As there are already quite a few articles lined up to be added to this post entered earlier today on the preceding page, I am reposting it on this page to add to, as soon as I can.
THE DAY AFTER
For the rest of the world that still depends on newspapers for their news, yesterday's historic news is in the Oct. 21 editions for them to read. I will post the more significant and interesting reports and commentaries.
Beginning with the Christian Science Monitor, which is unequivocal and precise about its historic significance.
Vatican welcome to Anglicans
boldest move since Reformation
by Nick Squires
Vatican City, Oct. 20 - The Vatican launched an historic initiative Tuesday to make it easier for disgruntled Anglicans worldwide to join the Roman Catholic Church. The Church said the move was not a swipe at the Anglicans but it could nevertheless result in hundreds of thousands of churchgoers unhappy with openly gay and female clerics defecting to Rome.
Pope Benedict XVI gave his approval to a new framework to bring back into the fold Anglicans who oppose their church's liberal stance on gay marriage and the ordination of women priests and gay bishops while allowing them to retain some of their separate religious traditions.
The move comes nearly 500 years after Henry VIII's desire for a divorce led him to break with Rome and proclaim himself as the head of the newly formed Church of England in 1534.
The framework is the Vatican's most sweeping gesture toward any schismatic church since the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century and the Thirty Years' War that followed it in the 17th century.
That war ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which acknowledged the right of monarchs rather than the Vatican to determine their national faiths, prompting Pope Innocent X to declare the document "null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time."
Over the centuries, relations between the various Christian faiths have improved and both Anglican and Catholic leaders were at pains on Tuesday to say that warming relations between the two churches will not be affected by the new plan.
But both churches have been struggling to retain adherents in recent years, particularly in the developed world, with poorer countries their only growth spots.
Individual Anglicans have long been free to convert to Catholicism, as former British prime minister Tony Blair did after leaving office in 2007. But the so-called Apostolic Constitution will enable entire Anglican communities to transfer their allegiance en masse.
The Pope was responding to "numerous requests to the Holy See from groups of Anglican clergy and faithful in various parts of the world who want to enter into full and visible communion" with the Catholic Church, Cardinal William Joseph Levada told a news conference. He is the American head of the Vatican's doctrinal body.
Vatican officials declined to say how many of the world's 77 million Anglicans might take the opportunity to convert to Catholicism.
The Traditional Anglican Communion, a vocal group of 400,000 conservatives who split from the Anglican Communion in 1991, are expected to move towards Rome.
"We have had requests from large groups, in the hundreds," said Cardinal Levada. "If I had to say a number of bishops, I would say it's in the twenties or thirties."
His American colleague, Archbishop Joseph Di Noia, Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, said after the press conference that he believed the number of bishops ready to convert was closer to 50.
They would come from the United States, Australia, and the island nations of the Pacific, he said.
Cardinal Levada was asked whether the Vatican's new policy weakened the Anglican Church's standing.
"I would not dare to make a comment on that. After the long years of the British Empire, and the work of Anglican missionaries, the Anglican Communion is a diverse and very varied worldwide communion."
Under the new constitution, married Anglican priests will be allowed to enter the Catholic Church but will not be ordained as bishops.
The initiative was in response to years of lobbying by Anglicans who had become disenchanted with Anglican liberalism, a dissatisfaction which reached a crisis point in 2004 when the Episcopal Church in the United States ordained the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
That move and other liberal shifts, such as a Canadian diocese's willingness to bless same-sex unions, have been fiercely opposed by more conservative Anglicans, particularly in Africa.
The new framework was announced simultaneously in Rome and in London, where the head of the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, said he did not see the Vatican move as "an act of aggression."
Neither was it a vote of no confidence in the Anglican Church, he said, but a sign of maturity and understanding between the two faiths.
But Vatican commentators described it as a blow to the Anglican Communion. "For people who harbor the vision of Anglican unity, this will be a great disappointment," said Vatican analyst Francis X Rocca, of the Religion News Service.
"But it may also help to let off steam within the Anglican Church. If disaffected traditionalists leave, then they will lower the tensions over issues like gay marriage and women clergy."
Vatican expert John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter wrote in a blog post that while the opening by the Vatican had long been rumored, some Catholics feared "potentially negative repercussions in relations with the Anglican Communion – whose leadership might see it as 'poaching.'"
[That tired and patently fallacious argument again! Disaffected Anglicans knocked, and the Church is opening its doors. The readiness of the 400,000-strong TAC to move en masse to the Catholic Church is the best argument against the absurd idea that the Church is 'poaching'.]
BTW, I am still waiting for some commentator to call this initiative by Benedict XVI as the most signigificant papal initiative since John XXIII decided to convoke the Second Vatican Council. Doesn't it send shivers down your spine to think of it?
In many ways, Benedict XVI has been building simultaneously and patiently - brick by brisk, as Fr. Z likes to say - on the good fruits of the Council of Trent which was the Church's strongest action in thw Counter-Reformation, and which was a fecund renewal of tradition, as well as on the good fruits of Vatican II, which was the Church's way of fitting into the modern world - in keeping with his view of the Church as an 'ecclesia semper riformanda' and a continuum in time.
Meanwhile, this is how TIME chooses to headline a historic action in the most flippant way:
The Pope to unhappy Anglicans:
Come on in!
By Jeff Israely
Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009
For Anglican leaders, the Vatican announcement is the latest minefield to manage in their ongoing effort to avoid a full-fledged schism within their 80-million-strong church, which includes 2.2 million American Episcopalians.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is juggling the gripes of Anglicans of all philosophical stripes and ecclesiastical sensibilities, most notably as battles over women and gay clergy have undermined that prized "communion" within Anglicanism for more than two decades.
In the more than four centuries since King Henry VIII pronounced the Church of England independent from papal authority, certain Anglican conservatives have always drifted back to Rome, "swimming the Tiber," as reverting to Catholicism was called. But in the past two decades, more and more seem to be doing so.
Benedict's latest ruling confirms and expands earlier ad-hoc decisions by Pope John Paul II to allow several married Anglican priests to convert and remain in the clergy.
Under the new structure, groups of Anglicans can move into a local Catholic Church that will be headed by former Anglican clergy, who can ease them into Catholicism without their having to kiss goodbye their own pastor or the rites they were raised on. Married Anglican priests who convert, like married priests in the Eastern Rite of Catholicism, will not be eligible to become bishops.
The Vatican's doctrinal chief, Cardinal William Levada, told reporters on Tuesday that Catholic leaders were simply responding to requests by certain Anglicans to find a comfortable home in Catholicism.
"We have been trying to meet the requests for full communion that have come to us from Anglicans in different parts of the world in recent years in a uniform and equitable way," said Levada, who would not specify how many Anglicans he expected to convert.
[Why should he? The door is open - everyone is welcome.]
"With this proposal, the church wants to respond to the legitimate aspirations of these Anglican groups for full and visible unity with the Bishop of Rome."
In a joint written statement, Williams, who as Archbishop of Canterbury is the worldwide spiritual head of the Anglican Church, issued a joint statement with the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, saying the decision "brings an end to a period of uncertainty" for those Anglicans who have sought to convert.
But while seeming to douse one flame, the opening of an officially recognized channel for reverting to Roman Catholicism could spark other conflagrations within Anglicanism, both from conservatives and progressives who are suspicious that Rome is poaching their faithful.
Indeed, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's outgoing chief of ecumenical, or intra-Christian, affairs, used a press conference last week to try to curb such fears, insisting that Rome was "not fishing in the Anglican lake."
The incoming converts, however, may offer a false comfort to Catholics that Rome is winning the battle for Christian hearts and souls in the West.
[Benedict XVI is the last person in the world who needs to be reminded about this! He is generous and bold, yes, but never naive!]
Indeed, in the bosom of Europe, where traditional Catholicism became an immense political force, the Church is very much on the defensive. The Holy See's eagerness to find a home for the core of conservative-minded Anglicans follows the Pope's outreach earlier this year to the traditionalist breakaway movement founded by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, which opposes the modern-minded reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
From Day One, countering Europe's
supposed slide ['Supposed slide'? Is Israely disputing the slide???] into a godless secularism has been high on Benedict's agenda. Recently, that defense of the Church's values has been looking almost like a counteroffensive.
[Of course, it is. It is Benedict XVI's version of the Counter-Reformation - only the principal enemy is secularization, and not far behind, the subversives within the Church itself.]
On Oct. 17 in Spain, the traditionally Catholic right turned out perhaps as many as 1 million people in the streets of Madrid to oppose plans by the country's center-left government to loosen abortion laws (allowing 16-year-old females, for example, to terminate their pregnancies without parental consent).
And on Tuesday, in a Vatican meeting with the new European Union envoy to the Holy See, Benedict chided those who deny the "Christian roots" of Europe.
Said the Pope: "Europe will not truly be herself if she cannot keep the originality that made her great. When the Church reminds Europe of its Christian roots, it is not looking for special status, [but] recalling the fact that the founding fathers of the European Union were inspired by Christianity."
Even Tuesday's news of the forthcoming arrival of like-minded Anglicans to reinforce the traditionalist ranks carries a built-in risk for the Catholic hierarchy.
Church liberals will point to the married priests leading Catholic masses as living proof that it's finally time to toss out the celibacy requirement for the clergy.
[This is the one apprehension that I immediately had, but the Apostolic Constitution will make it clear that the 'permission' for married priests will only apply to those who are Anglican priests now, not to those who will become priests as Catholics.
Besides, there was already precedent in the married Anglican priests who became Catholic under John Paul I's 'Apostolos Suos' - and the anti-celibacy advocates have not cited that precedent as an argument before today.
And I'm sure all those Anglican bishops and priests who have thought about rejoining the Church of Rome in the past few years have taken this consideration into account.]
A blog by Greg Kandra on
shares the reaction of Fr. George Rutler, a well known convert from Anglicanism who now works in the Diocese of New York, to yesterday's news. Fr. Rutler e-mailed it since he was not available for a personal interview:
A dramatic putdown
of liberal Anglicanism
by Fr. George Rutler
Oct. 20, 2009
It is a dramatic putdown of liberal Anglicanism and a total repudiation of the ordination of women, homosexual marriage and the general neglect of doctrine in Anglicanism.
It basically interprets Anglicanism as a spiritual parimony based on ethnic tradition rather than substantial doctrine and makes clear that it is not an historic "church" but rather an "ecclesial community"' that strayed and now is invited to return to communion with the Pope as Successor of Peter.
The Vatican was careful to schedule simultaneously with the Vatican announcement, a press conference by the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and the deeply humiliated Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury to enable the Anglicans to save some face by saying that this recognizes the spiritual patrimony of Anglicanism and that ecumenical dialogue goes ahead.
{I think, perhaps, Fr. Rutler should have been more charitable here! Things are bad enough for Archbishop Williams.]
That is like George Washington at Yorktown saying that he recognizes the cultural contributions of Britain and hopes diplomatic relations flourish.
The Apostolic Constitution is not a retraction of ecumenical desires, but rather is the fulfillment of ecumenical aspirations, albeit not the way most Anglican leaders had envisioned it.
The press, often uninformed and sensationalistic in matters of religion, will zoom in on the permission for married priests. They will miss the most important point: that this reiterates the Catholic Church's insistence that Anglican Holy Orders are invalid, and perforce so is their Eucharist.
These married Anglican priests have to be fully ordained validly by a
Catholic bishop. Following Orthodox custom,
they are allowed to marry only before ordination and not after. And no married man may become a bishop.
(Thus, any Anglican bishop joining one of these "ordinariates" would no longer be recognized as a bishop. Under special provision, Anglican bishops would have some right to pastoral authority, but would not be bishops.)
It remains to be seen how many Anglicans (Epscopalians in the USA) will be received into the Catholic Church under these provisions, but it is a final nail in the coffin of the rapidily disintegrating Anglicanism at least in the West, and will radically challenge Anglicans in other parts of the world.
Perhaps most importantly, it sets a precedent for reunion with Orthodox churches whose Holy Orders the Catholic Church already recognizes as valid.
[Ah, but the primacy of the Pope is a difficult fundamental issue with the Orthodox Churches - which have existed for centuries as autocephalous (self-led) - which is not an issue for the Anglicans who are coming in as individuals, even if en bloc, as they do not represent the Church of England as an institution.]
GOD SAVE THE POPE!
Can't resist adding this bit of clever whimsy here. On the Italian blog Cantuale Antonianum,
someone posted a video of a band playing 'God Save the Queen', below which he posted the ff. lyrics -
So, all together now! -
Thanksgiving Hymn for
the Apostolic Constitution
God save our present Pope,
Long live our holy Pope
God save the Pope!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the Pope!
O lord God arise,
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall!
Confound their knavish tricks,
Confuse their politics,
On you our hopes we fix,
God save the Pope!
Not in this land alone,
But be God's mercies known,
From shore to shore!
Lord make the nations see,
That men should brothers be,
And form one family,
The wide world ov'er.
From every latent foe,
From the assasins blow,
God save the Pope!
O'er him thine arm extend,
For Churches' sake defend,
Our Father, prince, and friend,
God save the Pope!
Thy choicest gifts in store,
On him be pleased to pour,
Long may he reign!
May he defend our faith,
And ever give us cause,
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the Pope!
A m e n!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/10/2009 02:12]