By Robin G. Jordan
How will the Anglican Church in America congregations and clergy that follow Archbishop John Hepworth and Bishop Louis Campese into the Roman Catholic Church feel if they discover that they have been misled? Will they feel betrayed? Will they make excuses for Hepworth and Campese, convincing themselves that Hepworth and Campese were misled like themselves?
The likelihood that the smaller ACA congregations will be granted personal quasi-parish status is slim as is the likelihood that their aging clergy will be reordained as Roman Catholic priests. A number of their clergy are not seminary trained. The Roman Catholic Church places a strong emphasis upon priestly formation.
In England the congregations and clergy that join the Our Lady of Walsingham Ordinariate may eventually attract more members of the Church of England. In the United States the situation is quite different. The ACA congregations and clergy are not likely to attract more people. A good number of the ACA congregations are in the declining stage in the life cycle of a church. Their clergy should have retired a long time ago or came out of retirement to serve them. Many continue to serve their church despite failing health and diminished energy because they know that it would close without them. The congregation would not find another priest. Whatever one may think of their doctrine, they must be commended for their devotion.
I do not believe that the prospects for such congregations are very good in a US Ordinariate. The kind of congregations that I suspect that the Roman Catholic Church would like to see join a US Ordinariate would be congregations like the handful of Anglican Use Roman Catholic parishes. The Roman Catholic Church is not particularly keen on the idea of caring for a group of geriatric Anglo-Catholics. She has enough problems of her own.
The Roman Catholic Church is confronted with absorbing and assimilating a group of congregations and clergy that are much more traditionalist than Roman Catholic parishes and priests. The celebration of the Mass that one finds in a typical ACA parish is not what one finds in a typical Roman Catholic parish. The liturgy comes from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the American Missal; the music comes from the 1940 Hymnal. The ceremonial is nineteenth century.
The likely future for the smaller ACA congregations is that they will either be consolidated into a single personal parish or they will be disbanded and their members expected to attend a local Roman Catholic parish not in the US Ordinariate. Attending Mass in a personal parish may require an hour or more drive both ways every Sunday. Daily Masses or Masses on feast days may be out of the question. Members of these congregations may have already tried the local Roman Catholic parish and found it not to their liking. The liturgy, the music, and the ceremonial were not what they are accustomed to.
The Roman Catholic Church will be implementing a new liturgy later this year. Roman Catholic parishes will start using the new Roman Catholic Mass in November. Some Roman Catholics may like the new liturgy; others may not. The new liturgy can be expected to influence the development of a new Anglican Use service book. The Book of Divine Worship, now out of print, is modeled upon the 1979 Book of Common Prayer with a Rite I and a Rite II. It is not modeled upon the 1928 Prayer Book and the American Missal. Its replacement, if a replacement is eventually authorized, cannot be expected to differ too greatly from the new Roman Catholic liturgy.
What “Anglican patrimony” the Roman Catholic Church will permit personal parishes to preserve, I suspect, will not be particularly Anglican. Over time these parishes will become indistinguishable from Roman Catholic parishes not in the Ordinariate. The Roman Catholic norm of a celibate priesthood will eventually prevail throughout the Personal Ordinariates worldwide. A Reformed confession of faith, a Reformed liturgy, a Reformed ordinal, two collections of Reformed homilies, a Reformed catechism, a Reformed set of canons, and a corpus of Reformed theological works, which form the principal legacy of the Anglican Church along with a married clergy and a synodical form of ecclesiastical governance, will not be saved from desuetude and oblivion in the Personal Ordinariates established under the provisions of Anglicanorum coetibus. What the Roman Catholic Church can be expected to pass on to future generations as the “Anglican Patrimony” will be its own reinterpretation of the Anglican tradition, not authentic historic Anglicanism.
It boggles the mind trying to imagine how the papal system can pretend to keep alive a tradition that rejects the primacy of the Pope along with papal infallibility and papal supremacy. It was the bankrupt ecumenism of the last century that would have accorded the Pope the title of “first among equals.” But with the latest papal adventurism in the form of Anglicanorum coetibus and the Personal Ordinariates, a number of Anglicans are giving serious thought to reviving a less honorific title for the Bishop of Rome.
It is difficult to see what purpose the latest round of Anglican-Roman Catholic talks serve other than to further the agenda of the Roman Catholic Church. How does one denomination sit down at the table for discussion with another denomination that is poaching its members? These talks create a false sense of normalcy when relations between the two denominations are more strained than they have ever been in recent years.
The Romeward Movement in the nineteenth century and ecumenism in the twentieth century worked to subvert the Protestant and Reformed character of the Anglican Church. Anglicanism’s future lies in the recovery of this character—that of a church that, while maintaining continuity with the pre-1549 Church where that Church preserved the primitive and apostolic faith, is also Protestant and Reformed. The defection of ostensibly Anglican congregations and clergy to Rome is a lesson in the consequences of faithlessness to Anglicanism’s true heritage. It is time that the Anglican Church insists that congregations and clergy that profess to be Anglican actually be what they profess and not use that profession as a blind behind which they conceal beliefs and practices that are inconsistent with the teaching of authentic historic Anglicanism, with the doctrine of the Articles, the Prayer Book, and the Ordinal.
3 comments:
Robin:
You said:
"It is time that the Anglican Church insists that congregations and clergy that profess to be Anglican actually be what they profess and not use that profession as a blind behind which they conceal beliefs and practices that are inconsistent with the teaching of authentic historic Anglicanism, with the doctrine of the Articles, the Prayer Book, and the Ordinal."
That means wide reading, focussed writing, accompanied by conviction and clarity of vision. On this, you are right. I think www.churchSociety.org has preserved this vision. As a rebuttal to this, however, this scribe does not see these issues as forthcoming with the ACNA leaders.
Am I wrong? If so, why? If not, why?
Regards.
Phil,
The Anglican Church in North America is basically a coalition of self-described Anglican groups that agree for the most part on what they are against but not on what they are for. In its Common Cause Partnership phase it put together a theological statement that is too obtuse where the historic Anglican formularies are concerned. It is also partisan in the position that it takes on bishops, asserting that they are essential to the church. Anglicans have historically been divided on this issue.
I have studied the constitutions and canons of a number of Anglican provinces and most of them affirm the formularies and then reserve the right to issue supplemental doctrinal statements and to authorize their own Prayer Book consistent in its teaching with the doctrine of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and any supplemental doctrinal statements. The Church of Uganda does not reserve the right to issue supplemental doctrinal statements but does reserve the right to authorize its own Prayer Book with the 1662 Prayer Book as its doctrinal standard. The Anglican Church of Kenya affirms the Prayer Book but not the Articles. From what I understand a Kenyan diocese may include an affirmation of the Articles in its constitution or canons.
The Anglican Church of Rwanda affirms the Thirty-Nine Articles but adds a peculiar qualification—something along the lines of “as they have been adapted from time to time.” The Rwandan canons adopt the doctrinal positions of the Council of Trent on a number of key issues as well as incorporate language, norms, and principles from the Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law. The Anglican Church of Rwanda’s foundational documents are the work of Kevin Donlan, a former Roman Catholic priest now with the AMiA. Donlan also was involved in the drafting of the ACNA constitution and canons.
The constitutions and canons I have studied do not align themselves with any of the three schools of thought on bishops in Anglicanism. Most of them contain a statement affirming the three-fold ministry of deacon, presbyter, and bishop and use language in their provisions on the ordination of ministers and reception of ministers from other denominations that all three schools of thought could accept.
The ACNA canons do not show that kind of sensitivity. They borrow language from the Rwandan canons and with that language Roman Catholic doctrine, norms, and principles. This I attribute to the AMiA representatives on the Governance Task Force that drafted the ACNA foundational documents. The two documents contain a number of provisions that clearly were intended to accommodate the AMiA, which had the largest number of congregations and clergy of the Common Cause Partners. For example, the minimum age requirement of an ACNA bishop is that of a Rwandan missionary bishop and of a Roman Catholic bishop.
(Continued from above)
At the Provincial Council meeting before the Bedford inaugural Provincial Assembly the ACNA leadership showed a tendency to shy away from doing anything that might divide the coalition. Martyn Mimms proposed some changes to the fundamental declarations in the ACNA constitution but Jack Iker and the other Anglo-Catholics objected to the changes. Only one minor alteration was approved. I do not foresee the Provincial Council or the College of Bishops issuing any doctrinal statements in the foreseeable future. They do not want to upset one of the coalition partners.
When I look at the theological makeup of the ACNA at its present stage of development, I cannot imagine its leadership adopting a stronger affirmation of the historic Anglican formularies and calling for greater conformity to their doctrine. The most that we can hope for is the formation of a non-geographic diocese or sub-provincial jurisdiction—I favor the latter—that upholds the teaching of the formularies, a church within a church. From my reading I gather that affinity networks, not territory-based judicatories, is how churches will be organized in the not too distant future. A growing number of churches are moving in that direction. Organizing the ACNA on a purely territorial basis would recreate the same conditions in the ACNA that prompted the formation of the ACNA.
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