homosexuality and other issues.
Hepworth has called the letter a sign of “warmth and encouragement,” and the traditional Anglicans posted the note on their Web site. But Monsignor Marc Langham, who is in charge of Anglican relations at the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, said that Levada’s letter was a “standard Vatican holding letter” and suggested interpreting it with caution.
“It’s very easy to turn expectation and hope into hard fact,” Langham said recently.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed that the traditional Anglican group and the Vatican have been in contact for some time and would continue to talk.
“Their request has been taken into consideration,” he said. But he dismissed as “absolutely unfounded” reports in the Australian media that a decision on welcoming the group was near.
Benedict’s recent efforts to bring Christians together have hit many obstacles.
In January, he lifted the excommunications of four bishops of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, which broke from Rome because of its opposition to the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. That decision sparked a public outcry since one of the four bishops denied that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
Separately, progress between the Vatican and the Anglican Communion has stalled, in part, because of the same issues that have fractured the fellowship: women priests and bishops, the ordination of sexually active homosexual bishops and the recognition of same-sex unions.
The Traditional Anglican Communion shares the Catholic Church’s concerns about these practices.
Still, Langham, of the Vatican, said it was “unlikely” that there would be a mass conversion of traditional Anglicans into the Catholic Church.
“Conversion is an individual process,” he said. “In our congregation, we would have trouble with that concept.”
As an example of the many outstanding unresolved issues, he noted that Hepworth, a bishop, has been married. “There are various problems with this, not least the tradition of married bishops is alien to the Latin rite,” he said.
Yet, the Vatican has made no secret of its willingness to welcome into its fold Anglicans who want to convert, even married Anglican priests. After the Church of England voted to ordain women in 1992, several hundred Anglican priests defected to Catholicism.
“Rome will continue talking; it’s not going to turn anybody away,” noted Simon Barrow, co-director of the British-based religion think tank Ekklesia. “But on the other hand it’s going to be extremely cautious about a group of people who want to enter, but with reservations.”
March 5th, 2009 at 7:50 am
[...] BibleBeltBlogger [...]
March 5th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Well, at least these guys don’t deny the holocaust, though their thoughts on other social issues might not match up well with those of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
For 500 years, everyone has said that the Catholics and Anglicans should re-join forces, and let bygones be bygones on that whole Henry VIII thing. At first glance, the two communions are natural allies: Both essentially use the same style of worship, calendar, and much of the same terminology. The problem is that the two churches have grown and matured in very different ways over the succeeding centuries, in both style and substance. Even the little differences are enough to cause trouble, such as the fact that Anglicans allow priests and bishops to marry, while the Roman Church does not, and Anglicans now universally ordain women.
The big issues are even harder. The Anglican Communion has become the poster child for liberal protestantism. The war in the Anglican Communion these days is not on the right wing, but on the left: How far left will the church go? In a sense, that doesn’t matter to the Catholics, because we’re already so far to the left of them that there’s no room for movement in that direction.
The Catholics are not going to accept openly gay priests and bishops anytime soon (though statistics suggest that many of their priests and bishops are gay but not open about it), and the Episcopal Church already has one openly gay bishop, and who knows how many openly gay priests. And, the factor that the article doesn’t mention is the impact of the sex abuse scandal on talks between the Anglicans and Catholics. I don’t know that anyone has quite said it openly, but there was a sense during the scandal that the Catholics were not a group that we wanted to be associated with. Certainly the fervor for any sort of dialogue has not picked up to anywhere near the level it had reached before the scandal.
But the biggest single issue is going to be theology. There is simply no way that the average Anglican is ever going to believe that the Pope is infallible on anything (we certainly don’t believe that about the Archbishop of Canterbury), and the Catholics are not going to let anyone in who wavers on that point. I don’t see much chance for re-union, nor much chance for a closer relationship with the Vatican thinking as it does. We’re just too Protestant for them, and they’re too Roman for us.
March 6th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
I hope the Vatican can work out something for this group of Anglicans. I feel the Anglicans’ pain. I was an Anglican who “swam the Tiber” and I’m glad I did. No regrets. There were many reasons for my conversion but the papacy was both a draw and a problem. It was a draw because something like a pope with real authority is the exact antidote needed by the Anglicans’ to combat their suicidal “broadness of doctrine” and the ensuing fragmentation and dilution of doctrine. It was a problem, at least temporarily, because the notion of papal infallibility is difficult to accept. In the end, I followed Cardinal Newman and the other Oxford Movement “Tiber swimmers” into the Roman Catholic Church. To my Anglican friends–”Come on in, the water is fine.”
March 7th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Caleb, you have to realize that Catholics view the Pope as the link between God and man. When I was young, I had the opportunity to see John Paul in south Carolina, even if you were an atheist, you couldn’t help but notice that there was a spiritual presence among that crowd. It doesn’t happen with all popes, John Paul was an exception. I also went to see Billy Graham, the presence there wasn’t the same as it was with Billy, nor was it as profound. But in the business of saving souls who does the greater good?
With the new Pope, he is following Church protocol. there are rules in place that help him make his decision and what he decides to tackle. I don’t want to take anything away from his position, he, as a humble man appears to have chosen a route that doesn’t draw as much controversy to himself or his opinions.
March 7th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Perplexed, you are obviously an orthodox and believing Catholic, and I applaud you for that, even if I disagree with virtually every view held by the modern hierarchy of the church. My point in the comments I made was not to criticize the papacy (though I could certainly criticize it), but merely to point out that whatever Catholics may believe about the Pope, we Anglicans simply don’t. We are not a church that sets up people in positions like that. The Archbishop of Canterbury, our spiritual leader, is nothing more to us than a denominational leader chosen by our hierarchy for a short period of time. We don’t think he’s infallible, and he has no special pipeline to God, in our view. We don’t place anywhere near the kind of reverence on that position, or on our own Episcopal presiding bishop, as the Catholics do the Pope.
My point is that so long as Catholics believe as they do, particularly about the Pope, and we believe as we do, there is little room for a formal reconciliation, though of course we can still work together on many things, as we have traditionally done.
March 7th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Caleb, are you saying it boils down faith being the main difference or simply making a choice of what to beleive or not to believe. I do applaud any groups that work together toward a common goal.
March 7th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Perplexed, I think it’s just a difference in religious tradition. The Anglicans and Catholics have views that have evolved differently over the years. I agree that it would be a great thing to re-unite our two apostolic traditions, but I don’t think we’re at that point now, if we ever will be. The Anglicans have developed as a Protestant church, and we’re simply unwilling to recognize the type of devotion to an institution such as the Papacy that the Catholics would want.
It always amazes people that while we few embattled Episcopalians in America only number a little over two million, there are 77 million Anglicans in the world, making us, depending on how you count us, either the smallest “catholic” group (we are smaller than either the Roman or Eastern churches), or the largest protestant group in the world. (According to one source, the Assemblies of God, at 50 million world members are next largest, which certainly impressed me.) Even so, though, the Roman church weighs in at 1.1 billion members worldwide, which clearly makes us the tail, not the dog.
So, it’s unlikely that the Catholic Church has any real incentive to make the kind of concessions it would need to make for us to re-join. Interestingly, though, there are a few parishes in America that are Roman Catholic parishes, fully recognized by their bishops, which use the Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican prayer book, for their services. These are called “Anglican Use” parishes, and exist only in the US. Apparently many of their members are former Episcopalians who converted to Catholicism over issues like the Episcopal Church’s ordination of women. I suspect that this breakaway Anglican group is trying to come in under some similar arrangement.