Last Monday I was traveling to Tampa, Florida for a week long retreat with other Catholic priests who were once Anglican priests. In the airport I got an email with the news that the new Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus had been published. Suddenly the rest of the week’s program was decided. My brother priests and I spent time studying the document and discussing its implications.
The wider implications of Pope Benedict’s invitation to Anglicans to come into full communion are genuinely historic. It impacts discussions not only with Anglicans, but with all of the churches derived from the Protestant Reformation. It is a popular past time among traditionalist Catholics to throw dirt at ecumenism. Catholic triumphalists trumpet the truth of the Catholic faith and denigrate discussions with Protestants. They point out the false premises, the artificial camaraderie, and the fickleness of their ecumenical partners. The ecumenical movement is not without its faults, but it is also not without its accomplishments. Through the ecumenical movement Catholics and Protestants really have learned from one another. Over the last 40 years astounding progress has been made. Old prejudices have disappeared. Historic misunderstandings have evaporated. New formulas for old truths have been discovered and agreed.
Some commentators have reported the end of the old ecumenism. In one sense this is true. Through the new Apostolic Constitution, the Catholic Church is following up her warnings with action. For over a decade now the Vatican has had a consistent message to the Anglican Church, and the message can be summed up as, "Please don't do that. It puts yet another obstacle in the path of Christian unity." Time and again the Anglicans have gone ahead anyway. Each item on the progressive agenda has been another wound to the body. Now Rome has acted and with Anglicanorum coetibus, directed the ecumenical journey in a radical new direction. No doubt the old style ecumenical meetings will continue, but they will lack urgency. It is as if the Catholic Church has sent a butler with a bell into the hall where the pre prandial cocktail party was going on to announce that dinner is served. The drinks are over. Dinner time has begun. Are you coming in to dinner or not?
Ecumenism isn’t over. It has taken a new direction. To understand the wider implications of Anglicanorum coetibus one needs to look further than the shores of England and Europe. Most people have rightly focussed on the troubles within Anglicanism, and the new relationship between the Catholic and Anglican churches. However, we sometimes forget that the rest of Protestantism is struggling with the same conflicts that besiege Anglicanism. It is said that “where Anglicanism goes the rest of the Protestants soon follow." Here in the United States, where Anglicanism is just one of many Protestant groups, the Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists and Evangelicals are all battling over the same issues of modernist theology and relativist morality.
In England, the Anglican Ordinariate will benefit the small rump of Anglo Catholics who are still in the Church of England, but elsewhere in the world I believe it will eventually become a bridge into full communion with the historic Church for Protestants of many different backgrounds. In the United States there are large numbers of Evangelical Christians who are attracted to the historic liturgical churches. They hold to the historic faith, but they want to move away from the sectarian and often shallow worship and theology of the large Evangelical churches. They admire Catholic liturgy and spirituality, but they are repelled by the progressive political and moral agenda of the liturgical Protestant churches like the Lutherans and Episcopalians. They admire the Pope and much of Catholicism, but for most of them the step into the Catholic Church is still a step too far.
If the Anglican Ordinariate includes 'broad church Anglicans' as well as Anglo Catholics, then these other Protestants may also find a way to 'come home to Rome.' If this is the way the Ordinariate develops, then it will provide not only a bridge across the Tiber for Anglicans, but an Anglican bridge across the Tiber for many other Christians, and if this happens, then the harvest from the ecumenical discussions over the last forty years will be rich indeed.
Fr Dwight Longenecker is Chaplain to St Joseph's Catholic School in Greenville, South Carolina. He is a former Anglican priest, and the author of ten books on the Catholic faith. He blogs at Standing on My Head .
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