St. Therese Little Flower Catholic Church will be the host of a two-day “Becoming One” conference on Friday and Feb. 26 at the church, 5814 Euclid Ave.
The event is for Anglicans and Episcopalians who are exploring whether to accept an invitation to come into the Roman Catholic Church, and for those who have already done so.
The Commission recognises that, if the goal of fuller communion is to be realised, in the course of the next two years significant work will need to be undertaken on some specific areas. These include issues relating to the interchangeability of ordained ministries and the ministry of oversight (episkope). Our hope is to find ways in which, in every place, the churches of our two world families may work as one in the urgent task of mission.
The Commission took careful note of the bilateral conversations between our communions. These are taking place in the United States, England, Ireland, and New Zealand, and in Canada and Australia between Anglicans and the united or uniting churches. In listening to the experience of two United Churches (Church of South India/Church of North India) the Commission has become more aware that questions of identity and belonging to wider Christian fellowships require ongoing attention. The Commission would welcome hearing news of any other bilateral conversations.
Did you know there is a Google Map that is tracking Anglican parishes entering the Ordinariate? You can visit it the Ordinariate Google Map [] anytime to look at the latest statistics.
According to the recent count, the United States leads with 36 groups, Canada has 30 and the United Kingdom has 18. The originator, Shane Schaetzel, is currently looking for collaborators in Australia and the United Kingdom to help him keep track of those coming in.
About 500 people gathered at Central Moravian Feb. 10 to celebrate the full communion of the Episcopal Church and the Northern and Southern Provinces of the Moravian Church. The Episcopal Church approved the full-communion agreement at General Convention in 2009, and the two Moravian provinces approved it in 2010. The churches had practiced interim eucharistic sharing since 2003.
This historic occasion featured a prelude with music by the Central Moravian Brass Ensemble, and opened with a procession of nearly a dozen Episcopal and Moravian bishops. For this event, the Central Moravian choir merged with those of the Cathedral Church of the Nativity and Trinity Church, Bethlehem.
Yet for all its importance, the service was less than two hours long, including the singing of 11 hymns. The service honored both churches’ traditions on the elements of Communion, offering worshipers a choice between wine or grape juice. Recitations were short but heartfelt, stressing fellowship and unity.
In January it was revealed up to 300 Essex Anglicans and seven vicars could join the Ordinariate set up by Pope Benedict XVI for disaffected clergy.
Father Richard Tillbrook of St Barnabus Church in Colchester said he had thought long and hard about the offer.
“I have made my decision to stay because I love the Church of England,” he said.
“I pray the new synod may well understand more fully the need to have provision within the Church of England for our sacramental surety and what it’s all about.”
Bishop Arthur Kennedy has been appointed by the Vatican to participate in an ecumenical dialogue with the Anglican Communion this spring.
Bishop Kennedy, who is the rector of St. John’s Seminary, has been named by Pope Benedict XVI to participate in the next phase of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), the Catholic Church’s official dialogue with the Anglican Communion.
He has previously served as the executive director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) is opening a new phase of dialogue with a meeting scheduled for May 17-27.
A communiqué from the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity noted that this new phase of work was mandated by Benedict XVI and the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at their meeting in November 2009.
The first meeting of the new phase of the commission will take place at the Monastery of Bose in northern Italy.
The first step is to respond to all U.S. Anglicans who have indicated an interest in the ordinariate and to learn more about them.
“Questionnaires have gone out asking them to identify more clearly who they are and what the nature is of their current community,” Cardinal [Donald] Wuerl explained. “The goal is to determine whether there is a response substantial enough to warrant the establishment of an ordinariate here in the U.S.”
“We’ve already seen how the Holy See, at the request of Pope Benedict, has established an ordinariate in England, Our Lady of Walsingham. And that would probably be a model for what we would do here in the U.S.”
“We’re a little ways off yet,” he said.
The third phase of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission will begin in May with 18 bishops and scholars set to examine the theology behind some of the thorniest questions creating tensions within the churches and keeping Catholics and Anglicans apart.
The Vatican released a statement Feb. 3 announcing that the dialogue commission would meet May 17-27 at the ecumenical Monastery of Bose in northern Italy and listing the 18 commission members.
Pope Benedict XVI and Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, met in late 2009. They pledged to continue the formal dialogue even as the ordination of women as priests and bishops, the blessing of gay unions and the ordination of openly gay clergy threatened the unity of the Anglican Communion and made it more difficult for Catholics and Anglicans to see a way for their communities to draw closer together.
To be honest, with regard to the first comments, I do not understand…[Professor Tina Beattie’s] perplexity. It seems quite simple: it means that a goodly number of Anglicans and their clergy will be entering into full communion with the Catholic Church. Moreover, surely their arrival will only enrich the diversity of the Catholic Church, as they bring their own traditions, or “patrimony”, of liturgical worthiness, pastoral sensitivity and biblical engagement. They will speak an idiom clearly understood by Anglicans, who may then, we pray, feel moved to explore further the path to full communion by means of this familiar idiom.
Here, one suspects, is her problem. The Ordinariate reveals clearly that for the Catholic Church ecumenism is not about ongoing “dialogue” for its own sake. It is about encouraging and convincing Christians to enter into full communion with the Church, from which they are estranged due to actions centuries ago. If it means anything regarding the relations between the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church it is that the Church has only one goal, ultimately, for ecumenical dialogue with Anglicans: that they return to the Church. This may disturb many Anglicans, for sure, but that is no reason to stop the progress of ecumenism.
Her second comments raised the eyebrows as she describes the actions of Ordinariate Catholics as “Protestant”. How it can be Protestant to enter into Communion with the Catholic Church is beyond me!
Among the Christian communities in the Holy Land marking the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is the Episcopal or Anglican diocese of Jerusalem, which includes parishes in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, as well as Israel and Palestine. Based at the Cathedral Church of St George close to the old city of Jerusalem, the diocese supports many institutions including schools, hospitals, clinics, vocational training programmes and centres for the disabled and elderly. Palestinian Bishop Suheil Dawani heads this Anglican diocese and he spoke with Philippa Hitchen about his ministry, as well as his perspective on vital ecumenical and interfaith relations…
The Church of England’s apparent pride in its comprehensiveness in contrast to the ecclesiological narrowness of Roman Catholicism is now emerging as fantasy.
The Ordinariate is showing the Roman Catholic Church offering compromises, fudges and political fixes to Anglican traditionalists. Whereas the Church which has always taken pride in the image of itself as a via media and a place where everyone could fit in had nothing to offer the same traditionalists. As a result a number of bishops, clergy and laity have joined the Ordinariate or are still considering Pope Benedict’s offer.
And while the Roman Catholic Church’s secrecy, which bordered on contempt for Anglicanism, is to be criticised, it is the Church of England time and again which is showing itself to have no vision for the possibility of ecclesiological change. Bishops have even harshly ruled out the use of Church of England buildings for Ordinariate congregations, even under sharing arrangements. This looks more like a political strategy to dissuade laypeople from joining the Ordinariate than a decision about ecumenical principles.
God of Light, we give you thanks for the revelation of your truth in Jesus Christ, your Living Word, which we have received through the apostles’ teaching, first heard at Jerusalem. May your Holy Spirit continue to sanctify us in the truth of your Son, so that united in Him we may grow in devotion to the Word, and together serve your Kingdom in humility and love. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
As bishops charged with responsibility to uphold the unity of God’s church on earth we are painfully aware of the divisions that still impair the unity that Christ longs for and for which he shed his blood. This is not just a unity within the church ”“ though we long for this to be revealed ”“ but a unity for all God’s people and between the families of the nations.
As Tucsonans continued to reel from the Jan. 8 shooting spree at a shopping center that left six dead and another 14 wounded, religious leaders around the country looked to help heal the emotional pain through prayer and memorial services.
Tucson Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas planned to preside at a public commemoration and healing service Jan. 11 and expected to participate in the funerals later in the week for his friend, Judge John Roll, 63, and 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, both Catholics.
He also was going to be part of an interfaith memorial service at Catalina United Methodist Church, also Jan. 11, which was organized by United Methodist Bishop Minerva Carcano of Phoenix. She planned to attend a public Mass of commemoration at St. Odilia Catholic Church that evening.
John Broadhurst, Andrew Burnham and Keith Newton will be ordained into the priesthood at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday, it was announced yesterday.
The Ordinariate, the group for disaffected Anglican priests and their congregations who seek full communion in the Catholic Church, will also take in its first members.
Fifty-one Winnipeg churches, representing Anglican, Baptist, Mennonite, Presbyterian and Pentecostal denominations, as well as various evangelical groups, closed their doors Sunday morning, encouraging their members to attend the worship service at the downtown hockey arena instead.
“We had an 8:30 a.m. service and our main service is closed,” explained Rev. Ken Turnbull of St. Aidan’s Anglican Church from his seat in the arena. “I think it’s very important to do things together and to gather together for worship.”
“One thing I really like about this is a lot of Christians coming together and standing up and being counted as Christian and not hiding that,” said Cathie Chapman, who skipped services at her own church, which didn’t officially participate in the service.
Ten years ago this week, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and The Episcopal Church launched a relationship of shared mission and ministry in a worship service and ceremony at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
This relationship, known as full communion, is described in Called to Common Mission: A Lutheran Proposal for a Revision of the Concordat of Agreement adopted by both churches. The document states: “We do not know to what new, recovered, or continuing tasks of mission this Concordat will lead our churches, but we give thanks to God for leading us to this point. We entrust ourselves to that leading in the future, confident that our full communion will be a witness to the gift and goal already present in Christ, ‘so that God may be all in all’ (I Corinthians 15:28).”
Last weekend, in London, three Anglican bishops and their families were received into full communion with the Catholic Church in a very public ceremony in Westminster Cathedral. Three Anglican nuns and some laypeople were also received. By Easter it is expected that the Anglican Ordinariate will have been set up, and up to 50 more Anglican priests will be received into the Catholic Church along with a significant number of laypeople.
This public reception is in marked contrast to the manner in which I, and many others were received into the Catholic Church in England in the mid 1990s. At that time “ecumenism” was still the main priority for the Catholic bishops of England and Wales as well as the Anglican establishment. There was a pact between the rulers of both churches that the defections to Rome would be low key. No one wanted to rock the ecumenical boat. Consequently, the publicity machines of both churches went into overdrive to downplay and minimize what was happening. In fact, in the mid 1990s there were not fifty Anglican priests who converted but 500. Some even reckoned the numbers to be between 750 and 1000. The reason it was difficult to establish how many of us converted to the Catholic faith at that time was because certain categories of Anglican priest didn’t register in the official tally….
The president of the Lutheran World Federation, Bishop Munib Younan has said before meeting Pope Benedict XVI that their churches should issue a common statement on Holy Communion to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation that Martin Luther began in 1517.
“Our [the Lutheran federation’s] intention is to arrive at 2017 with a common Roman Catholic-Lutheran declaration on eucharistic hospitality,” Younan told the Italian Protestant news agency NEV the day before his December 16 audience with the Pope.
As soon as Our Lord is born, he is caught up in the terror and violence of our world. The wise men, without meaning to, prompt a tyrant to an act of dreadful barbarity. The life of the Incarnate Word of God is never to be spared the risk of suffering and death. Recalling the Massacre of the Innocents (on 28 December in the West) we affirm our faith that God’s action and presence are to be found in the darkest places of the world, alongside those who are exposed to pain and death.
In October during a pastoral visit to the churches of our Communion in India, I listened to a Christian from Orissa describe the murder of her husband as a result of his refusal to abandon his faith in Jesus Christ. In early November we had shocking news of atrocities against Christians in Iraq, and the whole Christian world prays and grieves with that small and courageous community living in daily danger. Regular reports reach us in the West of terrible atrocities against children in the war-torn lands of Congo, Sudan and other places. Every time such an outrage occurs, we are recalled to the reality of our involvement in the Body of Christ; when any member suffers, the whole Body suffers (I Cor 12.26).
But this in turn should rekindle our awareness of the positive reality of the Body, and the call and gift of God that comes with membership of the Body. Each of us is at every moment supported by every other through the life of the Body of baptised believers. Each of us is being fed and nourished by the Lord through this fellowship. And each of us is summoned to solidarity with all our brothers and sisters in prayer and action.
On Dec. 3, I had the privilege of ordaining Dennis Garrou, a married former Episcopal priest, to the sacred order of deacons for the Archdiocese of Denver. God willing, Deacon Garrou will be ordained a Catholic priest in May.
All this is made possible by a “Pastoral Provision” implemented by Pope John Paul II in 1980. In its own small way this special occasion fulfills one of the main goals of Vatican II””Christian unity. As the first sentence in the Decree on Ecumenism says, “The restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council.”
The importance of Christian unity cannot be emphasized enough, because Jesus Christ founded one Church and one Church only. This is not just a matter of faith, but of historical fact. The divisions that have occurred over the centuries are a sad testimony to the Fall and the effects of original sin. The separation of Christians from each other is contrary to God’s will, a wound to Christ’s body and a scandal to the outside world. It is like the amputation of limbs from a body, or divorce and the breakup of a family.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has travelled to Rome and Athens, holding private meetings with Pope Benedict XVI and the Archbishop Hieronymus II, the primate of the Church of Greece.
On Nov 17, Dr. Rowan Williams delivered a lecture commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He joined Cardinal Walter Kasper, Cardinal-designate Kurt Koch and Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon in addressing the evening service at the Sala San Pio V in Rome.
The lectures were part of the council’s Nov 15-19 plenary session focusing on the theme: “Towards a new stage of ecumenical dialogue.” The speakers noted the weakening spirit of ecumenism, but underscored the importance of continued church relations.
Watch it all from Rome Reports.
(ACNS) In a spirit of fraternity, The Archbishop of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan and the Catholic Archbishop of Juba registered together at Hai Jalaba referendum registration centre today. But registering, they now qualify for voting on Referendum Polling Day scheduled for 9 January 2011. Accompanying them was the presidential advisor on Religious Affairs, H E Tijwok Adheaguer.
Fears that the new Ordinariate being established by the Holy See for Anglicans who wish to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church will undermine good ecumenical relations were dismissed on Sunday by the Archbishop of Birmingham.
“Some have expressed fears that an Ordinariate may undermine good ecumenical relations but I believe those fears to be ill-founded,” said the Most Reverend Bernard Longley, the newly appointed Chairman of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales Department of Dialogue and Unity.
“During his visit Pope Benedict emphasised that his offer, in response to the petitions he had received: ‘Should be seen as a prophetic gesture that can contribute positively to the developing relations between Anglicans and Catholics.’
“The Holy Father is clearly encouraging the Catholic community to welcome and receive any groups who choose to follow this path in a way that respects and learns from the Anglican patrimony they will bring,” said the Archbishop.
Much has been achieved over many years as a result of the dialogue and the fruitful ecumenical relations which have developed between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. Obedient to the prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ to His Heavenly Father, the unity of the Church remains a constant desire in the vision and life of Anglicans and Catholics. The prayer for Christian Unity is the prayer for the gift of full communion with each other. We must never tire of praying and working for this goal.
During his visit to the United Kingdom in September, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI was therefore keen to stress that the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus: “”¦should be seen as a prophetic gesture that can contribute positively to the developing relations between Anglicans and Catholics. It helps us to set our sights on the ultimate goal of all ecumenical activity: the restoration of full ecclesial communion in the context of which the mutual exchange of gifts from our respective spiritual patrimonies serves as an enrichment to us all.”i
It is now just over one year since the Apostolic Constitution was published. The Pope’s initiative provided for the establishment of personal Ordinariates as one of the ways in which members of the Anglican tradition may seek to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. As the Holy Father stated at that time, he was responding to petitions received “repeatedly and insistently”ii by him from groups of Anglicans wishing “to be received into full communion individually as well as corporately.”iii Since then, it has become clear that a number of Anglican clergy and their faithful do indeed wish to bring their desire for full ecclesial communion with the Catholic Church to realisation within an Ordinariate structure.
The GAFCON statement notes a third sad fact about the Anglican Communion today:
The third fact is the manifest failure of the Communion Instruments to exercise discipline in the face of overt heterodoxy. The Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada, in proclaiming this false gospel, have consistently defied the 1998 Lambeth statement of biblical moral principle (Resolution 1.10). Despite numerous meetings and reports to and from the ”˜Instruments of Unity,’ no effective action has been taken, and the bishops of these unrepentant churches are welcomed to Lambeth 2008. To make matters worse, there has been a failure to honour promises of discipline, the authority of the Primates’ Meeting has been undermined and the Lambeth Conference has been structured so as to avoid any hard decisions. We can only come to the devastating conclusion that ”˜we are a global Communion with a colonial structure’.
This third fact is also in line with the observation of Metropolitan Hilarion that the source of false teaching and lax discipline in the Communion has its origins in the “North and the West,” that is to say, in Canterbury’s own jurisdiction. I have noted elsewhere that the “Instruments of Unity” as currently constituted are under the sway of the “Lambeth bureaucracy,” and hence the ecumenical failure of Anglicanism can only be laid at the door of Canterbury himself. This tough fact is exactly what Hilarion has brought to the banquet table at Lambeth Palace.
So GAFCON and the Orthodox share the sober critique of contemporary Anglicanism. It would be facile to say that today’s Anglican confessors are of one mind with the Orthodox. Surely there are issues of substance and ongoing discussion between the two.