(ACNS) The Anglican-Old Catholic International Co-ordinating Council (AOCICC) met in Schloss Beuggen, Germany from 8 to 12 November 2010. The Council welcomed Canon Dr Alyson Barnett-Cowan, Director for Unity Faith and Order at the Anglican Communion Office, as Anglican Co-Secretary.

In its most important piece of work, the Council finalized the text of a common statement on ecclesiology and mission ”˜Belonging Together in Europe’. This version of the text will be the major focus of the International Old Catholic and Anglican Theological Conference to be held in Neustadt, Germany from August 29 to September 2, 2011.

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A little more than a year ago (Oct. 20, 2009) William Cardinal Levada signaled to the world that Pope Benedict XVI was planning to release an apostolic constitution helping those spiritually disenfranchised Anglicans seeking to reunite with the See of Peter. Less than two weeks later (Nov. 9, 2009) the Vatican published ” Anglicanorum Coetibus “. This paves the way for the eventual establishment of a unique Anglican Ordinariate, for those entering into full communion with the Catholic Church from the Anglican tradition. At the announcement the Anglican world was shaken to its core.

Since that time Anglicans and former Anglicans around the world — including American Episcopalians — have been considering the Pope’s offer to become fully-fledged Catholics and yet retain some of their unique Anglican liturgy, patrimony and ethos in their life and worship as Catholics. Now a year has come and gone. Questions have been raised, meetings have been held, and some answers have been given, well all the while, slowly the face the various proposed national ordinatiates are starting to take shape.

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Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, will reveal on Friday the Vatican’s plans to welcome the departing priests – including five bishops – who are expected to be received into the Catholic Church early in the new year.

Hundreds of Anglican churchgoers will join them in the Ordinariate – a structure introduced by Pope Benedict XVI to provide refuge for those diaffected with the Church of England.

The number of worshippers who leave the Church is predicted to double as the new arrangement finally begins to take shape.

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The head of the World Council of Churches has affirmed its ties with the U.S. National Council of Churches, praising churches in the United States for “bringing change and reformation in this sinful world”.

“The ‘old world’ of Europe brought the teaching of Martin Luther; you had the Baptist leader and visionary dreamer of a new future, Martin Luther King,” WCC general secretary the Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit said on 11 November at the NCC’s centennial ecumenical gathering in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The WCC leader noted that the rest of the world has often criticised U.S. dominance in the 20th century, a period sometimes called the “American century”. But the Norwegian Lutheran cleric said the century would also be noted for the role of the U.S. churches in the development of the international ecumenical movement.

“This needs to be recalled at a time when you and also many others in the world are aware of less beneficial effects of the American century on others in the world,” said Tveit.

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Leaders of the nation’s largest coalition of Christian churches will gather here this week (Nov. 9-11) to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ecumenical movement.

Members of the National Council of Churches, representing 100,000 congregations and 45 million people in 35 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox denominations, will also discuss and how to fight poverty, war and environmental degradation””while trying to bring down barriers dividing denominations.

The group will hold its annual General Assembly alongside its global humanitarian arm, Church World Service.

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By entering into full communion, the parish will enjoy sacramental unity with the Roman Catholic Church but will retain its Anglican identity and liturgy.

The congregation of 28 parishioners is a member of the Anglican Church in America, which is part of the Traditional Anglican Communion and not recognized by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It is also not part of the Episcopal Church, the American branch ofthe Anglican Communion.

The Anglican Church in America has about 100 parishes across the country but only one in Arkansas. Individual parishes can make the decision to ally themselves with the Roman Catholic Church if they wish, Hall said.

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(Anglican Journal) Canadian Lutheran churches appear to be faced with many of the same problems known to Canadian Anglicans.

These include shrinking congregations and an increased interest in weekly eucharist.

According to Susan Johnson, national bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC), this is leading Lutherans to look at such measures as the use of ordained pastors as “circuit riders” bringing the eucharist to a number of parishes. Speaking here at the Oct. 22-25 joint meeting of the Anglican House of Bishops and Lutheran Conference of Bishops, she added there has also been pressure to revive a practice of permitting lay people to preside at the sacrament, as some Lutheran churches did at one time.

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Mount Calvary Episcopal Church in Baltimore on Sunday became the first congregation in Maryland to vote to break ties with the Episcopal Church and take steps to join the Roman Catholic Church.

The small Anglo Catholic parish at Madison Avenue and Eutaw Street was feeling increasingly alienated from the Episcopal Church as it accepted priests who did not believe in what most of the congregation saw as the foundations of the faith, according to Warren Tanghe, a former Episcopal priest who is now attending St. Mary’s Seminary in Roland Park and preparing for ordination in the Catholic church. Tanghe knows members of the parish, where he has assisted in the past, and said they also were uncomfortable when the church began ordaining women, gays and lesbians.

The Episcopal Diocese of Maryland issued a statement Monday about the vote, but both the bishop and the rector, the Rev. Jason Catania, declined to be interviewed. A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Sean Caine, said the Catholic Church would welcome the congregation.

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I suspect that the future of the Ordinariate lies elsewhere: with bright younger Anglo-Catholic clergy, some of them scholars, and with thousands of committed lay people who already belong to “gathered congregations” ”“ that is, who are used to worshipping at a church that suits them rather than just attending their local parish. This is an increasingly common pattern of worship throughout Catholicism, Anglicanism and the Evangelical world, not just some picky Anglo-Catholic habit. Another significant pattern is church-planting, which the Catholic Church in England has been really bad at until now”¦ but more of that in another post.

I’m not going to name the bright sparks of the Catholic tradition in the C of E who are planning to join the Ordinariate: it would make life difficult for them at a sensitive moment, particularly as some of them are attached to institutions whose own future in Anglicanism is looking doubtful. The important thing is that they believe that the intellectual case for traditional Anglo-Catholicism is no longer tenable….

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Shortly after eight o’clock one spring morning in 2007, an earthquake struck the parish church of St Peter in Folkestone, bringing down the gable-end of the south transept.

Three years later, the 19th-century church, which opened as a chapel for local fishermen, has caused tremors of its own, becoming the first parish in England to declare its intention to defect to Rome. Within hours of the news emerging last Friday, the Bishop of Fulham announced that he, too, will take up the Pope’s offer to join a new structure within the Roman Catholic Church for disaffected Anglicans.

Some are now talking openly of an “exodus” from the Anglican Communion next year, with thousands following Folkestone’s lead. The Archbishop of Canterbury, from whose back yard the revolt has sprung, can be in little doubt about the seriousness of the threat.

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An Anglican congregation in Kent has become the first to take up the Pope’s offer to leave the Church of England to convert to Catholicism.

The Pope has created a special enclave in the Roman Catholic Church for Anglicans unhappy with their church’s decision to let women become bishops.

Last month the church council of St Peter’s in Folkestone voted to take the first formal steps towards converting.

It comes as traditionalists performed well at the CofE synod elections.

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The Rev. Jason Catania, rector of Mount Calvary since 2006, said the congregation has consulted with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore about the parish’s future and with the Diocese of Maryland about the possibility of amicable separation.

If the congregation affirms the vestry’s two resolutions, the parish will send a proposal to the Diocese of Maryland’s standing committee four days later, Fr. Catania told The Living Church.

“A group from the standing committee has met with the vestry, and Bishop [Eugene] Sutton will be here on Sunday [Oct. 10] to hear from the folks,” he said.

He said Mount Calvary already had begun thinking about becoming a Roman Catholic parish when the All Saints Sisters of the Poor announced their decision to become a Roman Catholic Order.

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It is time to set aside, for the time being, the much-debated question of how many Anglicans will take advantage of the Apostolic Constitution. Let us focus instead on the core words of Bishop Burnham’s message: his flock is “energetically committed to mission and [local] evangelisation”. Future members of the Ordinariate are offering to help revitalise the Christian mission of the Catholic Church in England and several other countries. It is a wonderful prospect, made possible by their faithful witness to the Gospel over many years and the vision of the Holy Father. Ignore the cynics and hand-wringers who see only difficulties in this historic development: we live in exciting times.

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Although he serves as Vice-Chancellor of the Diocese of Nashville and also assists at the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Fr. [Prentice] Dean has been given permission by his bishop to form an Anglican Use group, which he has done. Our Lady of Martyrs Anglican Use Society is hosting its first event ”“ Solemn Evensong and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. This will take place on Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. at The Church of the Assumption, 1227 7th Avenue, North, Nashville, Tennessee.

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The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has named Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington to guide the incorporation of Anglican groups into the Catholic Church in the United States.

In this position, he is a delegate of the congregation and heads the U.S. bishops’ ad hoc committee charged with assisting CDF in implementing the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus. Pope Benedict XVI issued the document in November 2009 to provide for establishing personal ordinariates for Anglican groups who seek to enter corporately into full communion with the Catholic Church.

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Update: Rocco has important comments on this:

Intriguingly, it bears noting that Rome’s choice of its US delegate has fallen to a prelate: 1. whose mentor, the late Cardinal John Wright, bore a particularly concerted devotion to the now-Blessed John Henry Newman… and 2. who is particularly well known to the most prominent leader of US Anglicanism’s breakaway traditional faction.

Bishop of his native Pittsburgh until his DC transfer in 2006, Wuerl shares warm ties with the Steel City’s former Episcopal bishop, Robert Duncan, who led much of his flock out of the Anglican Communion’s traditional American province last year to become the founding head of a parallel group, the Anglican Church in North America. (Duncan was accordingly deposed as a cleric of the Episcopal church.)

What’s more, after the 2003 consecration of New Hampshire’s Gene Robinson as the Communion’s first openly-gay hierarch — the watershed moment in Anglicanism’s long-simmering divide over hot-button doctrinal and moral questions — the roots for what’s become the ACNA were laid at a summit in Plano, Texas, which drew an eyebrow-raising letter from a lone ecumenical representative pledging his “heartfelt prayers” for the gathering as he observed that “significance of your meeting is [being] sensed far beyond” the South, and even beyond the walls of the Anglican Communion.

The Vatican announced Thursday that Bishop Kevin Vann, leader of the Fort Worth Catholic Diocese, has been named to a committee that will lay the groundwork for the incorporation of U.S. Anglican groups into the Roman Catholic Church.

But the announcement received a muted response from the group of churches led by Bishop Jack Iker, which split from the national Episcopal Church last year over issues including same-sex unions and gay bishops. That group calls itself the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, as does the group of Episcopal churches that remained with the national Episcopal Church.

“As you know, the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth has cordial relations with Bishop Vann and members of his diocese, but today’s announcement doesn’t have an impact on those ongoing talks about the sharing of resources and fellowship,” said Suzanne Gill, spokeswoman for the Iker-led churches. “And it certainly does not portend any formal linkage of the two dioceses.”

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Q: It’s been a historic day for you, welcoming the first pope ever to Lambeth Palace, then praying together at the tomb of Edward the Confessor here in Westminster Abbey. Can you share your impressions?

A: The main thing I want to say is it’s been an enormously happy occasion and the reception that he’s had from Bishops, from people on the streets and also of course in Westminster Hall, has been hugely positive. And certainly Evening Prayer at the Abbey was intensely moving for everyone who was there.

Q: It exceeded expectations didn’t it?

A: I think one of the nice things about today and yesterday has been the sense of so many predictions being proved wrong. In the sense that this has been an occasion greatly blessed and that people have come out onto the streets in favour of faith.

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Some people involved in efforts to promote full Anglican-Roman Catholic unity said the pope’s special provisions were essentially an admission that full unity was virtually impossible because of the ordination of women priests and bishops and positions on homosexuality in some parts of the Anglican Communion.

Speaking to the Catholic bishops, though, the pope said his provision “should be seen as a prophetic gesture that can contribute positively to the developing relations between Anglicans and Catholics” by promoting unity while accepting differences.

The Rev. David Richardson, director of the Anglican Center in Rome and the archbishop of Canterbury’s representative to the Vatican, said the idea of the ordinariate was initially billed as a “pastoral provision” for disaffected Anglicans and appears to offer benefits to them, but “seems to contribute nothing to the full visible unity” of the Anglican and Roman Catholic communities as a whole.

Full unity can only be achieved through formal dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion as a whole, Rev. Richardson told Catholic News Service.

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You can find the video here.

It is not my intention today to speak of the difficulties that the ecumenical path has encountered and continues to encounter. Those difficulties are well known to everyone here. Rather, I wish to join you in giving thanks for the deep friendship that has grown between us and for the remarkable progress that has been made in so many areas of dialogue during the forty years that have elapsed since the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission began its work. Let us entrust the fruits of that work to the Lord of the harvest, confident that he will bless our friendship with further significant growth.

The context in which dialogue takes place between the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church has evolved in dramatic ways since the private meeting between Pope John XXIII and Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher in 1960. On the one hand, the surrounding culture is growing ever more distant from its Christian roots, despite a deep and widespread hunger for spiritual nourishment. On the other hand, the increasingly multicultural dimension of society, particularly marked in this country, brings with it the opportunity to encounter other religions. For us Christians this opens up the possibility of exploring, together with members of other religious traditions, ways of bearing witness to the transcendent dimension of the human person and the universal call to holiness, leading to the practice of virtue in our personal and social lives. Ecumenical cooperation in this task remains essential, and will surely bear fruit in promoting peace and harmony in a world that so often seems at risk of fragmentation.

At the same time, we Christians must never hesitate to proclaim our faith in the uniqueness of the salvation won for us by Christ, and to explore together a deeper understanding of the means he has placed at our disposal for attaining that salvation. God “wants all to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4), and that truth is nothing other than Jesus Christ, eternal Son of the Father, who has reconciled all things in himself by the power of his Cross.

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Pope Benedict XVI made history today by becoming the first pontiff to step foot inside Lambeth Palace.

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A day after he offered his strongest criticism yet of the Roman Catholic Church’s handling of the sexual abuse crisis, Pope Benedict XVI set out on Friday to mark a moment of ecumenical symbolism, praying together with the archbishop of Canterbury in a rare display of unity at Westminster Abbey, the spiritual heart of the Church of England.

The archbishop, Dr. Rowan Williams, is the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion that grew from the 16th century schism when Henry VIII broke with Rome. Britain’s Press Association news agency said a papal visit to the archbishop’s seat at Lambeth Palace and the subsequent prayer ceremony in the early evening at Westminster Abbey would mark the first time a pope has been to either venue.

A papal address at Westminster Abbey has been billed as the central speech of his visit.

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From here:

The Archbishop [of Canterbury] will welcome His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Lambeth Palace, as part of a visit to the UK at the invitation of Her Majesty The Queen.

On the eve of the Pontiff’s visit, ZENIT spoke with Reverend Canon David Richardson, also the director of the Anglican Center in Rome, about the importance of the trip in terms of ecumenism.

Speaking about his experiences meeting the Pontiff on several occasions as part of his position, the envoy said, “He has always been warm and I admire him greatly as a theologian.”

He added, “To have in the present the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury two such towering theological figures means that this is a fascinating time to be in my appointment.”

Richardson spoke about Cardinal John Henry Newman, due to be beatified by the Holy Father on Sunday, who he said is “a somewhat ambiguous figure both within Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism.”

“As an Anglican he had something of the prophet’s mantle and called the Church of England, that part of Anglicanism which was his home, back to a vision of itself which it had lost or was in danger of losing,” the representative said.

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All current versions of Christianity can be very conditionally divided into two major groups ”“ traditional and liberal. The abyss that exists today divides not so much the Orthodox from the Catholics or the Catholics from the Protestants as it does the ”˜traditionalists’ from the ”˜liberals’. Some Christian leaders, for example, tell us that marriage between a man and a woman is no longer the only way of building a Christian family: there are other models and the Church should become appropriately ”˜inclusive’ to recognize alternative behavioural standards and give them official blessing. Some try to persuade us that human life is no longer an absolute value; that it can be terminated in a mother’s womb or that one can terminate one’s life at will. Christian ”˜traditionalists’ are being asked to reconsider their views under the slogan of keeping abreast with modernity.

Regrettably, it has to be admitted that the Orthodox Church and many in the Anglican Church have today found themselves on the opposite sides of the abyss that divides traditional Christians from Christians of liberal trend. Certainly, inside the Anglican Community there remain many “traditionalists”, especially in the South and the East, but the liberal trend is also quite noticeable, especially in the West and in the North. Protests against liberalism continue to be heard among Anglicans, as at the 2nd All African Bishops’ Conference held in late August. The Conference’s final document stated in particular, ”˜We affirm the Biblical standard of the family as having marriage between a man and a woman as its foundation. One of the purposes of marriage is procreation of children some of whom grow to become the leaders of tomorrow’.

Among the vivid indications of disagreement within the Anglican Community (I am reluctant to say ”˜schism’) is the fact that almost 200 Anglican bishops refused to attend the 2008 Lambeth Conference. I was there as an observer from the Russian Orthodox Church and could see various manifestations of deep and painful differences among the Anglicans.

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[John Henry] Newman died in 1890 popularly considered a saint. Over a century later, the Church is vindicating this judgment of the people of the U.K. and the whole English-speaking world. Pope Benedict’s decision to preside over Newman’s beatification reflects his love and respect for a fellow theologian whose work he has studied from his seminary days, and whose influence on the Second Vatican Council made him perhaps the most influential theologian on the council, even though it was meeting more than 70 years after his death.

Yet what is most intriguing about Benedict’s upcoming visit to England is its ecumenical significance. Pope Benedict has established very cordial relationships with Orthodox patriarchs and bishops (a long-held ambition of his predecessor John Paul II as well). At the same time, he has made a remarkable and controversial offer to members of the Anglican Communion throughout the world to be received into the Church, singly or in whole congregations, bringing with them their liturgical traditions and even their pastors and bishops, if those clergymen were properly received into the Catholic Church.

If Pope Benedict’s outreach meets with even limited success, perhaps tens of millions of fervent Evangelical and Pentecostal “Bible” Christians may want to reexamine more closely this ancient Church as the 500th anniversary of the Reformation draws near in 2017. The mutual momentum towards reunion may be irresistible.

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It is fortunate, then, that Pope Benedict, though less popular than his predecessor, is intelligent enough to respond sensitively to the delicacy of his position as a guest in the UK. The English RC hierarchy will have prepared a full brief for him, and the offer last year of an Ordinariate for former Anglicans shows an awareness of local problems, if not a complete grasp of the best solution. More generally, what he lacks in radicalism he makes up for in integrity, and he will find a sympathetic ear if he chooses to speak about ethical issues.

Anglicans will want to welcome him as a Christian brother (some, indeed, as Christian father). Irritations persist, of course, over his refusal to countenance debate on women’s ordination, and that old stone in the shoe, the non-recognition of Anglican orders; but the blunt attacks of secularists have served to drive the different Churches closer together, in utterance if not in structure. There is a diversity of views of how best to meet the challenge of secularism, Anglicans in general favouring more cultural and ethical adaptability; but the pattern in the years since Pope John Paul’s visit has been for much greater cooperation between the Churches at all levels. If Pope Benedict can recognise and encourage this, it would prove to be the most fruitful element of his short visit.

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Pope Benedict’s arrival in Britain breaks new ground on many levels, with a state welcome from the Queen and the beatification of Cardinal Henry Newman. But buried in the itinerary is another and, some would say, more piquant landmark.

Next Friday, the pope will meet the Rev Jane Hedges, canon steward of Westminster Abbey and a campaigner for women bishops in the Church of England. It will be the first time the head of the Vatican, which earlier this year declared female ordination a “crime against the faith”, shakes hands with a clergywoman.

Their meeting will act as a reminder of the differences and difficulties between the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic church. The abbey team is aware of the many historic aspects to the visit.

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To achieve the goal of speaking meaningfully today, Kasper reasons, the Church must engage in two related tasks: the first is internal to the Christian community (ad intra), while the second regards the Church’s external ministry to the world (ad extra). The Church’s internal task is to understand Jesus Christ and itself more deeply. Kasper argues that the Church encounters problems in proclamation because it does not understand its own beliefs clearly enough (ad intra) to express them convincingly (ad extra). To show the significance of its message in the 21st century, the Church must look inward to better comprehend its own tradition and commitments. On this point Kasper writes:

The present crisis facing Christianity in the West does not touch merely on some peripheral concerns; … We are dealing here primarily with a crisis of relevance. We hear daily that dogmatic teachings and, even more, the moral rules of the Church no longer reach a large segment of believers. They appear to offer answers to questions which are no longer being asked. Nonetheless, the crisis of relevance represents merely the superficial side of the problem. It has long since led to a much deeper identity crisis within the churches. The question is no longer how the Church will be able to reach the modern, secularized world; rather, the question is what constitutes Christianity as such. What can Christianity, must Christianity, say to the modern world? Does it have something of its own to say, something unmistakable? (“Nature, Grace and Culture: On the Meaning of Secularization,” Catholicism and Secularization in America: Essays on Nature, Grace and Culture, p. 32)

Therefore, to succeed in its mission, the Christian community must continue to look introspectively, to deepen its appreciation of the mystery which constitutes its own identity. In order to know how to address the modern world effectively it must have a clearer understanding of what it is trying to convey.

The second task the Church must face if it hopes to communicate its message convincingly is the nature of its ministry to the world

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