I completely failed to check out the Times of London yesterday for how it reported 'the news', so I am posting this story from them today, and then I will post, for the record, how they reported the news yesterday.
Hundreds of Anglican clergy
to meet on Vatican offer
by Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
Oct. 21, 2009
Hundreds of Anglican clergy who oppose women bishops are meeting this weekend to discuss whether to abandon the Church of England for the Roman Catholic church.
About 500 members of Forward in Faith, the leading traditionalist grouping, will be in London to debate Pope Benedict XVI’s offer of an Anglican “ordinariate” or diocese to operate under a new Apostolic Constitution.
Many are waiting for the publication of a Code of Practice by Rome to flesh out the detailS of what is on offer before deciding whether to go.
More than 440 took the compensation package on offer and left the Church of England, most for Rome, after the General Synod voted to ordain women priests in 1992. Some subsequently returned.
The Pope has made it it significantly more attractive for Anglicans to move over this time by allowing them to retain crucial aspects of their Anglican identity and allowing them to set up seminaries which will, presumably, train married men for the Catholic priesthood.
But any serving clergyman would face a marked loss of income.
A job as a clergyman in the Church of England comes with a stipend of £22,250 and free accommodation. Catholic priests earn about £8,000, paid by their parish and sometimes topped up by a diocese.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams indicated there will be no compensation package on offer this time. It was only introduced at the last minute previously as a way of getting the whole women’s ordination package through the General Synod with the necessary two-thirds majorities.
Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Catholic who retired earlier this year as the Church of England’s Bishop of Rochester, today welcomed the Roman Catholic Church’s “generosity of spirit” and its recognition of Anglican patrimony.
But he made clear that many issues needed to be resolved before decisions about leaving could be made.
“Orthodox Anglicans should see this recognition of patrimony by another church as affirming the elements of apostolicity and catholicity in their own church, for which they have always stood.
“In the meantime, there is a need to build confidence in the evangelical basis of the Anglican tradition and to make sure that it survives and flourishes in the face of the many challenges it faces. However, before some fundamental issues are clarified it is difficult to respond further to what the Vatican is offering.”
The two “flying bishops” appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to care for opponents of women priests also said this was not a time for “sudden decisions”. [They do not belong to FIF].
Bishop of Ebbsfleet Andrew Burnham and Bishop of Richborough Keith Newton, who went last year to Rome to begin talks with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said: “Anglicans in the Catholic tradition understandably will want to stay within the Anglican Communion. Others will wish to make individual arrangements as their conscience directs.
“A further group of Anglicans, we think, will begin to form a caravan, rather like the People of Israel crossing the desert in search of the Promised Land.”
They suggested February 22 next year, the Feast of The Chair of Peter, as an appropriate day for priests and people “to make an initial decision as to whether they wish to respond positively to and explore further the initiative of the Apostolic Constitution”.
As much as the Times writer downplayed proespects in that story, here is what they report in another story today:
Pope's gambit could see
1,000 bishops quit Church of England
by Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent,
and Richard Owen in Rome
Oct. 21, 2009
As many as 1,000 priests could quit the Church of England and thousands more may leave churches in America and Australia under bold proposals to welcome Anglicans to Rome.
Entire parishes and even dioceses could be tempted to defect after Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to offer a legal structure to Anglicans joining the Roman Catholic Church.
His decree, issued yesterday, is a serious blow to attempts by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, to save the Anglican Communion from further fragmentation and threatens to wreck decades of ecumenical dialogue.
Dr Williams was notified formally only last weekend by the Vatican and looked uncomfortable at a joint press conference with the Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, to announce the plan.
Anglicans privately accused Rome of poaching and attacked Dr Williams for capitulating to the Vatican. Some called for his resignation. Although there was little he could have done to forestall the move, many were dismayed at his joint statement with the Archbishop of Westminster in which they spoke of Anglicans “willing to declare that they share a common Catholic faith and accept the Petrine ministry as willed by Christ for his Church”.
In a letter to bishops and clergy, Dr Williams made clear his own discomfiture. He wrote: “I am sorry that there has been no opportunity to alert you earlier to this. I was informed of the planned announcement at a very late stage.”
The Bishop of Fulham, the Right Rev John Broadhurst, chairman of Forward in Faith, which opposes women bishops, hailed it as a “decisive moment” and predicted that, based on his group’s membership, up to 1,000 Church of England clergy could go.
Christina Rees, of the pro-women group Watch, described the Vatican’s move as poaching. She said: “It is one thing to offer a welcome, but this seems to be a particularly effusive welcome where people are almost being encouraged. In the Anglican Church we like to operate with transparency. If this has not been done here that will add to the sense of this being a predatory move.”
[To be uncharitable, NYAH-NYAH-NYAH-NYAH-NYAH!]
Pope Benedict wants to make Christian unity an enduring legacy of his papacy. He is due to visit Britain next year; Dr Williams will visit Rome next month. The Pope has already shown his determination to reunite Christendom at almost any price, welcoming back the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X
despite a Holocaust-denying bishop in its ranks.
[One Holocaust denier out of a million followers, c'mon! Anything to distort the picture, right?]
Under the plan, the Pope will issue an apostolic constitution, a form of papal decree, that will lead to the creation of “personal ordinariates” for Anglicans who convert to Rome.
These will provide a legal framework to allow Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving distinctive elements of their Anglican identity, such as liturgy. Clergy will have to be retrained and re-ordained, since Rome regards Anglican orders as “absolutely null and utterly void”, but they will be granted their own seminaries to train future priests for the new ordinariate.
This deal was done with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Holy Inquisition
[centuries ago] that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger himself headed before he became Pope.
The Council for Christian Unity was not represented at simultaneous press conferences in Rome and London, suggesting that
the Pope has had enough of dialogue focusing on canonical moves towards unity.
[NO, NO AND NO! Why can't people with common sense see that it is perfectly sensible to bypass the dialog route if one can proceed straight to reunification of desirous groups and individuals - though not entire confessions yet? Ecumenical talks will go on, and hopefully be infused with fresh lymph after this jolt! - but don't hold your breath! Meanwhile, whether it is s few hundred, or hundreds of thousands, of Anglicans crossing the Tiber soon, is a gift of the Holy Ghost that is not to be denied while He 'decides' when, where and how He will breathe fire into the ecumenical movement!]
Dr Williams was briefed formally only when Cardinal William Levada, of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, flew to London at the weekend to tell Anglican and Catholic leaders of the plans. It is understood that leading members of the council and other senior Anglican and Catholic figures tried desperately to block the decree.
One result of the Vatican’s move is that women bishops are likely to be consecrated sooner rather than later in the Church of England. This is because Parliament and the General Synod will not sanction legal structures to “safeguard” opponents of women priests within the Church if Rome is offering an open door with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s blessing.
[Like they would do this for spite????]
Dr Williams said that the announcement did not disrupt “business as usual” in relations between the two churches. It would be a serious mistake to view the development as a response to the difficulties within the Anglican Communion, he said.
It was aimed at people who had reached a “conscientious conviction that visible unity with the Holy See was now what God was calling them to”, he said.
[That is a beautiful way to look at it. God bless you, Archbishop Williams.]
“It is not a secret that in this country the ordination of women as bishops is one of those test issues.”
Gledhill also wrote a commentary today that seems to give more context for the traditionalist bishops' revolt - in which everyone ends up somewhat villainous, starting with Rome, portrayed in bellicose terms ('parking its tanks' indeed!) - even though it was the passive protagonist in this drama; the bishops, and the Archbishop of Canterbury!
Desperate bishops invited Rome
to park its tanks on Archbishop’s lawn
by Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
Oct. 21, 2009
Rome has parked its tanks on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lawn after manoeuvres undertaken by up to fifty bishops and begun two years ago by an Australian archbishop, John Hepworth.
As leader of the Traditional Anglican Communion, a breakaway group claiming to represent up to 400,000 laity worldwide, he went to Rome seeking a means to achieve full, visible unity for his flock.
As a
former Catholic priest himself, divorced and remarried with three children, he would be unlikely to be recognised by Rome as a priest or bishop, even under the structures brought in by the new apostolic constitution.
He has nonetheless always received a warm welcome in Rome — in particular from Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who has made the running in Rome with the backing of his predecessor at the Congregation, Pope Benedict XVI himself.
In England, negotiations with the Vatican have been led by two of the “flying bishops” — the AngloCatholics sanctioned to provide pastoral care for opponents of the ordination of women as priests. The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Right Rev Andrew Burnham, and the Bishop of Richborough, the Right Rev Keith Newton, visited Rome at Easter last year for talks with Cardinal Levada.
Then in July last year Cardinal Levada wrote to Archbishop Hepworth assuring him and his flock “of the serious attention which the Congregation gives to the prospect of corporate unity” and promising that “as soon as the Congregation is in a position to respond more definitively concerning the proposals you have sent, we will inform you”.
Later that month, the by now desperate flying bishops appealed again to Rome for help. The General Synod of the Church of England had voted to consecrate women bishops without providing statutory protection for traditionalists. A synod revision committee overturned that this month, but too late to shut the gate.
At the start of this year Vatican sources began predicting that the announcement of some form of accommodation for Anglicans was close. But it never came, and less optimistic Anglicans assumed the whole thing was no more than a puff of grey smoke.
They dismissed the hopes of the traditionalists too soon. The reason for the delay was twofold.
Within the Vatican City’s frescoed ceilings and marbled corridors, in the Curia itself and in particular in the College of Cardinals, there were — and there remain — deep divisions about the appropriate response to Anglicans and former Anglicans seeking some form of corporate unity.
The liberals, among them Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who at the time was Archbishop of Westminster, were reluctant to open the door wide to the traditionalists, partly because of their “more Roman than the Romans” style of churchmanship, but also for fear of upsetting Anglicans and the Church of England in particular.
In the US, where a similar “Anglican usage” model has been in operation for years and will now be incorporated into the new ordinariate structures, there are 77 million Catholics alongside a mere 1.8 million Episcopalians. A few incoming conservative Anglicans have made little difference.
In England and Wales, the proportions are reversed, with 25 million baptised Anglicans but four million Catholics. Not only would a big influx of traditionalist ex-Anglicans undermine ecumenical harmony, it could challenge the identity of the Catholic community itself. Set against this, however, is the more confident American-style Catholicism that this initiative represents.
And while the shortage of Catholic priests would be alleviated by the influx of so many Anglicans, the acceptance of married clergy with families would inevitably shift the focus to a questioning of the insistence that cradle-Catholic priests be celibate.
The Orthodox Church, with which the Pope is also desperate to achieve unity, does not demand a celibate priesthood although its bishops cannot marry.
Celibacy is a requirement that is becoming increasingly hard to justify.
[Only to liberals. The historical and traditional reasons for celibacy in Catholic priests and bishops are solid. Besides, if a person wanting to become a Catholic priest believes he cannot keep the vow of celibacy, then he should not become a priest. The Church weill continue to pray for more vocations, and despite the painful priest shortage, it trusts that God will provide for His Church.]
So it seemed as though nothing would happen. But in May, with the retirement of Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, who is in Rome this week, Archbishop Vincent Nichols was installed as his successor.
Archbishop Nichols is a priest in the same mould as the late Cardinal Basil Hume, who led the moves to welcome in opponents of women priests back in 1994. It was predicted then that 1,000 would go but in the end a mere 441 took the financial compensation package on offer.
A priest of remarkable charisma, Archbishop Nichols could easily end up in a senior position in Rome himself, if not the most senior.
He was clearly “in charge” at the joint press conference at the Catholic Church’s Eccleston Square administrative offices yesterday, at one point interrupting to answer a question addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He appears to have no compunctions about unsettling a few Anglicans.
Many Catholics believe that their churches and cathedrals were “stolen” from them at the Reformation and want them back.
Although the established status of the Church of England means this could never be a straightforward process,
Rome’s new move undercuts all that by allowing for unity to evolve upwards organically, from the grassroots, as forseen by an ecumenical report produced a few years ago.
Every church leader speaks about unity, but they all want it on their terms.
Pope Benedict XVI is the first since the Reformation who seems to have hit on a realistic way of turning the clock back by moving it forwards. [Hmmm, that's a two-faced statement!]
As evangelicals defect in one direction and traditionalists in the other, and disestablishment beckons with the reform of the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury faces being left with a dwindling number of liberals in the centre struggling to maintain a heritage of ancient, Grade I listed churches.
Church-sharing already takes place between Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, the Orthodox and others. The Catholic Church could, through its new Anglican ordinariate, find itself repossessing its churches, almost by default.
There was bewilderment yesterday among Anglicans as they struggled to make sense of Rome’s initiative.
It was left to the National Secular Society to say publicly what many Anglicans would only admit privately.
“This is a mortal blow to Anglicanism which will inevitably lead to disestablishment as the Church shrinks yet further and become increasingly irrelevant,” it said.
“Rowan Williams has failed dismally in his ambitions to avoid schism. His refusal to take a principled moral stand against bigotry has left his Church in tatters.” [The 'bigotry' being that of the traditionalists? Well, Mons. Wiliams was equally remiss in failing to take a principled moral stand for what the Bible teaches, for that matter!]
So, from all the play they are giving the story, the Times appears quite shaken by this development, notwithstanding its feigned nonchalance! And it's cutting the established Anglican Church no slack. Mons. Williams certainly needs the prayers of all those loyal to his now badly frayed Communion.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/10/2009 10:12]