Cultural Gadfly

I will editorialize little about the portents of the news out of the Vatican today as I am trying to gather information and talk to family/friends/priests. What I know so far is that most Anglican contacts I have on Facebook are posting various versions of “great day, really exciting, waiting to see how things unfold.”

I did appreciate the Anchoress’ post over on First Things.

As I and others guessed yesterday, the announcements coming out of Rome and London today are big but not all that surprising. Damian Thompson has the first threadbare report:

The Vatican has announced that Pope Benedict is setting up special provision for Anglicans, including married clergy, who want to convert to Rome together, preserving aspects of Anglican liturgy. They will be given their own pastoral supervision, according to this press release from the Vatican:

“In this Apostolic Constitution the Holy Father has introduced a canonical structure that provides for such corporate reunion by establishing Personal Ordinariates which will allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony.”

This is very big. If this reconnection is well-facilitated, we may see the entire African arm of the Church of England (which is currently its most vibrantly-growing branch) cross the Tiber, and that will be a very interesting development, especially as Catholics are exposed to the Anglican-use liturgy, which will remind many of everything they loved about the Latin mass, but in the glorious language of the Anglican liturgy. This may accelerate the already-growing movement within the Catholic church to correct some of the liturgical excesses and errors we’ve seen in the last 40 years.

As I said earlier, as secularism and evangelical atheism gain in influence and power, we may well see the a new unity among Christians, ut unum sint, (that they all may be one).

She also goes on to note that “the Archbishop of Canterbury Doesn’t Seem very happy.” Which seems to me, for what it’s worth, to be good news.

Also worth reading was Cranmer, an Anglican blogger who’s very very good. He hasn’t posted yet today, but he had a good nugget back on October 14th (which, now that I think about it, was shortly after the Pope visited England…):

It is strange, is it not, that the relics of a saint are touring the UK, resting even in Anglican cathedrals to ‘joyful applause’ (while her thigh and foot went to Wormwood Scrubs); the Duke of Edinburgh is paying homage in Walsingham; Cardinal Newman is on the path to sainthood; Pope Benedict XVI is about to make the first ever papal state visit to these shores; the Queen has reportedly ‘grown increasingly sympathetic’ to the Roman Catholic Church while being ‘appalled’, along with the Prince of Wales, at developments in the Church of England…

…and the Archbishop of Canterbury is preaching about how setting up ‘carbon reduction action groups’ would help people to ‘reconnect with the world’ and ‘become human again’.

Categories: Culture, Religion \\ Tags: Anglican, Anglicanism, Church, Cranmer, Pope Benedict, Rome, Schism, The Anchoress, Union