For your interest, I offer here links to two opinion pieces recently written regarding the establishment of the Anglican Ordinariates and the continuing official international dialogue between the Catholic and Anglican communions. The first is by a Catholic journalist in the UK, the second by an Episcopal author in the US. Of course, I assume that I do not need to add that the opinions expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily of the owner of this ‘ere blog.
And now, ARCIC III: isn’t it time to bring this ecumenical farce to an end?
The forthcoming discussions will be an expensive freebie that achieves nothing
It is hard to remember now, but it is true: for the better part of the last hundred years, Anglicans were at the forefront of the ecumenical movement for Christian unity, with the Episcopalians in the lead.
William Oddie’s article recalls to my mind the article that Cardinal Newman’s biographer, Fr. Ian Ker, published in *The Catholic Herald* issue of 21 May 1999. I cannot now find the whole article online, but I did find this excerpt:
‘This (i.e., the Church of England) is a Church which recently signed with its left hand the Porvoo Agreement accepting intercommunion with Lutheran Churches which do not claim to have retained the Apostolic succession, without which, on any Catholic understanding, there can be no valid orders and therefore no valid sacraments apart from baptism. With its right hand, the same Church’s representatives on the Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission (ARCIC) have now signed an agreed statement on the “gift of authority”, which has been hailed as a bombshell. I strongly suspect it is nothing of the sort.
The commission has already produced two agreed statements on authority, but that did not stop its co-chairman, Bishop Mark Santer, from supporting the ordination of women at the 1992 General Synod in spite of the very serious warnings from the Roman Catholic Church about the ecumenical implications. The same bishop who caused a stir not long ago by marrying the divorced wife of one of his clergy has now signed a statement which recognises “the primacy of the Bishop of Rome” as a “gift to be received by all the churches.” This primacy is not seen as merely honorific: no, the agreed statement has taken on board not just “indefectibility” but the dreaded Roman Catholic concept of “infallibility,” by means of which the Pope can fulfil his “duty to discern and make explicit… in certain circumstances” the “faith” of the Church.
But what would the Bishop of Birmingham say if “the universal primate” told him that he could not receive Communion because he was married to a divorcee? Would Bishop Harries of Oxford “receive” a papal condemnation of his speech in the House of Lords justifying “therapeutic cloning,” or would Archbishop Habgood have been ready to say amen to a papal condemnation of his advocacy of destructive experiments on human embryos?
[…] Anglicanism is very English in its pragmatism, its dislike of logic, its suspicion of absolute truths, its endless capacity for compromise… The Anglican Communion knows which envoys to send to Porvoo and which to Palazzola, the delightful Alban town where this statement received its final shape. My impression is that ARCIC is good at choosing sunny spots where the wine flows. No doubt there will be many more convivial ARCIC meetings.
Meanwhile those of us who know that the vast majority of Anglicans don’t know the Hail Mary, think that the Holy Souls must be the old dears in the parish, have never been to confession in their lives, will regretfully conclude that, impeccable as the Scriptural theology underlying this statement is, the fact is it is totally unreal.’
Some readers may find my review (from 1999) of Dr. Oddie’s book *The Roman Option* (1997) of interest:
http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-05-046-b