A look at recent Catholic and Episcopal Church relations

I've been staying out of church politics for a good long while on this blog, not out of any lack of interest but more out of a feeling others are more knowledgable and saying things better than I could. And as I have mentioned a number of times, church politics is like plate tectonics -- it mostly moves beneath the surface, but erupts now-and-then with an earthquake.

We've had several of those tremors recently from the Vatican, and while those events may not directly affect daily life at St. Paul's  Memorial Church, it is nonetheless worth looking at for how it may impact our greater Church and sense of who we are as church. Here is a commentary published Friday in the Erie Times-Union that is quite readable written by The Very Rev. John P. Downey, the Dean of the Cathedral of St. Paul and the Ecumenical Officer for the Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania:

Downey: What's next for Episcopalians, Catholics?

BY REV. JOHN DOWNEY
Contributing writer

Two recent events mark a significant change in the ecumenical relationship of Roman Catholics and the Episcopal Church.

First, a new translation of the Mass was introduced at the beginning of Advent. Then, on New Year's Day, the Anglican Ordinariate for the United States was officially launched. The Ordinariate will serve much like a diocese created especially for Episcopalians and others of Anglican heritage who wish to be in full communion with the Pope. Such folk would fully accept Roman Catholic teaching and authority while retaining some aspects of their former life in the Episcopal Church such as liturgical texts, married priests, and (limited) democracy in governance.

With regard to worship, the recent change is a departure from decades of working together along with other ecumenical partners to provide common worship texts in the various churches and denominations.

The new Mass translation was undertaken unilaterally by the Roman Catholic Church, apparently with no ecumenical consultation. Other Christian bodies, including Episcopalians and Lutherans, made major liturgical changes after Vatican II with ecumenical optimism and a commitment to shared translations among themselves and Roman Catholics. This hopeful project has been abandoned by Rome and we have the curious situation that the "old" Mass texts can now be found in Lutheran and Episcopal churches!

As for the Ordinariate, it is likely that very few will take advantage of the offer, however grateful those few might be for the opportunity. Life in the Episcopal Church is an entire culture, and it remains to be seen if a few parts of it can be successfully grafted onto a very different understanding and practice of Church. Given that Roman Catholics will not be permitted to join Ordinariate congregations, its future will depend on further conversions and evangelism.

This does bring into focus, however, the deep distinction these events and others have revealed between Roman Catholicism and the Episcopal Church, which is the matter of governance. The Roman Catholic Church is structured as a monarchy, governed by the Bishop of Rome. Even though this governance is shared in communion with other bishops, in the end, full authority is vested in the Pope, trusting that this is Christ's will for the Church.

The Episcopal Church is structured as a representative democracy, modeled after the United States Congress. All matters are deliberated and decided upon by elected governing bodies that include bishops, clergy and lay people. Episcopalians trust that, even if some of their decisions are mistaken, the Church will not fail in it basic grasp of the truth, and God will eventually correct any errors.

The relative merits of these two understandings can be debated, but it has become clear that this is the source of the differences between Roman Catholicism and the Episcopal Church. The ecumenical progress of the last decades has shown that both churches share a wide and deep range of common doctrine, including some areas where conflict was once assumed, such as the meaning of the Eucharist and the priesthood. This has allowed a sense of friendship that will probably not go away despite the recent changes.

Nonetheless, the different forms of governance have led to differing outcomes in matters such as contraception, remarriage, ordination of women, and the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in all aspects of the church's life.

We have entered a time of differentiation that will probably not be resolved in the foreseeable future. Traffic is moving in both directions across the Roman Catholic/Episcopalian border.

Hopefully, this time will be lived with both honesty and charity and with the prayer and hope that these differences will not harden divisions, but will motivate a desire to discover a godly diversity in unity that will be a gift to the world.

THE REV. JOHN P. DOWNEY is dean of the Cathedral of St. Paul and ecumenical officer of the Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania.

Copyright 2012 The Erie Times-News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Faeder ure pu pe eart on heofonum ("Our Father who art in heaven")

Many people prefer the Lord's Prayer in "traditional" English ("Our Father who art in heaven..."). However, that English is relatively recent. A friend sent this along the other day; it is the Lord's Prayer in 11th century English, and thankfully it comes with subtitles. This takes about 3 minutes to watch, and the mystical tone comes through. Imagine those 11th century Angl0-Saxon monks saying this together in the stony monasteries of York. Enjoy . . .

Anglican melodrama one more time

I promise not to blog overly much on the melodrama of the Anglican Communion. Last week I chipped in a few words on this blog, and I’ve enjoyed hearing the responses. A few additional thoughts and observations to expand on some comments I made today at a Rector’s Q&A after our worship:

First, let me offer a bit of factual perspective: There are four dioceses which have declared their secession from the Episcopal Church – four out of 110 dioceses. The four that have gone are small. How many people do they represent? Judging by total reported attendance, the breakaway dioceses boast, at best, about 20,000 people, and that is assuming everyone in all four dioceses have left the Episcopal Church, which they have not.

To put that in perspective, the total attendance for the Episcopal Church is about 804,000, so the breakaways represent a bit more than 2 percent. In terms of membership, we are at about 2.15 million, and the breakaway churches have about 49,000 members (again assuming all 49,000 are seceding, which they are not). To put it another way, the total communicants of the Diocese of Virginia is considerably larger than the four breakways dioceses combined. Again, do the math – they may be loud, but the breakaways aren’t large.

Many churches within the breakaway dioceses have declared they will remain in the Episcopal Church regardless of what their bishops and diocesan conventions do. The Cathedral for the Diocese of Quincy, in Peoria, Illinois, voted to remain in the Episcopal Church. The Diocese of San Joaquin, in the Central Valley of California, has 19 of its churches – nearly half – staying with the Episcopal Church.

Next, let me offer a few observations about all of this:

The breakaway bishops agree on one thing: they don’t want gay people in the church. Beyond that, they are already finding it difficult to find common agreement, much as they label what they are doing as a “common cause.”

There are already schisms within the schismatics. Bishop Jack Iker of Fort Worth, who has for years been vocally against the ordination of women, has already said he is in a state of “impaired communion” with another of the breakaway dioceses because that bishop is ordaining women.

And just because a group of disaffected former Episcopalians wish to call themselves “Anglican” does not make them Anglican any more than it makes them astronauts. The definition of what makes an Anglican an Anglican has to do with being in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The breakaway bishops have not been recognized by the Archbishop and they’ve given no indication that they even wish that recognition.

Lables aside, those who are following these bishops ought to pause and ask how some of these bishops got to be bishops. Although some were bishops in the Episcopal Church, others were not elected by any convention of laity and clergy. Some, like Martyn Minns of Virginia, were ordained bishop in an irregular, unorthodox manner by Anglican bishops from Africa, Singapore and elsewhere. It is unclear how bishops in this new so-called “Anglican province” of North America will be selected; by whom and how? My friends in the Diocese of San Joaquin, whose bishop took the diocese into the province of the Southern Cone (Argentina), have been asking for months to see the canons for Argentina, to no avail. The rules appear to be what these breakaway bishops say they are.

Although the breakaway bishops and their followers have created layers of organizations with important sounding names, that does not legitimize them as Anglicans, nor does it makes their actions legal. David Anderson, who heads one of these self-appointed organizations, the “American Anglican Council” (and he is another of these irregularly consecrated bishops), gave a description today in his weekly on-line newsletter of the organizational structure and how the organizations are interrelated. If you can sort this out, you are doing better than I am. Here’s Anderson on this:

“The formation of ACNA, which is a coming together of Anglican judicatories under an Archbishop, leaves two of its sponsoring organizations in a here-and-there position. Both Forward In Faith-North America (FIFNA) and the American Anglican Council (AAC) are advocacy and affinity organizations that overlay actual ecclesial judicatories, and although both are presently headed by bishops, the bishops and the members are all embedded in separate actual church structures.”

Huh? Who got to decide all that? Were the regular church-going pledge-paying faithful people sitting in the pews on Sunday in Fresno or Fort Worth or Quincy ever asked if it was OK with them to be shunted into one of these “ecclesial judicatories” and be summarily ex-communicated from the Episcopal Church? And if just one person objected to leaving the Episcopal Church, by what authority did a bishop, or a “ecclesial judicatory,” decide that a majority had the right to tell that one person he or she could no longer be an Episcopalian?

Finally, there is paranoid secretiveness to the breakaways. Anderson in his weekly missive noted yet another new organization, this one to have secret membership. To quote Anderson again:

“Because some TEC [The Episcopal Church] bishops are hostile to members or congregations joining or remaining a part of the AAC because of our clear stand against the increasing heterodoxy of the Episcopal Church, a new type of membership is available, called ‘In Pectore,’ which means in the heart. It will be an unpublished list of members who individually know that they are members, and we know that they are, but no one else but God knows that. This list will be treated as Top Sacred [sic], realizing the danger that is present for the orthodox today in many TEC dioceses.”

Amidst all of this murkiness and muck, there is an important challenge to all of us: We should not be letting the princes of negativity hijack the language of orthodoxy, the authority of Scripture, our voice in speaking out against evil and sin, and most especially our embrace of the love and grace of Jesus Christ. Our Lord and Savior challenges us to make room for all people at the Table, sinners and saints alike, and to be the hands and feet of love, healing, forgiveness and reconciliation in the world. We don’t get a pass on our mission because of the distractions of church politics.