A New Bridge Across the Tiber

From Crisis Magazine

By Father Dwight Longenecker

The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham has now been established in England. By Easter this year, three bishops, sixty priests, and nearly one thousand lay people had left the Church of England to be received into the Catholic Church. Archbishop Donald Wuerl is working with interested parties to establish the ordinariate in the United States, and progress is being made in Canada and Australia for ordinariates to be erected there later this year.

What will be the future of this new ordinariate? It could be that it will simply bring into full communion with the Catholic Church a small number of conservative Anglo-Catholics. They were an eccentric church within a church in the Anglican Communion, and some predict that they will continue to be an eccentric church within the Catholic Church. Around the world, there will be small groups of traditionalist Anglicans who will differ from all the other tiny Anglican schismatic churches, in that they will actually be in full communion with Rome. They will keep to themselves and be viewed by mainstream Catholics as an eccentric rump of dissident Anglicans who like incense and lace, old-fashioned language and splendid old hymns, who somehow managed to worm their way into the Catholic Church. They will be regarded with bemusement and some bewilderment. Anglicans will shake their heads and wish them well and wonder why they didn’t become “proper Catholics” if they wanted to swim the Tiber. Eventually, the theory goes, they will die out. Their descendants will be absorbed into the mainstream of the Catholic Church, and the whole thing will be a footnote in the history of ecumenism.

A second possibility is that the Anglican Church herself will eventually disintegrate or morph into something unrecognizably Anglican, and the ordinariate will be all that is left of historic Anglicanism. In this scenario, an increasing number of Anglicans worldwide will see that, if they want to be historic Christians within the Anglican tradition, the only place to do that will be within the ordinariate, and they will flee the sinking ship of Anglicanism to join it.

This is almost certainly not going to happen, for several reasons: First of all, the Evangelical Anglicans are Protestants. After they have made the polite ecumenical noises, they do not really understand or appreciate the Catholic Faith. Secondly, many Anglo-Catholics also do not really want to be Catholic: They want to be Anglican. They honestly do not see the importance of being in full visible communion with the Catholic Church. They have serious misgivings about some of the Catholic dogmas, and they continue to believe that they are “Catholic within the Anglican Church.” Thirdly, the liberal wing of the Anglican church certainly has no wish to be in full communion with Rome. They dislike Roman authority, dogma, and moral teachings and are increasingly anti-Catholic.

However, there is a third way. The ordinariate could develop in a very different and exciting direction. The way to understand this more dynamic possibility is to see the ordinariate as a new bridge across the Tiber for a whole range of Protestant Christians. Already, conservative, liturgically minded Lutherans are asking why there isn’t a Lutheran ordinariate, while some of them point to the formal intercommunion that already exists between Lutherans and Anglicans and argue that the Anglican ordinariate should naturally be open to Lutherans as well. 

Homosexualists to Force Anglican Church Weddings in UK

After this legislation goes through the homosexualists will set about hounding every priest and vicar who dares to decline them 

From Catholic Online

By Father Dwight Longenecker

Father Dwight Longenecker

England's Daily Telegraph reports here that parliament is preparing legislation to remove the ban on same-sex civil unions being religious. Some years back when they began to allow same-sex civil unions, they made it clear that these ceremonies could not be held in religious premises and were not to include religious elements in any way.

But, of course, the homosexualists complained that this still contravened their civil rights and, because they were not allowed to be "married in church," they were being treated as second class citizens. So now, bowing to their demands, the lawmakers are to allow the same-sex union ceremonies to be religious and for religious leaders to make their premises available for these rituals.

No one will be forced to conduct such services or make their premises available for such service. Oh no, such a thing would never be forced on anyone. Not in modern Britain. No sir. That would never happen, now would it?

It just happens that the homosexualists in Britain are busy, on the other hand, suing anybody they can find who denies them their "rights" -- even to the point of setting them up. So this nice Christian couple who have been running a Bed and Breakfast in a seaside town in Cornwall for years and took joy in welcoming especially a Christian family clientele are being sued by a homosexual couple because they were refused a double room.

The allegations are that the homosexual men knew the stance the couple took (it was advertised on their website) and booked a room there on purpose to push their case. They went to court, and the Christian couple lost.

Anybody, therefore, who thinks that it will stop with permission for homosexuals to have their civil unions in church buildings with religious elements if they want to (but nobody will have to if they don't want to) is seriously deluded. After this legislation goes through, the homosexualists will set about hounding every priest and vicar who dares to decline them the opportunity to conduct their same-sex marriages, and take them to court.

Where will the Church of England stand on all this? The Church of England says they don't allow same-sex unions in church, but certain renegade Anglican vicars are defying both the law of their church and the law of the land to conduct same-sex unions in their churches. They get around it by calling it a "blessing," so Adam and Steve go to the registry office for their civil union, and then they tootle along to the parish church where Rev. Lav "blesses" their union. While there are many more vicars who do not conduct the services, a good number are in favor and many more 'don't really mind.'

We shouldn't be too smug about the Brits being any worse than we are. Because of their stronger national government, it is more nationwide, but in the USA there are plenty of states that already allow same-sex civil unions, and most of the mainstream liberal Protestant denominations are already well into same-sex "marriage." The attempts at lawsuits against people infringing homosexualists' "rights" are also gathering strength.

Get ready. 

 

 

Fr Dwight Longenecker is parish priest of Our Lady of the Rosary parish and chaplain to St Joseph's Catholic School in Greenville, South Carolina. Visit his blog and website at www.dwightlongenecker.com

An Anglican Bridge Across the Tiber

A Bob Jones University Graduate, former Anglican Vicar, and now a Catholic Priest Reflects on the Apostolic Constitution

From The Times (UK)
By Father Dwight Longenecker

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 .