Do ex-Anglicans make the wrong kind of Catholics? You know, the kind who really believe the Catechism? I ask for two reasons. One, the Dallas Morning News reports today that priests of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth have been inquiring of the city's Roman Catholic bishop about their diocese coming over to Rome en masse, so to speak. No report on how the RC bishop, Kevin Vann, responded to the Episcopal priests' petition, though the Catholic diocese did confirm that the meeting took place.
Here, from the blog of Katie Sherrod (a liberal north Texas Episcopalian), are more details, including a text of the proposal itself. That proposal included this information:
There are currently 60 active clergy [in the FW Episcopal diocese].We believe 9 will opt to stay in The Episcopal Church.
51 will remain in a temporarily realigned diocese with the Southern Cone.
5 are not interested at this time in working for full communion [with Rome].
46 are truly interested. If we add our seminarians currently on the priesthood track and our retired clergy the number becomes 59.
Our best guess is that approximately 59 clergy are willing to pursue an active plan to bring the Diocese of Fort Worth or a significant portion of it into full communion with the Holy See, if this be God's will.
And:
We would also like to point out that of the 59 clergy, 20 are under the age of 40. These young clergy are committed to seeking the truth that the Holy See possesses. They have come to this realization independent of the four clergy who are represented in this presentation. We have noted over the last few years that God has been raising up phenomenal young men in our diocese for priesthood. We now realize and believe the purpose of this explosion of priestly vocations at this time is to further help us understand the direction we must take. They are committed to teaching the truth of the Catholic faith and they have many years of ministry to give to accomplish what God began with us in 1983. We have seen many pieces of a puzzle come together over the years. We believe all of this is truly the work of the Holy Spirit and we continue to pray for guidance, courage and faith.
Well, if you were a Catholic bishop, you ought to find that inspiring. One hopes Bishop Vann does. But the example of a former Episcopal bishop of Fort Worth who wanted to convert to Rome but was sabotaged by Catholic clergy offers a cautionary tale, which is basically this: some Catholic clergy don't want those traddie Episcopalians, presumably because they would be a force for Catholic orthodoxy. A possible secondary reason: because keeping the church bureaucracy functioning, including maintaining good relations with bureaucrats in other churches, is more important than conversions. Here it is from Una Voce, the RC traditionalist organization, via Katie Sherrod's blog:
[From Una Voce]:
Some of the individual stories are shocking. One key player in the negotiations was Episcopalian Bishop Clarence Pope of Fort Worth, Texas. He tried to negotiate for a personal prelature, or some form of nationwide, expanded pastoral provision, with the help of Cardinal Law. They had a meeting in Rome with key Cardinals, which concluded with a dramatic meeting where Pope John Paul II embraced Bishop Pope and gestured towards him saying, "in communion." But when they went back home, nothing happened.
Finally, the ailing Bishop Pope announced his retirement as Anglican bishop, and that he couldn't wait any longer and wished to come into the Church as an individual. On retirement, he moved to the diocese of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The bishop of Baton Rouge had said that he would happily reordain Bishop Pope as a priest. But having said this, the bishop then said that he would first... (wait for this) put it to a vote of the diocesan priests council. Guess what? They voted against allowing an Anglican bishop, involved in direct negotiations with the Pope and Cardinals Law and Ratzinger, to become an ordinary priest. Pope was completely isolated from the Catholic community in Baton Rouge, and was left in the dark as to what was happening at the national and international level (after all, he was just a retired layman now). Old and sick, he started getting calls from the Episcopalian primate and the new Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth to return to the Episcopal Church to the dignity of being a retired bishop. He did, thanks to the petty jealousies and heartlessness of a small bishop and his liberal priests.
In the end, thanks to a myriad of stumbling blocks on the Catholic side, and a more creative response on the Anglican side by giving the dissident parishes four bishops of their own and allowing them to opt out of the regular Church of England structure, the negotiations with Rome and Westminster came to nothing. Many individual priests and laity came over, but the prospect of a mass conversion of whole parishes flopped.
The similarities to the position of Roman rite traditionalists to the Anglo-Catholics discussed in Oddie's book were striking. How many times have we had friendly words or documents from Rome, only to be shot down by bishops? How many times have we heard initially positive responses from bishops, only to be shot down by a vote of the priests council? How many times have we had to endure insults that we are not really loyal to the Church because we want our own distinct liturgy?
It also makes me think that if Rome is too powerless to bring over an Anglican bishop who the Pope has said he is "in communion" with because of the Baton Rouge priests council, or unwilling to help bring over 200+ whole Anglican parishes, how much power will they have or energy will they spend to help us? We may have to come to the same sad lesson that most of the Anglo-Catholic dissidents still in the Church of England came to: the bishops and priests don't want us, and Rome is unwilling or unable to help us. Therefore, we have to help ourselves.
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I often wish the Gallup polling folks had asked for agreement with something like "everybody else is a hypocrite" (put with a little more subtlety) for the last 50 years or so, because my sense is that agreement has gone up a lot lately. Somebody in authority disagrees with me, and my immediate response is "they're all in league with the liberals/conservatives/reasserters/reappraisers/some other label that allows me to dismiss them (and celebrate myself) without further thought. Thank God I'm so bmuch better than them!
Maybe your NFP teaching friends were really persecuted for their faith, or maybe they just gave up pretty quickly because they already expected most of their fellow Catholics were, in fact, not up to snuff (wild eyed liberals!). And the parishes they were turned away from? They probably heard them mention NFP and turned them away quickly because, of course, they also believed most of their fellow Catholics were not up to snuff (wild eyed traditionalists!). Maybe it's just human nature and we've always been like this, but my own experience is that it's gotten a lot worse -- everybody honestly believes they're persecuted for their fidelity.
I agree with Sally -- too many uncharitable presumptions about people's motivations are being made here by people who claim that charity is the greatest of the virtues.
You bet the largely Liberal American Catholic Bishops and their pet priests work to keep culturally and morally conservative Protestants from entering the Catholic Church. I have seen it up close and personal. I have seen the feminist principle of a doscesan grade school go out of her way to get Jewish, Moslem, Unitarian-Universalist, and Quaker students on her rolls, while she has rejected a sizebale number of applicants who are from truly conservative Protestant backgrounds. A friend of mine made the mistake of noting on his daughter's application that he was considering entering the Catholic Church because it was consistent in rejecting female ordination and labeling homosexual activity as disordered sin, and his daughter has never been accepted. The school does have one openly homosexual male teacher and a woman well known lcoally for demanding women priests.
Those Catholic dissidents - Liberals - do want any more cultural, moral, and theological conservatives/traditionalists in what they see as 'their' church because they intend to use the argument of democracy to effect their desires for a church with women priests that praises homosexual activity and teaches universalism.
One more thing: if I were a conservative Roman Catholic priest and had to decide whether to welcome a large number of ex-anglican priests into my diocese about whom all I knew was that they couldn't live with liberal episcopal views on homosexuality and women priests, I'd have a lot of questions to ask, too. After all, the Roman Catholic church and the Anglican churches have been separated for a long time, and they've been separated by issues that were around long before any Anglicans were talking about women priests and gay issues. That's why Pope Leo declared that Anglican holy orders were "absolutely null and utterly void" (and Cardinal Ratzinger made a point of affirming this a few years ago). Why wouldn't a conservative RC commentator just assume that the Anglicans were kept from joining the RC priesthood en masse because they were still Anglicans at heart, whatever their views on hot button issues?
Several commenters have asked if an Episcopal bishop could be "received as an Orthodox bishop." First of all, I am not aware of any Episcopal clergy in any order being "received" into the Orthodox Church. In every case, complete and unconditional ordination, starting from the beginning, is necessary, since the Orthodox Church does not in fact recognize the validity of Episcopal orders (despite a misunderstanding of some past statements by local churches dealing with how a unification of Anglican and Orthodox Churches might be accomplished).
Second, at least one bishop of a Continuing Anglican Church (Bishop Robert F. Waggener), along with his congregation, became Western Rite Orthodox in the Antiochean Archdiocese. They were made catechumens when they were received and he was eventually ordained a priest in the Orthodox Church, but not a bishop. Since he was married, there was no possibility of ordaining him a bishop. So, an Episcopal bishop could become Orthodox, but would be ordained from scratch to whatever order was appropriate for him.
Anyone received into the Church must affirm that they believe all that the Church teaches. After forty years, I have come to the cynical conclusion that many Catholic priests would be lying if they were required to make a reaffirmation of that sort, that their theology is, in some cases, less Catholic than John Calvin's.
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