An Open Letter to the Bishops of the Anglican Church

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An Open Letter to the Bishops of the Anglican Church

Dear Right Reverend and Most Reverend Bishops of the Anglican Communion:

At the Lambeth Conference of 1908, your brothers of a saner age offered an unequivocal condemnation of the evils of contraception, abortion, and other degrading immoralities. One century later, in marked contrast, one quarter of the churches of the Anglican Communion are boycotting the Lambeth Conference because of homosexual activism in your ranks, capitulation to every form of political correctness, declining numbers, and the abysmal state of Anglican discipline throughout your church. This contradictory situation is entirely of your own making—it is not the work of the Holy Spirit—and there is really only one proper response that you could make to this desperate situation; namely, repentance and a return to true and full communion with the Church from which you were divorced by your founder.

With all due respect for persons and motives, the historical record of Anglicanism’s doctrinal surrender has clearly prepared the way for the problems you are now having, problems which get increasingly worse as time goes on. The Anglican Church was created by an act of rupture of unity from the Church that Christ founded and its apostolic succession in 1534. It capitulated on the fundamental question of divorce and re-marriage in 1536; presided over thousands of unconscionable martyrdoms between 1534-1729; broke the centuries-old Christian consensus on contraception in 1931; took the unprecedented step of ordaining women priests beginning in 1944; caved in on abortion in 1967; allowed women’s episcopal ordination in 1989; and endorsed openly gay clergy in 2003.

And to be blunt about it, just last week in London, two Anglican priests were “married” by a third Anglican priest in a public ceremony at the threshold of your conference—to make an obvious statement—and not a one of them has been called to account for his sin. How can this church be called a “communion” with anything other than the spirit of the age—any age? My purpose in listing these anomalies is simply to make the point that it’s time to stop playing church and start getting back to church.

The present state of decline leaves little hope of your church’s survival as a recognized body of Christian believers. A significant portion of your own bishops are so fed up with the betrayal of both doctrine and discipline that they are having a parallel conference in Jerusalem as you meet in the staid halls of Lambeth. This fissure will leave the Anglican Communion permanently damaged and demoralized. Not only that, but the contrast between the precipitous decline of the Anglican Church and the vibrancy of the Roman Catholic Church is nothing short of astounding. While Pope Benedict is in Sydney at World Youth Day evangelizing the future—Anglicans are wondering whether they have a future.

As you gather for your 14th Lambeth Conference I ask you to honestly face the truth of the appalling mess that your church is in and address it like true men and women of Christ, unafraid to confront the moral decay and doctrinal disorder in your ranks. The Anglican ship is sinking, not because God has abandoned you, but because almost five hundred years ago King Henry VIII cut you adrift in a turbulent sea of confusion, called human respect. We, as Roman Catholics, stand on the Rock of Peter and would welcome you generously back into the hold of his ship, assured that your homecoming would immensely strengthen the Body of Christ for the work of evangelizing the world. In the United States there are already five Anglican Rite parishes so a precedent already exists for receiving Anglicans back into true and full communion with the one Church of Christ! Undoubtedly, the Roman Church has enough life preservers for all our separated brethren when you are finally unable to hold off the onslaught of the winds and the sea.

Sincerely Yours in Christ,

Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer
President, Human Life International
…

Wow, I love how he just tells it like it is. How refreshing!

(this letter is on the HLI website)
 
As former Episcopalians disgusted with the rampant moral relativism in the ranks of the Anglican Communion, our whole family left that denomination. My husband and I were received into the Catholic Church two years ago. Praise God!
 
A superb letter…but one must also remember that by its 1550 Ordinal, Anglicanism lost Holy orders and in 1559, with the Acts of Supremacy and Unifoirmity lost both the communion of the Pope and five of the seven sacraments.

At the date which preceeded the passage of the Acts, the last Catholic Archbishop of York, warned that by deserting peter, we risk shipwreck of Faith. prophetic words indeed.
 
In regard to:
Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer's letter:
The Anglican Church… presided over thousands of unconscionable martyrdoms between 1534-1729
Click to expand...
  1. The Church played hardly any part in the persecution of Catholics, except when James VI and** I** tried to impose “prelacy” on Scotland. (The Scots, being Presbyterian, objected.) Archbishop Spottiswoode played a part in the trial of (St.) John Ogilvy, S.J.
South of the Border, in England, the involvement of the Church was minimal.
  1. The first martyrdoms were on May 4 1535 - the last of those executed was (St.) Oliver Plunkett, Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, in 1681. The last death, IIRC, of anyone of those who are reckoned as martyrs, was one of the Irish Martyrs, was that of a priest in prison in 1692.
  2. “Thousands” is a gross exaggeration - it is utterly untrue. With some massaging, it is possible to inflate the figures to about a thousand who are known to have a claim to be called martyrs inthe strict sense. The scale of the number of martyrs - not executions - is indicated by the number of causes for canonisation; not all Catholics executed were executed for crimes they had not committed, for some were executed for treasons of which they were guilty, which is why they have never been regarded as martyrs.
The figures are as follows - there are:
  • 357 English & Welsh Martyrs
  • 257 Irish
  • 1 Scottish (George Douglas was a Scot by birth, but his cause was presented as one of the E & W causes)
  • 243 E & W Dilati: IOW, those whose cause has been “deferred”; in their case, for lack of evidence of the fact of martyrdom
    That comes to 858 martyrs, in three kingdoms, from 1535 to 1692 (or at the latest 1702). That is 167 years at the outside - hardly the bloodbath of Catholic mythology. Mary I of England, by contrast, put to death about 287 Protestants in the three years 1555 to 1558, which is 95-&-a-bit per annum. If Catholics had killed at that rate, the figure of 858 would been reached in nine years.
157 years to kill 858 people is not much of a rate for a persecutor; especially when it is remembered that some periods were far worse for Catholics than others: In 1588 alone, the year of the Armada, 30 of the 357 E & W martyrs were put to death. 1678-81, the period of the Oates Plot, was another difficult time; as was that just after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. But most of the time, Catholics had to contend with far less spectacular problems - harsh laws (there was no lack of anti-Catholic legislation) are only as harsh as they are allowed to be. The notion that Catholics suffered unremittingly brutal persecution is as inaccurate as the similar idea about the Church’s life until the time of Constantine I.

Figures cannot quantify suffering, nor are they likely to be exhaustive; but they do give some idea of the scale of frequency of the martyrdoms. It is very difficult to make statements about “the Penal Times” that are true of all parts of (what became known as) the United Kingdom, & true for the whole period of the “PT”.

As for the letter as a whole - the tone is too combative; & unfortunately the pot is calling the kettle black: A Catholic cannot credibly rebuke Anglicans for the evils among them, when those very evils are not all absent from among us. 😦
 
Father,

Could you please post here copies of the letters I am sure you must have written to the “Catholic” members of the US Congress and Senate about their pro-abortion votes on abortion funding and pro-abortion judges?

How about the letters you wrote to Cardinal Law and all the other mitre wearing criminal aiders and abetters in the RCC regarding child abuse?

Reprints will be fine.

Before you cast an angry stone at Anglicans, you may want to clean up that glass house known as Roman Catholicism.

There are hundreds of thousands of Anglicans who have left the Anglican Communion, and who would like to be united with Rome, but WILL NOT be absorbed by your church.

If absorption is the only option, Christian unity will be a long, long time coming.
 
piperspop said:
Father,

Could you please post here copies of the letters I am sure you must have written to the “Catholic” members of the US Congress and Senate about their pro-abortion votes on abortion funding and pro-abortion judges?

.
Click to expand...
Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer to Congresswoman Nancy Pelossi: 'Thank you for clarifying for all U.S. Catholics the meaning of the word ‘apostasy’
6/28/2004 - 6:00 AM PST

ent1
http://www.catholic.org/ads/adlog.p...capping=0&cb=f85081cce42d987df35a31b8effce847

By Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer - www.hli.org
Dear Congresswoman Pelosi,

Thank you for clarifying for all U.S. Catholics the meaning of the word “apostasy.” Your May 10 letter to Cardinal McCarrick qualifies for what the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines as the “total repudiation of the Christian faith” (§2089). That, by the way, is a document you may wish to consult before writing another letter to a prince of Christ’s Church.

Not only did your letter manifest an utterly infantile understanding of the Catholic Faith-the Blessed Sacrament is properly called the Eucharist, not the “sacrament of holy communion,” please-it was intellectually dishonest in the extreme. Your lip service paid to the teaching office of the bishops while knifing their authority in the back is a treachery that deserves the scathing contempt of every honest person, Catholic or otherwise.

You have lost your faith. Just admit it. One either accepts the hierarchy of truths and the hierarchy of authority, or she doesn’t. You obviously don’t. In such case by continuing to call yourself Catholic you are gambling with the most precious of all birthrights, your own soul; and it’s yours to lose. I can understand that it is not politically correct to care about your immortal soul-prescription drug benefits are more popular in Washington-but at least have the decency not to make the souls of others “twice as fit for hell” as you. Have you forgotten about the millstone? The Lord delivered that image to another group of sophisticated public officials who scandalized the weak in faith.

All those who dare call themselves Catholic while shamelessly advocating the death of Christ’s “least brethren” will not have the Supreme Court to appeal to on the Day of Judgment. There is a Supreme Judge that you should be more concerned about. However, He obliges no one to remain in the Catholic Church. Membership is, above all, a free “choice.” The door of the Church that opens wide to welcome every repentant sinner swings both ways. In the Name of Jesus, use it and spare the rest of us your perversity.

I hold out hope that some day you will see the light and want to reconcile with the Church you have so brazenly betrayed. If so, call me. I will hear your confession. But get ready to do some serious penance.

Sincerely,
Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, President
Human LIfe International
 
Well seeing how Lambeth turned out. They probably threw this letter right in the trash, even before it was over. They could care less what the Catholic and Orthodox Churches said. Good letter though!.
 
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