This is the Times story today, and includes some parts they already reported yesterday in items also posted on this page - I have reduced them to smaller print in this post.
What's the Times's game? Yesterday its headline read 'Pope's gambit could see 1,000 quit Church' [encircled above), which
I immediately thought was deliberately playing it down. Now, they've swung around to 400,000, the original figure most cited
before Oct. 20, since it represents the membership of the Traditional Anglican Communion. Maybe they think by putting
the larger figure up front now, they will have a chance to say later 'Estimates were greatly exaggerated' if less than
400,000 make the move in the next few years!... Also, note the 'malicious' choice of pictures: Seen beside Rowan Williams's
look of chagrin, the Holy Father's beaming face looks like he is gloating (he seems to be clapping, too!) See the many ways
news can be slanted or commented upon....
Leaders of more than 400,000 Anglicans who quit over women priests are to seek immediate unity with Rome under the apostolic constitution announced by Pope Benedict XVI.
They will be among the first to take up an option allowing Anglicans to join an “ordinariate” that brings them into full communion with Roman Catholics while retaining elements of their Anglican identity.
The Pope’s move is regarded by some Anglicans as one of the most dramatic developments in Protestant christendom since the Reformation gave birth to the Church of England 400 years ago.
Archbishop John Hepworth, the twice-married Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, who led negotiations with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, said he was “profoundly moved” by the Pope’s decision and would immediately seek the approval of the group’s 400,000 members worldwide to join.
He described the development as “a moment of grace, perhaps even a moment of history”.
As fully-fledged Anglicans also seek refuge from liberalism in the shelter of Rome, it is feared that the proposal could deal a deadly blow to the 77 million-strong Anglican Communion, which already faces schism over homosexual ordination.
Up to 500 members of Forward in Faith, the traditionalist grouping that opposes women bishops, are meeting this weekend to debate the Pope’s offer of a home for former Anglican laity and married priests.
Many are waiting for the publication of a code of practice by Rome to flesh out what is on offer before deciding whether to go.
Insiders believe that Rome’s new canonical solution to the Anglican crisis could tempt entire dioceses and possibly even a province.
More than 440 clergy took compensation and left the Church of England, most for Rome, after the General Synod voted to ordain women priests in 1992. More than 30 returned.
The Pope has made it significantly more attractive for Anglicans to move over this time by offering a universal solution that allows them to retain crucial aspects of their identity and to set up seminaries that 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 topped up by a diocese where the parish cannot afford even that.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, indicated that there would be no compensation 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 this year as the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, welcomed Rome’s “generosity of spirit” in its recognition of Anglican patrimony. But he made clear that many issues needed to be resolved before decisions could be made. The two “flying bishops” appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to care for opponents of women priests also said that this was not a time for “sudden decisions”.
Andrew Burnham, the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, and Keith Newton, the Bishop of Richborough, 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 will begin to form a caravan, rather like the People of Israel crossing the desert in search of the Promised Land.”
In the US a writer for the Jesuit magazine
America expressed fears that some newcomers would be “nostalgists, anti-feminists and anti-gay bigots”.
At Notre Dame University in Indiana, scholars forecast a migration of Catholics into the new Anglican Catholic rite because of the sudden freedom to marry that it would grant.
Professor Lawrence Cunningham called the Vatican’s move a “stunning” endorsement of the married priesthood, adding that it would have immediate repercussions for Catholics. It would “raise anew the question, ‘If they can do it, why can’t the priests of Rome?’ ”
Archbishop Robert Duncan, of the Anglican Church of North America, which broke away from the Episcopal Church over the ordination of the gay Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire, said: “We rejoice that the Holy See has opened this doorway, which represents another step in the co-operation and relationship between our Churches.”
In Rome, Vittorio Messori, who has co-written books with the Pope, said that the Anglican Communion was already losing followers because of female and gay priests.
“More Muslims go to the mosques in London than Anglicans go to church” he said. “The exit of half a million Anglicans to Rome will only confirm a trend.”
But the following lead paragraphs from a Times 'analyst', who has been known for her venomous attacks on the Pope and the Church before, has a truly twisted and preposterous hypothesis - to which one might remind her to look at the motto on the British royal coat of arms: Honi soit qui mal y pense!' [Shame on him who thinks ill of it). I am posting this only to show that the pitchforks and daggers and cyanide bombs are out... and that it can only get worse.
From The Times October 22, 2009
Converts may choke on
raw meat of Catholicism
by Libby Purves: Analysis
The welcoming of Anglican clergy into the Catholic Church highlights the differences, and difficulties, of approach.
Attack is the best form of defence. On the eve of another damning report on clerical abuse and cover-up in Ireland, that seems to be Pope Benedict’s tactic.
His sudden invitation to Anglican defectors will certainly take the spotlight off a continuing child abuse scandal fed, for decades, by the masculine and intimidating structures of authority in the Catholic hierarchy. [As if anyone but the media themselves could turn the spotlight on and off anything they choose to!]
Words like “poaching” may seem harsh, but there is more than a whiff of power politics in this move. A “rush to Rome” would resolve Catholicism’s shortage of priests, win back some ancient church buildings annexed at the Reformation, and reduce Anglicanism to an anxious, liberal rump. Result! It is not, after all, so long since Catholics prayed weekly for “the conversion of England”.
But wavering clergy should beware. Apart from anything else, onlookers might accuse them of two opposing faults: an illiberal lack of elasticity over human beings — notably women and gays — yet a woefully pliable attitude to belief.....
There oughta be a law to muzzle bigoted, even evil, journalists.
Patrick Archbold at Cretive Minority Report has unearthed a quotation from St. Edward the Confessor (King of England, 1043-1066), which might be apropos today - not that 'the English people' are necessarily corrupt and wicked now, but simply too secularized perhaps, and cowed somehow by the Islamic presence among them.
The extreme corruption and wickedness of the English nation has provoked the just anger of God. When malice shall have reached the fullness of its measure, God will, in His wrath, send to the English people wicked spirits, who will punish and afflict them with great severity, by separating the green tree from its parent stem the length of three furlongs.
But at last this same tree, through the compassionate mercy of God, and without any national (governmental) assistance, shall return to its original root, reflourish and bear abundant fruit.
At the Telegraph, Damian Thompson filed a wrap-up story today with some new information:
The Vatican opens its arms to Anglicans:
Huge impact expected from Pope's
dramatic invitation to disaffected Anglicans
by Damian Thompson
Oct. 22, 2009
On Tuesday morning, Pope Benedict XVI sprang a big surprise on both the Roman Catholic Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion. He announced the setting up of what amounts to a church within a church for Anglicans who reject the ordination of women priests and bishops and liberal teachings on homosexuality.
If they choose, these disaffected churchgoers will soon be able to worship together in full communion with Rome but with their own Anglican-flavoured liturgy, their own married priests and their own bishop or senior priest (an "Ordinary", to use the Vatican's arcane terminology).
The announcement was made at joint press conferences in Rome and London, the latter attended by the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
Dr Williams looked uncomfortable at the press briefing: he said he was happy with the news, but his body language told a different story. And no wonder. According to reliable reports, the details of the Pope's very grand decree on the Anglicans, called an Apostolic Constitution, were communicated to him only a couple of days earlier (and they have still not been made public).
The Pope's chief doctrinal adviser, Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is thought to have paid a secret visit to Lambeth Palace to brief Dr Williams as late as Monday.
It cannot have been an easy conversation; sources in Rome claim that the Archbishop and his advisers had been "implacably opposed" to the Pope's scheme.
Yesterday came the headlines and media reports that Dr Williams dreaded. The position of the Church of England "has been dangerously weakened", declared
The Times. Religious correspondents announced the end of the Anglican Communion – not as speculation, but as fact.
"The faces of many Church of England bishops have turned as purple as their cassocks," said one commentator. They knew nothing about this Apostolic Constitution in advance: the first official notification was a letter from Dr Williams published yesterday, in which he apologised for the short notice but explained that "I was informed of the planned announcement at a very late stage".
This anger is widely shared by Catholic bishops of England and Wales – and not just because they feel that the Anglicans have been insulted by the Vatican.
Pope Benedict XVI decided not to consult the English Catholic bishops about his dramatic offer. Indeed, the Vatican's own professional ecumenists in the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity were also kept out of the picture until "a very late stage".
But it is precisely the exclusion of liberal Catholic bishops that has delighted traditionalist Anglicans. It helps explain why, yesterday, Forward in Faith, the umbrella group for conservative Anglo-Catholics, welcomed the Pope's decision effusively.
They do not know how this arrangement will work in practice – "A lot depends on the fine print but so far there is no fine print," says Stephen Parkinson, director of Forward in Faith – but they know what it will not contain: any provision for a local Catholic bishop to make their services trendy and "relevant".
Anglican congregations who pride themselves on being more Catholic than the Pope will be able to carry on celebrating Mass in antique vestments, in sanctuaries behind traditional altar rails, to the accompaniment of motets sung by a professionally trained choir.
These details may seem trivial, compared to the mighty theological disputes that have divided Rome from Canterbury. They are not.
For well over a century, hardline Anglo-Catholics – many of them occupying grimy Victorian Gothic buildings in inner-city parishes rather than medieval rural churches with lovely rectories – have accepted nearly all the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Increasingly, as the authority of successive Archbishops of Canterbury has crumbled, they have been won over to papal supremacy.
The biggest stumbling blocks are not doctrinal; nor does the question of married priests loom large, since the Vatican is happy to ordain married former Anglican clergyman. Intriguingly, under the new arrangements, Rome may agree to ordain some married laymen – a startling departure from tradition, unknown in the West since the Middle Ages.
At a conservative estimate, about 1,000 of the Church of England's 12,000 serving priests have seriously contemplated conversion to Rome. (Many years ago, before he was ordained, Rowan Williams flirted with the idea himself.)
When you ask them why they have not taken the plunge, the most common response is:
"The English Catholic bishops are more wishy-washy and liberal than our lot."
If they become "Romans", they have reasoned, they will no longer be able to worship God with the solemnity He deserves.
On the south coast of England, in particular, Catholic bishops treat their own traditionalists with snooty disdain, and an influx of ex-Anglicans with similar tastes is the last thing they want.
Which is why Pope Benedict has effectively cut his bishops out of the picture. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he made friends with High Church Anglicans; he is the first Pope in history to understand their concerns. He watched in dismay as liberal Catholics and liberal Anglicans engaged in ecumenical dialogue that led nowhere: the Church of England voted to ordain women priests in 1992, and now seems certain to ordain women bishops, too.
Last year, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's chief ecumenist, desperately pleaded with the Lambeth Conference to pull back from ordaining more women bishops or openly gay men.
But Pope Benedict had already made up his mind. A succession of Anglican bishops had asked for a new home, free from interference by Catholic liberals. Now he has given them what they wanted – and more.
How will the Apostolic Constitution work in practice? No one knows: it is not even published, and even then the outcome will depend on local negotiations. Several hundred Church of England clergy are likely to join the scheme, but will their congregations follow?
"Some congregations will be divided, and you will get parishes where the vicar wants to go and the people don't, and vice versa," says Stephen Parkinson. "The dream solution is for St Aloysius-by-the-Gasworks to be received en masse, priest and people – but, even if there is total agreement, what about the church?
Rowan Williams is always telling the American bishops to be generous to those who want to leave and take their buildings with them, but will he practise what he preaches over here?
"And what happens to institutions such as the Anglican shrine at Walsingham, which may well want to join the scheme? These are tricky issues, though I notice that Rome has not set any sort of deadline, so presumably people will have plenty of time to make up their minds."
The legal complexities facing Dr Williams will only add to the sadness he feels at the prospect of losing so many of his priests, and at least three Church of England bishops.
But as George Pitcher,
The Daily Telegraph's religion editor and himself an Anglican priest, pointed out yesterday, the exodus of Anglo-Catholics opposed to women bishops will make unity on this subject easier to achieve across the Anglican Communion.
"Ironically, the Pope has given disaffected traditionalists the province they always wanted from the Church of England," he says. "But it would be a great pity if some Anglo-Catholics did not feel they could remain Anglicans, because that rich tradition has so much to offer us."
Some Anglicans are unimpressed by what they interpret as an attempt to park Roman tanks on the Anglican lawn. Professor Diarmaid McCulloch, a leading Church historian who also plays the organ at St Barnabas, Oxford, describes the Pope's offer as "a storm in a teacup, a gesture based on a fundamental misconception of how religion works in England".
But Forward in Faith
[a worldwide federation which at the end of 2005, had 800 member parishes - and was organized soon after the Church of England approved women's ordination in 1992] is delighted by what it regards as an act of great boldness and imagination by the Pope.
Three of its bishops – John Broadhurst of Fulham, Andrew Burnham of Ebbsfleet and Keith Newton of Richborough – are likely to take up the Pope's offer, since they (unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury) seem to have had a very clear idea that it was coming, and helped frame its terms. Most traditionalists, however, are as surprised as anyone else.
"When we heard on Monday night that there were going to be joint press conferences in London and Rome, we thought it was something to do with the Traditional Anglican Communion [
a small group of ex-Anglicans also seeking reconciliation with Rome]," says Stephen Parkinson. "We never dreamed that the news was going to be this big. It's Forward in Faith's annual conference on Friday and Saturday and I've just torn up the agenda, because the Holy Father has changed everything."
[I wonder how a communion that claims at least 400,000 adherents can be considered a small group - perhaps in relation to the 77 million total membership in the Anglican Communion.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/10/2009 22:33]