By all accounts it was a brilliant move. The Vatican suddenly announced that a personal ordinariate would be made available to traditionalist Anglicans in the Anglican Communion, offering them a place of refuge and catching off guard the Archbishop of Canterbury. For the first time there is a sense in which Rome is recognizing that you can be Anglican and Roman Catholic.
It was a shrewd move that angered liberal Catholics like Hans Kung and threw into doubt the long standing history of Roman Catholic Anglican unity talks known as ARCIC. The ball game has changed forever. ARCIC may well be dead. At least that’s the view of Rochester Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali. He may well be right.
The Church of England’s toleration of gay clerics, ordained women and the future prospect of women bishops and The Episcopal Church’s further and further drift from the historic Christian Faith while preferring to engage the culture by merging with it brought a sharp response from the Pontiff. Pope Benedict XVI moved quickly to stem the hemorrhaging of both Anglican churches. Rather than tolerating the excesses of the culture, he engaged it by condemning those things he saw as fatally flawed from a faith-based perspective.
Even as The Episcopal Church applauded pansexuality, the Pope condemned it. Even as the Pope condemned abortion, Episcopal leaders applauded it. Even as women moved into ecclesiastical places of power, the Pope disapproved of it. The rift was a mile wide and growing deeper by the day. A wall of ice had descended between the two church super powers.
As Rowan Williams continued to dither, the Pope heard the cry of Anglo-Catholics around the world and finally acted. Reflecting on this, Bishop John Broadhurst, leader of Forward in Faith UK, said he was increasingly “horrified” that the Church of England was prepared to accommodate those who believed in the ordination of women bishops, but rejected any notion that traditionalists cannot have a Third Province – a jurisdiction of their own and an interdependent life within the Church of England.
Instead the Church of England has offered and honored the requests to consecrate women dashing its own ecumenical hopes as well as those of traditionalists in her bosom.
“This situation must not be used to damage the Church of England but I do believe we have a valid claim on our own heritage in history. The doctrinal standard demanded by Rome is the New Catechism which most of us use any way,” concluded Broadhurst.
Will hoards of disenchanted Anglo-Catholics now rush to accept Rome’s offer? The answer seems to be no. Few in England will become Roman Catholic, said the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt. Rev. Tim Stevens, to a BBC presenter. Is it significant or over-hyped? It has been said that as many as half a million Anglicans and 50 of their bishops world-wide could take advantage of this invitation. But the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams is playing the situation down. Whatever the outcome of this unprecedented move it will only become apparent in the fullness of time.
The bigger and unasked question is this: What lays hence for Evangelicals within the Church of England and those abroad?
This is the question David W Virtue explores on Virtue Online:
