I am encouraged by the fact of the TAC’s petition, but I will withhold my optimism until we see its fruits. We haven’t actually seen the text of the petition, so who knows if they are placing conditions on their conversion or something like that.
There is one way around this though, that is the married priest issue. Rome could create an Anglican Rite Church with its own hierarchy and allow it its own rules. The Anglican Use could become a full Rite.
Anglican liturgical practices are preserved in the Anglican Use Liturgy.
What Anglican spirituality needs to be preserved that is different from Western Catholic spirituality with out being heresy?
Even the Mozarabic rite and the Milanese/Ambrosian rite are still considered fully Roman Catholic. They are remnants of ancient churches dying away and both have deep roots in the first centuries of Christianity as original churches. Anglicanism has no such claim to make, it’s roots in Britannic-Celtic Christianity disappeared long ago, and what’s left is a form of the Frankish-Latin church practice, very much the standard issue rite for the west.
Michael
I know that’s a lot of quotes, but I think they bring out interesting points in the discussion of setting up either an independent rite or even a church
sui iuris. I think the idea of their own church is entirely out of the question - their history is simply not the same as the other churches, and their theology and spirituality do not differ significantly enough from the rest of the Latin Church. As David pointed out, it’s almost entirely a question of liturgy, and Michael gives good examples of far more venerable and distinctive rites within the Latin Church that, despite their distinctiveness, have not warranted the erection of a separate church.
I also think granting the AU status as its own rite would be ill-advised. If we have a rite we need to be able to identify which priests are allowed to celebrate it, which is why our other distinctive rites (or uses, if that’s how we want to refer to the rites of the religious orders) are attached to particular jurisdictions - be they defined territory (like the area designated in the dioceses of Milan and Toledo) or communities (Dominicans, Praemonstratensians, etc.). If we’re not erecting the TAC as its own church, where would that definition come from?
Furthermore, speculation as to retaining the AU as an independent rite raises the question as to whether a Protestantization of Catholic worship is worth keeping around - even though it has been cleaned up to eliminate outright heresy and ensure validity, we’re talking about a liturgy that was intentionally altered so as not to be Catholic. Is it really wise to be raising such a creation to the same level as the ancient liturgies of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Byzantium, and Babylon? What message would we be sending to the faithful of these rites by establishing a permanent structure to presere the AU on the same level?
And that, I think, brings us back around to my initial worry. I don’t think the TAC should be created as an independent jurisdiction within the Church or even an independent rite, but those may be precisely the terms upon which it is requesting full communion. What will happen if such terms are not met? Will the TAC - or at least the majority of it - be just as committed to full communion if that means being assimilated into the rest of the Latin Church? We simply need to wait this one out and see what happens.
