Was reunification between the Catholic Church and Anglican Communion ever a viable prospect?

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I’m actually a little worn down at the current time.

Look at how little I’m posting in this thread.
 
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I tend to refer to the Tractarians/Oxford Movement as Anglo Catholic, the High Church/Ritualists, arising a little later, as High Church.

Some folks agree with me, others see High as referring to either.
 
Real Life can refer to a lot of disasters, small and large. I’m avoiding most (I hope) of the large. Going to return to Mass for the first time in 6 months, next Sunday.

As to posting, wonky computer requires me to write and rewrite each post 4-5 times.

Pipe smoking is more pleasant.
 
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I can only say what it was like for me reading theology at Oxford in the early 1980s. The legacy of the Tractarians and Oxford Movement was still palpable; yet it had been split by events at Rome. At Ozford at that point there were two factions represented by the Church of St Mary Magdalen, where you could find the Revd Walter Hooper, who had been Secretary of and confessor to CS Lewis. Here you could find the idea that the CofE was the last survivor of pre-Vatican II or even pre-Vatican I Catholicism. Here the phrase High Church was used.

Across the road at Pusey House you could find those who liked to use the term Anglo-Catholic. The chaplain was Revd William Oddie. The Eucharist was nearly indistinguishable from the post Vatican II Mass. Here, the idea was not the preservation of Catholicism from Roman innovation, but the reunification of Anglicanism under the Roman Pontiff.

Both clergymen became Catholics in the end. I saw Walter Hooper at Mass a couple of years ago. I think William Oddie was reordained.

I think this distinction changed after the ordination of women, but that was how it was at that time.
 
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No. It would be (assuming the source was RC), a statement of RCC teaching.

I think all RCs should affirm RCC teaching, at the appropriate level of theological certainty.
 
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Different strokes for different folks. I consider the Oxford group centered on doctrine, the Ritualists on, well, ritual.

I’ve collected books, on or by Lewis for 55 years.

I once heard Dr. Oddie speak, IIRC. I hope someone will be able to complete the followup book to his CHESTERTON AND THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY. I consider it among the most essential books on the man. I’ve collected GKC for the same 55 years.
 
anything is possible with God.

However, the fact that people had been killing each other on both sides for centuries makes me think the divisions were always too great for man alone to overcome.
 
@Dovekin I do agree with some of your points, but I wonder whether you are a little too optimistic on some topics. For example, I am not convinced that the two churches are actually wholly in agreement about the Eucharist. I am certainly aware of the documents published from the 1970s onwards, but I am not persuaded that the issue has been definitively resolved. The two churches have certainly identified a number of areas in which they do agree, but I am sure that there remain other areas in which they do not agree. For example, if there are no theological differences between the Roman Rite of the Mass and the Holy Communion service in the Book of Common Prayer, why do the ordinariates for former Anglicans not simply use the text of the Book of Common Prayer completely unaltered? For example, this entire section has been removed:
ALMIGHTY God, our heavenly Father, who of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption; who made there (by his one oblation of himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world; and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memory of that his precious death, until his coming again: Hear us, O merciful Father, we most humbly beseech thee; and grant that we receiving these thy creatures of bread and wine, according to thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ’s holy institution, in remembrance of his death and passion, may be partakers of his most blessed Body and Blood
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One also has to remember that the Anglican scholars who will have been involved in these discussions will not be representative of the Anglican Communion as a whole. While many Anglicans are now comfortable with the term “altar”, for example, there are also many evangelical Anglicans who would use only the word “table”. Some would indeed eschew the term “priest”, preferring the term “presbyter”.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Indeed, the whole issue may just go away if the Anglican/ Episcopal church simply goes extinct in the future.
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I get the impression that you would rather welcome that. I am not sure whether you have just taken against me personally or whether you are more generally hostile towards Anglicanism.
Tis_Bearself said:
Corporate reunion wasn’t going to happen anyway for the reasons that Bithynian and others have posted in the thread.
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You say that almost as if I had not made that very point myself.
Tis_Bearself said:
However, the idea of priests marrying after ordination is a non-starter, including in all the Eastern Catholic churches where a married clergy is the norm. So I don’t see any change being made ever to accommodate that
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On this point, we certainly agree. Conversely, as I said before, clerical celibacy would be a non-starter for Anglicans. I don’t believe that Anglicans would ever be persuaded that there is any sound theological reason for clerical celibacy, and I don’t believe that it would ever be tolerated on a cultural level.
bpd_stl said:
Anglicanism in GB & North America is dying…slow-motion collapse.
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I really do not think that that is true. Weekly church attendance is not dramatically different for Catholics and Anglicans in England (one cannot make the same comparison for the whole of the UK due to significant differences between the four countries that make up the UK, e.g. Presbyterianism being the national religion of Scotland). You could make a stronger case for the Episcopal Church in the US, which has barely more than half the weekly attendance of the Church of England despite being in a country with a population almost six times greater than that of England.
 
Bithynian said:
They have also established non-denominational parishes in liberal dioceses
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Yes, the same thing goes on (perhaps to a lesser extent) in England. St Helen’s Bishopsgate is a particularly egregious offender. They claim still to be part of the Church of England, but they plant churches, some of which are within the Church of England, others belong to rival Anglican organisations, others are non-denominational, and at least one actually belongs to a different denomination (the minister is a Baptist). One of their church plants (which happens to be next door to the actual Church of England parish church) is in fact led by an Englishman who went to Sydney for his training and ordination. They can plant whatever churches they like, but they should not be doing so while claiming that they are still part of the Church of England.
Bithynian said:
The African hierarchy generally discourages their ministers from attending most Oxbridge colleges (the traditional seat of liberal theology)
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I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this. In Cambridge, where I now live, there are two Anglican theological colleges, Westcott House, which is liberal Anglo-Catholic, and Ridley Hall, which is open evangelical. However, neither these are not colleges of the University of Cambridge. Students wishing to receive a University of Cambridge degree must do so through one of the colleges that are part of the university. There are also two Anglican theological colleges that are permanent private halls of the University of Oxford, St Stephen’s House, which is Anglo-Catholic, and Wycliffe Hall, which is evangelical. Ripon College Cuddesdon is not part of the university, but its students may, under certain circumstances, matriculate as members of the university. Wycliffe Hall, though not as extreme as Moore Theological College or Regent College, would probably be acceptable to most of the conservative Africans. The Anglican Church of Southern Africa is of course notably more liberal than other parts of Africa. I am not sure whether their clergy study at Oxford and Cambridge, but they certainly sometimes study at King’s College London.
 
Xarto said:
That just blows my mind and scares me at the same time. There is so much talk here (Ireland) of lay people taking over more roles if we lose our priests. I wonder how far down the rabbit hole will we fall.
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I think the Diocese of Sydney is the only jurisdiction (including all of its extra-territorial church plants) in the global Anglican communion that practises it. It was very controversial when it was first legislated: local Anglo-Catholic parishes tried all sorts of things to stop it, including appealing to the secular courts, demanding ‘alternative episcopal oversight’ (a la CoE parishes that reject women bishops) and threatening schism. Insofar as I know, the Anglo-Catholics stayed because the archbishop provided his gentleman’s word that lay presidency would not be forcibly imposed on dissenting parishes.

Fat chance that guarantee will bind the next archbishop. The Sydney episcopate has a long and highly aggressive track record of forcing evangelical rectors on its dwindling Anglo-Catholic parishes: out go the sacred vessels, the altar and the tabernacle and in come the subwoofers, projectors and bongos.
 
commenter said:
But now? Why aren’t they in ACNA or Continuum or ordinariate?
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Many of them are. I don’t know where you are from, but I think one has to understand that for many people who choose to stay within the Church of England, it is because it is so closely connected with national identity.

I was once talking to a verger who was telling me that he makes a pilgrimage to Rome every year, “Because that’s where the faith began”. Every time he went to Rome, he brought back a relic of a different saint. He also said that he likes to hear a bell ringing when he walks past a church, because he knows that “God is being lifted up” (i.e. some Anglican churches actually ring the church bells during the Eucharist rather than using altar bells). He also referred to a prominent Anglo-Catholic clergyman having “taken the 30 pieces of silver” when he persuaded his congregation to accept the ordination of women and then promptly left to become a canon of Westminster Abbey. So, I asked him, why did he not simply become a Catholic? He said, “There’s something very un-English about being a Catholic”.

I guess another reason would be that becoming a Catholic involves accepting a different standard of sexual morality. Many Anglo-Catholic clergy are gay, and certainly some of those are in same-sex relationships. If Anglo-Catholic clergy are heterosexual and unmarried, they probably don’t want to rule out the option of marriage in the future. For the laity, the Church is England is very liberal. Although the official line is vague and constantly changing, there is basically nothing stopping Anglican laypeople from being in same-sex relationships, civil partnerships, and even marriages. The Church of England’s position actually seems to have become a little more conservative recently, with a pronouncement that the proper context for sex is marriage and that marriage is only permitted between a man and a woman, replacing earlier advice that more or less explicitly said that same-sex relationships were fine for laypeople. However, none of this is official teaching as such, and gay and lesbian laypeople in the Church of England are free to have a partner and to be sexually active. So, for gay Anglo-Catholics, of whom there are many, moving to an ordinariate or to one of the other Anglican organisations would mean having to adhere to a different standard of sexual morality.
 
scousekiwi said:
He said, “There’s something very un-English about being a Catholic”.
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I can readily understand that as a knee-jerk reaction, but I don’t think it has any depth to it. Think of Waugh and Chesterton. Was either of those two “un-English” in any way?
 
scousekiwi said:
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commenter:
But now? Why aren’t they in ACNA or Continuum or ordinariate?
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Many of them are. I don’t know where you are from, but I think one has to understand that for many people who choose to stay within the Church of England, it is because it is so closely connected with national identity.

I was once talking to a verger who was telling me that he makes a pilgrimage to Rome every year, “Because that’s where the faith began”. Every time he went to Rome, he brought back a relic of a different saint. He also said that he likes to hear a bell ringing when he walks past a church, because he knows that “God is being lifted up” (i.e. some Anglican churches actually ring the church bells during the Eucharist rather than using altar bells). He also referred to a prominent Anglo-Catholic clergyman having “taken the 30 pieces of silver” when he persuaded his congregation to accept the ordination of women and then promptly left to become a canon of Westminster Abbey. So, I asked him, why did he not simply become a Catholic? He said, “There’s something very un-English about being a Catholic”.

I guess another reason would be that becoming a Catholic involves accepting a different standard of sexual morality. Many Anglo-Catholic clergy are gay, and certainly some of those are in same-sex relationships. If Anglo-Catholic clergy are heterosexual and unmarried, they probably don’t want to rule out the option of marriage in the future. For the laity, the Church is England is very liberal. Although the official line is vague and constantly changing, there is basically nothing stopping Anglican laypeople from being in same-sex relationships, civil partnerships, and even marriages. The Church of England’s position actually seems to have become a little more conservative recently, with a pronouncement that the proper context for sex is marriage and that marriage is only permitted between a man and a woman, replacing earlier advice that more or less explicitly said that same-sex relationships were fine for laypeople. However, none of this is official teaching as such, and gay and lesbian laypeople in the Church of England are free to have a partner and to be sexually active. So, for gay Anglo-Catholics, of whom there are many, moving to an ordinariate or to one of the other Anglican organisations would mean having to adhere to a different standard of sexual morality.
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Thanks for the perspective! I’m your typical U S Catholic, know almost nothing about Europe or Anglicanism, though that never stops my flow of opinions. I did look up your word “verger”.
 
commenter said:
What does disestablishment mean? Is there a current economic, political, or public relations benefit for being the official Church?
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I think others have already answered this, but some obviously consequnces:
  • The monarch would no longer be supreme governor of the Church
  • The 26 senior bishops and archbishops would lose their seats in the House of Lords
  • The archbishops and the bishop of London would lose their places in the Privy Council
  • The archbishop of Canterbury would probably lose the right to crown the monarch (the coronation ceremony would probably become a secular event as it is in every other European country)
  • The General Synod of the Church of England would cease to function as effectively a part of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (currently, any legislation passed by General Synod is sent to Parliament and thence to the monarch to receive royal assent)
  • Canon law would no longer be part of the law of the land and would not be justiciable in actual English/British law courts
  • Clergy would no longer swear allegiance to the monarch
  • The royal coat of arms would not be displayed in churches
  • Senior clergy would not be appointed by the monarch, and bishops would not be consecrated with her mandate
  • The archbishop of Canterbury would presumably lose the right to confer academic degrees
  • Our role in providing weddings would presumably be greatly reduced, and we would presumably provide weddings only on the same basis as other churches already do (the Church in Wales did win a major concession on this point, and continues to conduct weddings as if it were the established church, but that was over 100 years ago)
Those are a few consequences I can think of. Of course, nobody really knows what it would be like until it happens. For example, the monarch could continue to make the three most senior bishops privy counsellors simply out of resect for tradition, legislation could be passed stating that the archbishop of Canterbury’s right to award degrees is unchanged, etc.
 
BartholomewB said:
I can readily understand that as a knee-jerk reaction, but I don’t think it has any depth to it. Think of Waugh and Chesterton. Was either of those two “un-English” in any way?
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I entirely agree with you. Before the Reformation, there was nothing more English than being a Catholic! Also, think of the Duke of Norfolk and all those other aristocratic recusant families. All very English. Also, there are several other denominations that are very distinctively English without being Anglican, e.g. Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, the Salvation Army.
 
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