George Weigel has a fresh insight into the forthcoming Anglican accommodation within the Catholic Church, and he gives persuasive evidence of it. It also places the entire ecumenical picture - with the Anglicans, at least - in a realistic light, so different from the rosy kumbaya visions offered by the 'professional ecumenists'.
Catholicism and Anglicanism:
the end of an era
Oct. 21, 2009
The first wave of reactions to the October 20 Vatican announcement of a new arrangement for receiving into the Catholic Church groups of Anglican clergy and laity who would retain distinctive elements of their spiritual and liturgical heritage tended toward the critical: Rome's move, it was suggested, was a new obstacle to Anglican-Catholic dialogue, an act of ecclesiastical "poaching," and a retreat from the ecumenical commitments of the Second Vatican Council.
What the Vatican intended as an act of ecumenical hospitality, however, was also bit of theological shock-therapy: a moment of clarification in a situation that had begun to resemble an ecumenical Wonderland in which well-intentioned people taught themselves impossible things before breakfast.
Many of the practical details of the new arrangement remain unsettled, for the text of the Apostolic Constitution that Benedict XVI will issue, creating "personal ordinariates" by which Anglicans can enter into full communion with Rome under the spiritual guidance of Anglican clergy who will be ordained as Catholic priests, has not been completed.
Nonetheless, the announcement does mark the end of an era in Anglica-Catholic relations, which began with a pioneering ecumenical dialogue led by the Belgian Cardinal Desire Mercier and the British statesman Lord Halifax after World War I. That era reached its apogee at Vatican II in the mid-1960s, when corporate reunion between Canterbury and Rome seemed to many an achievable, short-term goal.
As both Anglicanism and Catholicism sought to find their way through the cultural whitewater of late modernity, however, the theological premise on which an era of good feelings had been based - that Anglicanism and Catholicism both affirmed the binding character of apostolic tradition, which in turn led to a common understanding of the priesthood and the sacraments - began to seem less a given than a hope.
The tensions were evident more than twenty years ago, in a historic exchange of letters among Pope John Paul II, Archbishop Robert Runcie of Canterbury, and Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, the veteran Dutch ecumenist then leading the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
The Pope and the cardinal asked Runcie to explain the reasoning that had led certain parts of the Anglican communion to ordain women to the ministerial priesthood. Runcie replied in largely sociological, rather than theological, terms, citing women's changing roles in business, culture, and politics.
By the end of the exchange, in 1986, a parting of the ways had been reached: the highest authorities of the Catholic Church believed that apostolic tradition, not misogyny, precluded ordination to
the priesthood, which Catholics understood in iconographic terms as a sacramental representation of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
[What is it about this concept that advocates of women priests do not understand? Or refuse to understand. God chose to incarnate the Son as a man, male, like Adam, because he was the new Adam for the new humanity!]
Archbishop Runcie and those whom he represented believed that contemporary human insights into gender roles trumped apostolic tradition and necessitated a development of both doctrine and practice. Rome could not accept that as a legitimate development of Christian self-understanding.
Catholic authorities also feared that
this approach to the authority of tradition would inevitably lead to an Anglican re-conception of the moral law on a host of issues, including the morality of homosexual acts. That, too, happened, fracturing the Anglican Communion in the process.
Now, Anglicans who have come to accept the Catholic view
that what numerous Anglican authorities understood as a legitimate development of doctrine was in fact an abandonment of the very idea of "doctrine" have been offered a path into full communion with the Catholic Church that honors the distinctiveness of their spiritual and liturgical traditions.
Which, in the end, may actually clarify things.
The theological gulf between Rome and Canterbury had become wider, not narrower, since Vatican II. An honest recognition of that fact might lead to a more fruitful, less fantasy-driven theological dialogue, as well as to new and intriguing historical explorations of just what the English Reformation entailed, back in the 16th century.
Surely, Benedict XVI had all that background in mind when, last August, Rowan Williams made his decision to 'settle' the intra-Anglican dispute over women and gay priests by proposing that both sides should simply co-exist along two tracks, to wit :
On the one hand there would be those who adhere to biblical tradition, share a common vision of Anglican teaching and practice, and feel themselves part of a larger fraternity with the other Churches and Christian communities.
On the other hand would be those who give priority to the decisions of their own community [i.e., support women- and homosexual priests) and view the Anglican Communion as a free federation of independent bodies, with simply a common cultural history behind them.
He was desperate principally to keep the ultra-liberal Episcopalian Church (the US arm of Anglicanism) from breaking away. And he proposed that each of the Anglican Communion's 44 provinces worldwide (the US Episcopal Church is one province) sign on to which side they wished to belong, although individual members could choose their own side. How on earth did he expect that to work out in practice?
At which point, Benedict XVI must have had the signal he needed to go ahead with devising the Apostolic Constitution to assist Anglicans who felt they could no longer stay within the Church of their baptism.
A quick summary of the above can be found in two posts in the CHURCH&VATICAN thread:
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=859...
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=859...
10/23/09
I started to post this item yesterday because it comes from the Wall Street Journal, and it was written by someone who had reported on the the immediate pre- and post-Conclave days for WSJ in April 2005.
But as I started to go through the article, so many factual errors came up - none of them insignificant - that I was appalled to realize how a prestigious newspaper like the WSJ (now the US daily with the largest circulation) could post such an article. I tried to get a background on Meichtry, but all I can get online so far is that he/she is a Dow-Jones reporter, Dow Jones being the financial agency that began the WSJ and owned it until NewsCorp acquired it last year.
I have decided to go ahead and post it - appropriately fisked -
as a prime example of the uninformed/misinformed reporting about the Church that takes place in the secular media, even at supposedly prestigious newspapers.
For the Vatican, new resolve
to expand the Catholic fold
By STACY MEICHTRY
Oct. 22, 2009
ROME -- Long regarded as a hard-liner on religious doctrine, Pope Benedict XVI also is emerging as the pontiff of interchurch, or ecumenical, relations.
The 82-year-old Pope's decision Tuesday
to amend Vatican laws [He's not - he's issuing an Apostolic Constitution to govern the special case of Anglicans converting to Catholicism; and anything in it will presumably be consistent with existing canon law] to make it easier for Anglicans to become Roman Catholic represents his most aggressive attempt to bring more Christians into the Catholic fold.
The Pope's outreach to rival churches has
spanned the conservative-liberal spectrum.
[Because he is not reaching out to others on the basis of their ideological persuasion but on the basis of the common belief in Christ as the Savior.]
He has bolstered dialogue with Lutherans and other mainline Protestants. He met with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople,
regarded by some as the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Churches.
[Not just by some: He is 'primus inter pares' among the Orthodox Patriarchs, by tradition and by consensus even today, and that is why his title is Ecumenical Patriarch, not just Patriarch.]
And he lifted an excommunication ban on the highly conservative Catholic splinter group Society of St. Pius X.
[On four bishops of the FSSPX, not on the group, because none in the congregation was ever excommunicated.]
Few expected Pope Benedict to reach out to other Christian churches aggressively when he was elected in April 2005.
[He pledged himself solemnly to the cause of Christian unity in his first homily the day after his election, as the writer notes in this article later! Did they think he was merely improvising? Or that he did not mean it? Here is what he said and how he said it:
With full awareness, therefore, at the beginning of his ministry in the Church of Rome which Peter bathed in his blood, Peter's current Successor takes on as his primary task the duty to work tirelessly to rebuild the full and visible unity of all Christ's followers.
This is his ambition, his impelling duty. He is aware that good intentions do not suffice for this. Concrete gestures that enter hearts and stir consciences are essential, inspiring in everyone that inner conversion that is the prerequisite for all ecumenical progress.
The new Pope Benedict wrote this homily in Latin a few hours after his election, to be delivered to his fellow cardinals the following morning at his first Mass with them as Pope. Thee is no greater earnest of how he views his task to advance the cause of Christian reunification with 'concrete gestures that enter hearts and stir consciences'.
Yet the rise of secularism among European Christians and the expansion of Islam on the Continent in recent decades have influenced thinking within Vatican corridors.
In addition, this Pope considers divisions among rival Christian churches as a threat to Roman Catholicism's credibility in the market of ideas and faiths, according to Vatican analysts and advisers to the Pope.
"Anyone who thought he wasn't serious about ecumenical dialogue was seriously mistaken," said the Rev. Joseph Fessio, one of Pope Benedict's former students whom he occasionally consults.
Yet some Christians don't view Pope Benedict's latest move as an ecumenical gesture, and they warn that it risks derailing decades of formal dialogue between the Vatican and Anglican leaders.
[Those are people who think of ecumenism as ecumenism for its own sake, to be pursued endlessly, not as the path towards actual Christian reunification, as it was and is meant to be!]
Much of Pope Benedict's reputation as a hard-liner stems from his days as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the late Pope John Paul II's chief enforcer of doctrine. Over two decades, the then-cardinal addressed controversial issues ranging from bioethics to birth control. While some other Christian churches began to ordain women, the Catholic Church resisted.
[Not a question of resistance at all! It is simply standing by its doctrine and practice of two millennia.]
Some of his most contentious positions addressed the question of how the Catholic Church relates to other faiths and Christian denominations.
In 2000, his office issued the document
Dominus Iesus, which outraged leaders
[Some leaders, the less thoughtful ones - not all!] of other religions and Christian churches by asserting
the Catholic Church was the only sure path to salvation*.
The document also said that divisions among Christian churches were
undercutting the mission of Roman Catholicism as the universal church.
[Oh, the many ways in which Dominus Iesus is continually being misrepresented by those who have apparently not read it at all!]
But that message was obscured by the document's
confrontational tone, Vatican analysts say.
[Confrontational? Only one who has not read the document will say that. Or demagogues from the other Christian confessions who ignore that their 'churches' are all offshoots of the Catholic Church. How can ever-smaller twigs - that will never become tree trunks, to extend a metaphor - compare themselves to the original 'giant sequoia' out of which they came?
Anyone who bothers to look at DI, will see that as early as the third paragraph, the declaration itself says it is using "expository language...to set forth again the doctrine of the Catholic faith" regarding the uniqueness and universally saving mystery of Jesus Christ and the Church.
And of course, it states firmly what Catholics believe about the Church, and have always believed, from the time of the Apostles. To state firmly what one believes is not confrontational.
Because it was a straightforward exposition of a doctrine of faith, serious Protestant pastors and theologians were not outraged, unlike those who reacted like Pavlov's dogs, based on a mere reading of the misleading reduction with which the professional media - including the abovementioned 'Vatican analysts' [meaning people who analyze Vatican affairs', not 'analysts from the Vatican'] - reported DI and commented on it.]
For decades, Catholic officials have engaged in talks with other Christian leaders
with the aim of reaching compromises on doctrine.
[NO, A THOUSAND TIMES NO! As Mons. Fellay recently said, "We are not looking for compromises" - for the simple reason that there can be no compromise on Catholic doctrine. There has never been, since the time of the Apostles.]
At the same time, Pope Benedict has said each church needs to defend its own doctrine, and rival Christian churches need to accept each others' differences.
[Well, DUH!]
Pope Benedict signaled his intentions on the Vatican's ecumenical approach early in his pontificate. In one of his first Masses as pope, the pontiff said he planned to make ecumenical dialogue his "primary task."
He also has reached out to other religions, meeting with Muslim leaders in Turkey and paying a visit to the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Israel.
[COLORE][It's journalistic laziness (i.e., not having to look through the record) to reduce the Pope's outreach to other religions to two events which are not even the most emblematic!]
There still are few details on the new Apostolic Constitution that
amends church laws to attract Anglicans.
[No, it will not amend any Church laws. It will set forth new regulations based on existing canon law - Cardinal Levada said the two-week publication delay is to enable all the canon law involved to be thoroughly checked out.]
The new laws
[more correctly, the Apostolic Constitution (specifically for returning Anglicans), which canon law allows a Pope to promulgate within the limits of canon law itself], will create church structures, called personal ordinariates, that will operate within local Catholic dioceses and be administered by former Anglican clergy who convert to Catholicism.
The ordinariates will allow Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Pope while continuing to practice a large part of their traditional liturgy, according to Vatican officials. The new structures also will recognize the ordinations of Anglican priests, including those who are married.
But
the Vatican hasn't released the text of the new regulations that will govern how the ordinariates will function, leaving
many Anglicans to question whether the Pope is genuinely carving out a space for Anglicanism within the Catholic Church.
[Was this writer paying attention to Cardinal Levada's news conference at all? Or did he/she at least read the news reports on it? The Apostolic Constitution will be published in two weeks. At that time, ask the questions. And that last assumption, supposedly in the name of Anglicans, is just mindless!]
Some Anglican bishops have expressed concern over whether the proposed system will actually allow those who convert to keep their Anglican practices.
[I do not think this is based on an actual bishop's concern. It's probably the writer's own assumption - apparently ignoring the fact that this has already worked out in practice in certain parishes in the United States whose activity is well documented in the religious media.]
One point of concern is that the Vatican has said that married former Anglican priests will never be able to become a Catholic bishop.
[And this, too, shows ignorance or forgetfulness or simply not reading what was reported of Cardinal Levada's news conference. Because it is established tradition in the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches - one that has never been questioned, and one that any Anglican priest would have learned in the seminary. So how can it be a point of concern for them?
The Primate of TAC, Bishop Hepworth, is twice divorced and remarried, yet he led the lobbying with Rome for a mass crossover of his congregation. His statement welcoming the Pope's decision was a model of Christian gratitude and humility. If his interest was to remain a bishop, rather than a sincere conviction that it was time for him to return to the faith of his baptism, and to represent the sentiments of his vast congregation, would he have done that?]
The Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, a married Anglican cleric who is Bishop of Rochester, England, said the Vatican's announcement showed a "generosity of spirit."
But he questioned whether the new system would uphold Anglican traditions in the training of new priests. "Before some fundamental issues are clarified, it is difficult to respond further to what the Vatican is offering."
*I must add something more about Dominus Iesus, since I have an opening:
The simplistic, habitual and consensual charge that DI claims the Church is the only way to salvation ignores the qualifications that the document takes pains to spell out, e.g.,
... these separated Churches and communities as such, though we believe they suffer from defects, have by no means been deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation.
For the spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church”.
It continues that for those who are not formally and visibly members of the Church,
...Salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relationship to the Church, does not make them formally part of the Church, but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation.
This grace comes from Christ; it is the result of his sacrifice and is communicated by the Holy Spirit”; it has a relationship with the Church, which “according to the plan of the Father, has her origin in the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit”.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/10/2009 22:43]