I am not as familiar with these matters as many people here are.
As someone who is hoping to convert to Catholicism, but with a spiritual and familial link to the Church of England, I can only speak of the pain felt by the people within the Church.
My mother was brought up in the Presbyterian church in Glasgow, and in her 20s rejected many of its teachings. For many years she was agnostic, and I was raised without a religion.
She married an atheist, but when I was 16 they divorced. Shortly after this she started attending her local Anglican church. She found a spiritual home and rediscovered her relationship with God. She became confirmed and eventually trained as a Reader - a lay preacher who can conduct services but not the Eucharist.
A few years ago she met a man who had recently converted to Catholicism. He was divorced also. They married a couple of years ago, without realising the consequences for him. Although he had been cohabiting with a woman for 19 years since his divorce, he had been allowed to receive communiion. Once he married my mother he was not. So now he exists in a state of anguish which obviously affects her, he receives communion as an Anglican, but agonises over this, does the priest believe in transubstantiation? Is there a Lady Chapel.? etc etc.
She is now attending a church in a new parish because of having moved house to be nearer his family. But the divisions in the church make it very upsetting for her. As someone raised in a suffocating environment, women cannot do this, women cannot do that, who thought she had found a spiritual home, she now finds the arguments surrounding her again.
In many ways she would be happy to be Catholic, it would make her husband very happy, but they would apparently not be allowed to receive communion.
I don’t know the answers to all this. It seems inevitable that the Anglican Communion will split. It seems to me that it would be better that it happened sooner. Less painful for all those involved, then the congregation could make their choices according to their conscience, and follow either the traditionalist/anglo-Catholics to the Roman Catholic Church, or the liberals to a new style Anglican church. The evangelicals I’m not sure about, they might be best to form an alliance with the Methodists or Baptists. But it is inevitable that the split will happen I think. The Church is a family, whose members simply cannot agree, they love one another but cannot find a way to live together. Its so painful.
Anyway, as I am trying to decide where to make my own spiritual home, I am drawn to the Catholic Church as it seems to be consistently certain about what is the truth. Maybe I will find that I am deluded, and similar divisions exist within the Catholic Church too, I hope not though.
Rachel
