Posts tagged Revision Committee
Not a Last Resort
Feb 19th
Fr. Chadwick has already commented on Damian Thompson’s current editorial in The Catholic Herald vis-à-vis the potentially humble beginnings of the future English personal ordinariate. But another bit of Thompson’s piece stood out to me as it reiterates a point that we have made several times before on The Anglo-Catholic.
The General Synod will not outline its legislation for women bishops until its July meeting. So far as I can work out, there is a slim chance that the Synod may give traditionalists limited oversight by bishops who do not ordain women. This would be no more than a fig leaf, and it is probably not going to be offered anyway, so how can Forward in Faith, the main Anglo-Catholic body, justify delaying its official response to Anglicanorum coetibus until the Synod is over? The Apostolic Constitution, remember, was drawn up following requests from traditionalist Anglican bishops for pastoral oversight; it was not intended as a last resort.
I get the distinct impression that there are not a small number of folks in FiF UK who are yet hoping for some statutory accommodation to protect faithful Anglo-Catholic parishes from the oversight of future women bishops, and for whom Anglicanorum Coetibus represents only a fallback position. Fr. Geoffrey Kirk put it this way at the 2009 National Assembly of Forward in Faith UK (and I quote his words as being illustrative of a certain attitude that almost certainly isn’t his own):
I would be a rich man if I had a twenty pound note for every time in the last five years a member of Forward in Faith has asked me the leading question: “We know what the plan is,” they would say, “to secure within the Church of England a viable, ecclesiologically-coherent future for traditional Anglican Catholics. But if that’s Plan A, what’s Plan B?” Well, now you know!
But I would commend to our brethren in FiF UK these words of the Bishop of Richborough at that same assembly:
We should not view this possibility as a last resort if everything goes wrong. I suppose I want to disagree again with Fr. Kirk about the Plan A and the Plan B. I think this probably is Plan A. We should not consider this imaginative offer of full communion with the Holy See simply because we’ve got nowhere else to go. Such an attitude will not endear us to the Conference of Bishops of England and Wales or the wider Catholic community. Cardinal Levada made it very clear in his press statement that those who request such a personal ordinariate — and it will have to be asked for — must share the Catholic Faith as it’s expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and also accept the ministry of the Bishop of Rome as something Christ willed for His Church. These are important things to consider and should not be taken lightly.
I am forced to agree with Mr. Thompson. Even were the General Synod to offer some provision for limited episcopal oversight for faithful Anglicans, it would indeed be a fig leaf — or rather an illusion. How exactly would this work anyway? Would traditional Anglo-Catholics see themselves as being in communion with some of the Church’s bishops and not others? Would they be out of communion with a bishop today and tomorrow restore communion with the particular see when the incumbent happened to be male? …but perhaps not if he were consecrated by a woman bishop? How many female episcopal consecrators will be deemed invalidate the sacrament of Holy Orders? One? …two? …or must all three be lady bishops? What happens when the Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman? What then? And honestly, even on the outside chance that Synod provides more than a code of practice, how long would it be before the Church of England reneged on that?
This must be a decision of conscience rather than convenience. And it is not going to be easy. Many of us in the Traditional Anglican Communion have already had to make the same sorts of sacrifices that you will likely have to make. It was tough, but we managed… and now we’re the better for it. We know you all can do it too, and we’re praying for you!
No Alternative Oversight for Faithful Anglicans
Feb 7th
Update: Here is the audio. Evidently, the statement leaked by Ms. Gledhill was delivered on Monday word-for-word.
Ruth Gledhill has leaked the statement the Bishop of Manchester is set to deliver to the Church of England’s General Synod on Monday concerning women in the episcopate. In a nutshell, the Revision Committee’s recommendation will be that no statutory alternative oversight be provided for congregations unable to accept women bishops. At best, it seems that any accommodation would be totally at the discretion of the diocesan bishop.
There are some in FiF UK that insist that, before they go over to Rome, this process must be allowed to play out, that perhaps there is yet a future for faithful Anglo-Catholics in the Established Church. Personally, I fail to see how the decisions of the Church of England General Synod enter into the question at all: either Anglicanorum Coetibus is a movement of the Holy Ghost or it is not. Either we ought to be in communion with the Successor of St. Peter or not. But were one to take a less spiritual, more pragmatic approach to things, honestly, does ANYONE really think this is going to end with Catholic Anglicans being able to remain in the Church of England in good conscience?
10. Where have we got to? It was only at our tenth meeting on 26 November that the Revision Committee completed the first phase of its work, namely considering whether to substitute a significantly different approach for the one reflected in the initial draft of the Measure. What we had done in our earlier meetings was to adopt a ‘traffic light’ system of red and amber.
11. Having heard representations in favour of creating additional dioceses the Committee decided before the summer to give the idea the red light. But proposals for a recognised society, some sort of transfer or vesting, or for adopting the simplest possible legislative approach all got initial amber lights, that is to say, we agreed to consider them further.
12. We then did some serious work on these models, particularly to tease out the pros and cons of the society model and to understand exactly what it might mean in terms of who exercised what jurisdiction and on whose authority. After much discussion we came to the point of decision on 8 October. The Revision Committee voted by a clear majority to reject the society option but, by a similarly clear majority to go for the transfer or vesting route. This meant that, in relation to petitioning parishes, certain functions – though the Committee had not agreed which – would be exercised by bishops by virtue of the Measure rather than by way of delegation from the diocesan bishop.
13. We were then confronted with a dilemma over what if anything to say about such a significant decision. We had confirmed at the outset of this exercise that we would not offer a running commentary on progress. Nevertheless, we have no sanctions to enforce confidentiality. With 19 members we are a big Group and in addition there are usually several other Synod members present at our discussions. We were also conscious that people would be attending subsequent meetings and would need to know the changed context in which they were presenting their proposals.
14. So, it was clear that news of what we had decided would get out, not necessarily accurately. After discussion there was agreement across the Revision Committee that the least bad option was to put out a short factual press release.
15. Even with the benefit of hindsight I’m not sure that we could have done differently. But it did, in the event, create difficulty for us and necessitate a further statement when, on 13 November, further work resulted in all the specific proposals for the vesting of particular functions being defeated. The Revision Committee was simply unable to identify a basis for specifying particular functions for vesting which could command sufficient support both from those in favour of the ordination of women as bishops and those unable to support that development.
16. This meant that after more than six months work we had rejected all the options which would have involved conferring some measure of jurisdiction on someone other than the diocesan bishop. The legislation that the Revision Committee sends back to the Synod will, therefore, be on the basis that any arrangements that are made for parishes with conscientious difficulties about women’s ordination will be by way of delegation from the diocesan bishops. That much is already clear.
Read the entire statement below.
Archbishop Says Pope’s Offer Is Not a Solution
Dec 23rd
Anna Arco has this story in The Catholic Herald. Comments in red.
Archbishop: Pope’s offer is not a solution
By Anna Arco
18 December 2009
Dr Williams delivers a homily at an ecumenical vespers service during a stay in Rome last month when he also met Pope Benedict XVI (AP Photo)
The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the Pope’s new Anglican provision is not a “solution” for Anglo-Catholics.
That’s funny… It seems to work for the TAC. And why is the Catholic Church in England and Wales preparing to receive perhaps 200 FiF UK parishes?
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph Dr Rowan Williams criticised the idea that English Catholicism is about to experience a “second spring” and said that some Anglo-Catholics would think the theology behind the Pope’s offer is “eccentric”.
Really, Your Grace? More theologically eccentric than claiming that the sacrament of Holy Orders is a “second order” issue?
He also said that he thought the release of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus would have an impact on the committee working on a provision within the Church of England for those Anglicans who cannot in good conscience accept a woman bishop, but argued that a number of Anglo-Catholics might have good reasons for staying in the Church of England.
Arguably, the release of Anglicanorum Coetibus has already had an effect on the Revision Committee!
Dr Williams said: “I would guess that the papal announcement had some impact on the way some people thought and voted on the committee.
“But actually I don’t think it is a solution. A great many Anglo-Catholics have good reason for not being Roman Catholics. They don’t believe the Pope is infallible. And that’s why they’re still pressing for a solution in Anglican terms, rather than what many of them see as a theologically rather eccentric option on the Roman side.”
Oh yes, the Anglican solution to the problem isn’t the least bit eccentric, is it? “Flying bishops” to come to the rescue of the few orthodox faithful trapped in the dioceses of a Church which has abandoned Catholic Faith and Order? Perfectly legitimate that.
Anyway, the supposed eccentricity stems from the possibility that the ordinary of a Anglican P.O. might be a simple priest, thus the Catholic ecclesial model of bishop-clergy-laity would be upset. While the first generation of ordinaries might be former Anglican bishops serving as presbyters, I suspect that future ordinaries will be Catholic bishops.
British Catholicism, he said, had “a kind of resurgent – no – recurrent cycle of the ’second spring’, in Cardinal Newman’s imagery, and in the wave of distinguished converts in the inter-war years. Evelyn Waugh and so on.
“There was just a hint of it when Cardinal Hume uncharacteristically talked about the re-conversion of England – and I think he regretted that actually. And a few people in the last round,” he said.
What a silly notion! England certainly isn’t in any need of reconversion.
“It’s a pattern, the sense that the Reformation wounds are going to be healed in favour of Rome. And it just keeps coming back – I think this has been the occasion for another little bit of that. It’s bits of the repertoire.”
Anglicanorum Coetibus provides a means to heal the wounds of the Reformation in favor of the Catholic Faith and unity of the Church, while, at the same time, recognizing the significant liturgical, spiritual, and pastoral patrimony born of the English Reformation. Dismissing the Holy Father’s invitation in the Apostolic Constitution as “bits of the repertoire” is an insult to the mandate of the Gospel. This is NOT about winners and losers!
While Dr Williams refused to say what he had discussed with the Pope during his visit to Rome in mid-November, he suggested that there had been a shift in the understanding of papal authority since the death of Pope John Paul II.
After the formal introductions, exchange of gifts, &c., the Archbishop had perhaps five minutes to speak with the Pope. Yes, there has been a shift, the seemingly interminable “dialogue” of the JPII years is at least over. After pleading with the Anglican Communion to step back from the brink, the Holy Father has responded decisively to the pleas of Anglo-Catholics. Papal authority has, at long last, come to the rescue of Catholic-minded Anglicans. Thanks be to God!
He said: “Nothing entirely new about that of course. At the end of John Paul II’s pontificate you have that discussion of how papal authority is meant to be understood, how it might be received by others. I think that’s treading water at the moment. I’d like to see that revived and that’s part of what I was nudging at in Rome.”
If presuming to correct the Pope (at his own university) on the theology of women’s ordination and the divine constitution of the Church is a “nudge,” I’d hate to see +Rowan’s idea of a shove.
When Dr Williams was asked about the October press conference at which he and Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster announced the publication of the papal decree for disaffected Anglicans wishing to be in full communion with Rome, he said the conference was “not ideal”.
No, I imagine not.
“Everyone on the platform was a bit uncomfortable,” he said. “I know the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the whole doesn’t go in for much consultation – we were just on the receiving end of that”.
No consultation? How about over thirty years of ARCIC? And despite the Archbishop’s protestations, he knew that this was coming for quite some time. Perhaps, like so many other uncomfortable truths, +Rowan hoped it would just go away.
Archbishop Nichols and Dr Williams announced the publication of Anglicanorum coetibus together to signal the unity between the Church of England and the Catholic Church. At the press conference it emerged that Dr Williams had been told about the Vatican document which offered new structures for Anglicans within the Catholic Church, at a late stage.
At the time, both men were keen to stress that the papal decree would not damage ecumenical relations. During the press conference Dr Williams rejected the suggestion that he saw the apostolic constitution “as an act of aggression or a vote of no confidence precisely because the routine relationships that we enjoy as churches continue”.
He has continued to insist, as have prominent Catholics involved in the ecumenical movement, that the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) is not dead as a result of Anglicanorum coetibus. He said that the third round of ARCIC talks have been set for next year in Rome, which he described as a “small miracle”.
He said: “I think reports of the death of ARCIC have been much exaggerated. There are a lot of Roman Catholics who want a chance to talk. They need an ecumenical forum to do that.”
The talking of the professional ecumenists will continue, no doubt; but the Holy Father has moved beyond ARCIC. The progressives can have their talk: the Pope acts!
Last month Dr Williams addressed a symposium of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity on November 19. In his speech he discussed ecclesiology and focused on questions of authority, primacy and the universal versus the local Church.
Dr Williams’s comments regarding the “eccentric” theology of Anglicanorum coetibus were criticised in the Catholic blogosphere, but the Anglo-Catholic blogger Fr John Hunwicke SSC defended the Archbishop of Canterbury.
He said: “The ecclesiology of Anglicanorum coetibus does diverge from the norms to which we are accustomed and which he himself has lucidly expounded: that a ‘local church’ is not a denomination or a province but bishop-and-presbytery-and-diaconate-and laos (laity).
“Perhaps his words indicate that he is going to make one last herculean effort to secure just such an uneccentric provision for us from General Synod.”
I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Letter of Parish Priest of St. John the Baptist, Sevenoaks
Nov 25th
Fr. Ivan D. Aquilina, SSC, parish priest of the Anglo-Catholic church of St. John the Baptist, Sevenoaks, has written to his congregation regarding recent events.
A letter to all members of the Congregation of St John the Baptist in Sevenoaks.
18th November 2009
My dear brothers and sisters,
So many different things have been thrown about on the media in these last few weeks regarding Anglo-Catholics. This media speculation was mostly inaccurate and also caused deep confusion. It has created a wind that will make the dust take longer to settle. I write to put in context and in order the events that have happened so that you can have, hopefully, a clearer picture of what is going on.
The background
For many years, it was our rightful delight to claim that the Church of England (CofE) is a broad Church that could hold together people of different Christian traditions and disciplines. We had different ways of doing good things but at the end of the day we all came together as members in full communion with the same Church. That broadness was being undermined since the late seventies. The trigger to this was the admission of women to Holy Orders. Many in the Church of England rightly questioned the ability of the CofE to do this without making reference to what other Christians in the world were saying. This is a point that the Archbishop of Canterbury emphasised in a letter he wrote to the Anglican Communion in July 2009. (http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2502).
Some members of the CofE decided to bring about some fundamental changes. For those who have not studied theology these seem trivial, but indeed are not. These matters go to the heart of what it means to be the Church faithful to Christ. The ordination of women to the priesthood and now to the episcopacy are part of a wider tendency to be led by public opinion rather then by the Gospel. For us Christians, Christ is the heart of our being, our minds are conformed to his and his Gospel is our law. Just look at the way the Gospel book and its proclamation is done at St John’s and you will see how central this is.
More >
+Ebbsfleet on Revision Committee Decision
Nov 17th
It’s time to go with Plan A++.
I think we have to stand back from the conflict a little and remain in the desert of prayer. Anglicanorum coetibus (the Pope’s offer) is either a gracious gift from God, whereby Catholic unity is possible for those Anglo-catholics who have longed and prayed for unity with the Holy See or it is a distraction from the task of bringing the whole of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion safely into the ambit of Catholic Faith and Order.
If this second possibility is ruled out by the Church of England’s own actions – and that seems to be an ever stronger interpretation – then we need to accept the Holy Father’s offer, not as Plan B but as Plan A++. But, if we accept the offer, we need to be careful not to damage our brothers and sisters in Christ in the Church of England and the mission of Reformed Christians in this country – a mission which God also enables and inspires. And we must make the journey in humble faith and trust. + Andrew
More Reaction to the Revision Committee’s Decision
Nov 17th
Fr. Edward Tomlinson, SSC reacts to the “shameful kick in the teeth” from the General Synod’s Revision Committee on women in the episcopate, noting the irony of those in the Church of England who now decry the horrors of papal infallibility.
And in the midst of all this confusion, doubt and fear I am also having to endure a tirade of people warning me about the horrors of Rome! (The only people seeking to offer me sanctuary and the fullness of Catholic truth.) I would not mind if these warnings were given in a reasonable manner to incite healthy debate. But they have come from many sources and are as illogical as they are poisonous! It seems anti-Catholic rhetoric runs deep in the English psyche and the successor of Peter is considered fair target for bigoted vitriol.
The chief moan, rather predictably, centres on papal infallibility. The belief that the Pope, when speaking to the whole church solemnly concerning a matter of faith or morals and under guidance of the Holy Spirit, is preserved from the possibility of error. In truth infallible teaching is almost never proclaimed, the last time was over 50 years ago when the Pope gave credence to the doctrine of the Assumption. It also only happens with teaching that fits the divine revelation and has the backing of Christian tradition. His infallibility is certainly never used to usher in innovation and trendy new ideas.
And that is where I find the irony! Those bashing the pope for his ability to speak infallibly are happy to accept that same gift of infallibility vested in General Synod- a confused and unqualified bunch of volunteers given free reign to decide what the Church of England believes! For make no mistake, by refusing traditionalists space in which to thrive, the revision committee has made infallible the innovation of women priests and bishops. No longer is the Catholic theology of priesthood allowed in our national church. And if you don’t like it- the message is simple- get out or live as soiled goods in the margins.
“A Great Piece of Wickedness”
Nov 16th
The Telegraph (UK) reports that the Revision Committee of the Church of England’s General Synod has failed to achieve a compromise which would have safeguarded faithful Anglican parishes from future women bishops.
Anglo catholics and evangelicals had hoped the church would appoint dedicated male bishops to oversee them. But yesterday the Church’s committee tasked with looking at the proposal failed to back the idea.
The move is likely to spark an exodus of clergy who have warned previously that they would leave the Church if they were not given safeguards to protect their beliefs.
Fr. David Houlding, a member of the Archbishops’ council and a leading traditionalist, notes that crossing the Tiber may be the only alternative.
This forces people out of the Church who otherwise would have stayed. We didn’t want to go to Rome, but now have been left with no choice.
But this is not just about people leaving, but about the destruction of the character and identity of the Church.
Of course, the character and identity of the Church of England was effectively destroyed seventeen years ago when the General Synod voted to permit the ordination of women priests! The decision to promote women to the episcopate is merely the logical outcome — and arguably the only equitable result — of this fateful departure from Apostolic order.
And while it is promising that many “traditionalists” now look to Rome for the preservation of their Anglican identity and catholic order, they should not simply default to this position because of (yet another) abominable deformation in the Church of England. Much soul-searching is yet required. Is the office of the Successor of St. Peter part of the divine constitution of the Church and intended by God as the focus of Christian unity? Or is the Holy Father’s offer in Anglicanorum Coetibus merely a the lesser of two evils?
The Church of England’s official press release is also online.
