Former Anglicans entering the Catholic Church can preserve their liturgical traditions, married priests in some circumstances and even a shade of their consultative decision-making processes, according to Pope Benedict XVI’s document on new structures for welcoming the former Anglicans.

The pope’s apostolic constitution “Anglicanorum Coetibus” (“Groups of Anglicans”) was published Nov. 9 at the Vatican along with specific norms governing the establishment and governance of “personal ordinariates,” structures similar to dioceses, for former Anglicans who become Catholic.

As previously announced by the Vatican, the text said there could be exemptions to the church’s celibacy rule to allow married former Anglican priests to be ordained as Catholic priests. However, it emphasized that this would be done on a “case-by-case basis.”

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It is the mid-1760s, and in Dublin’s grand St. Patrick’s Cathedral the famed revivalist John Wesley is preaching with all of his might. He is aware that the congregation of St. Patrick’s is filled with the city’s more successful, comfortable, perhaps self-satisfied souls. And so he thunders against their self-centeredness, rails against their disregard for the poor. “Oh who has courage to speak plain to these rich and honorable sinners?” Wesley writes afterward in his journals.

In the congregation is a young businessman who only a few years before has begun to make his mark in the city. Born in nearby Celbridge and raised on the archbishop’s estate that his father managed, this young man has gained something of a reputation for his skill at brewing beer. In fact, he has purchased a defunct brewery at St. James’ Gate, along the River Liffey, and, having married well and embedded himself skillfully in Dublin’s merchant class, he fully intends to rise.

Now, listening to John Wesley speak of the obligations of wealth, of a God-given duty to care for the hurting of the world, this gifted young man is reminded of values he learned on that archbishop’s estate and at his father’s knee. They are values that resurfaced in the Reformation of Calvin and Luther and that were set aflame and made personal in the Methodism of John Wesley. This rising entrepreneur hears and allows Wesley’s words to frame a vision for his fledgling company: a vision for producing wealth through brewing excellence and then for using that wealth to serve the downtrodden and the poor.

We should be glad that he did, for that young man was Arthur Guinness, the founder of the renowned brewery whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year.

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A Catholic journalist has suggested that the name of the “personal ordinariate” in England and Wales may be linked to John Henry Newman, a famous former Anglican priest and theologian whose beatification is expected in 2010 when Pope Benedict XVI visits England. Other reactions have been very mixed: from many Anglicans of anger and from some atheists of protection and protest. Perhaps the atheists in England deep down are Protestant atheists?

The long term consequences of this announcement are difficult to see at the moment, but the achievements of the dialogical approach of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) and of the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM) need to be safeguarded. The profoundly reconciling legacy in Liverpool and England of the friendship between Bishop David Sheppard and Archbishop Derek Worlock needs remembering and developing.

It may well be that the number of Anglican Catholic bishops and other clergy in England who take this up is likely to be low, and the number of congregations in England will be even lower.

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The Apostolic Constitution has been published. It is all that Catholic Anglicans hoped for and more.While it officially keeps the door closed on any relaxation of the norms on celibacy – former Catholic priests who became Anglicans, married or no, will not be permitted to join the new Ordinariates – it is clear from Article 11 that former Anglican bishops can become Catholic bishops in all but name, even where they are married. They will officially retain the status of presbyter, but will be allowed to be the Ordinary or head of the Ordinariate, will be allowed to be a member of the local Bishops’ Conference with the status of retired bishop and, significantly, will be allowed to ask permission from Rome to use the seal of episcopal office. This leaves the path clear for Bishop of Fulham Father John Broadhurst, married father of four, to head the new Ordinariate in Britain. Heady stuff indeed – and I mean that theologically and metaphorically.

This document is in essence a practical working out of the embracing spirituality expressed in Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est.

It shows once again a passionate man, this time one who is passionate for unity.

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We meet tonight through Wednesday.

From here:

Responding to today’s publication of the Apostolic Constitution and its complementary norms by the Vatican, the Rt Revd Christopher Hill, Bishop of Guildford and Chairman of the Church of England’s Council for Christian Unity, said:

“We note the publication of the text of the Apostolic Constitution and its complementary norms today. It will now be for those who have requested and at this point feel impelled to seek full communion with the Roman Catholic Church to study the Apostolic Constitution carefully in the near future and to consider their options.

The Vatican response to certain requests from individuals and groups across the world does not deflect us from either the continuing mission of the Church of England in its parishes and dioceses throughout the land, or its longstanding commitment to seeking the unity of all the Churches, including the Roman Catholic Church.”

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I’m going to analyse the Constitution in detail later, but let me draw your attention to an intriguing detail which demonstrates just how far Rome is prepared to go to make special provisions for ex-Anglicans. Married ex-Anglican bishops will not be ordained Catholic bishops ”“ but, if they become Ordinaries, they will be able to join Bishops’ Conferences with the status of retired bishops, and may be allowed to use “the insignia of the episcopal office”.

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There are two pieces, one pro and one con, see what you think.

Archbishop Williams, whose case history demonstrates that it is easier to be a theologian than an archbishop, was his usual irenic self in his official statement: “It would not occur to me to see this as an act of aggression or statement of no confidence, precisely because the routine relationships that we enjoy as churches will continue.”

Pope Benedict XVI is no ecumaniac (as we used to call enthusiasts for the unity of the Christian churches in the ’50s and ’60s). Remember that when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, he led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for 24 years. I used to characterize him as more Catholic than the pope because he was more conservative theologically than John Paul II. He wasn’t called the “Pope’s Rottweiler” for nothing.

And he has been interested for years in building ties with Anglicans who are in agreement with Rome on what he considers the crucial issues concerning gays and women. He plans to visit the U.K. next year.

What does all this mean for Anglicans or Episcopalians in the United States? Not much.

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It could be the start of a groan-worthy joke.

A Catholic priest, a rabbi, an Episcopal rector, a Methodist minister and a Lutheran pastor sit down for some interfaith dialogue.

But yesterday at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in East Liberty, there was no joking about the discussion topic, the death penalty.

The Judeo-Christian religions have come a long way from the Old Testament notion of an eye for an eye, the panelists said. Representatives of the five religions said their churches have officially come out strongly against America’s use of the death penalty.

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But its narrow passage in the House, where the Democrats have a large majority, underscores the difficulties ahead. Senate Democrats are struggling to agree on how to pay for the overhaul and whether to create a new public insurance plan to compete with private insurers, as the House did. Friction over how the bill treats abortion, which almost derailed the House vote, is likely to divide the Senate too.

“If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote,” Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) said on Fox News Sunday.

With the passage of the House bill, Congress moved closer than ever to providing Americans with near-universal health insurance — a goal that has eluded many presidents since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.

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A majority of Charleston County teachers surveyed say they don’t feel valued by the school district, evidence of a serious morale problem among those on the front lines of education.

The Charleston Teacher Alliance, a teacher advocacy group, asked its roughly 1,000 members to answer questions related to the start of this school year, and 845 responded. About 3,500 teachers work for the district.

The new survey revealed that 60 percent of teachers who responded don’t feel valued by the school district while 76 percent think the district views them as expendable. The alliance represents a large group of teachers, but district leaders don’t respond to their requests or seem to hear their feedback, said Kent Riddle, chairman of the alliance and a kindergarten teacher at Angel Oak Elementary.

“They need to start listening to teachers,” he said. “It feels like we’re being ignored.

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Clergy and lay representatives from seven dioceses in The Episcopal Church, as well as six bishops with Episcopal jurisdiction, met in Charleston, S.C. on November 3-4, 2009 to consider ways they might assist each other in more effectively reaching their communities and the world for Christ. More specifically, in keeping with General Convention resolution B030, which encouraged domestic Dioceses within The Episcopal Church to enter into missional relationship, this meeting encouraged the dioceses to consider what resources they can share with each other and work more closely to further the Gospel mission. Evangelizing and reaching the unchurched; catechizing and discipling the converted; assisting members in generational faithfulness; renewing, strengthening and growing existing parishes; and planting new congregations to reach their communities with the Gospel were the areas of greatest interest.

To this end, through the work of some of the Communion Partner bishops and rectors, along with others, these Dioceses in Missional Relationships will begin by hosting two initiatives for the purpose of encouraging and equipping missionally focused dioceses, congregations and individuals through:

1. Establishing a website for sharing resources and networking for ministry and mission. It is their intention to have this ministry-networking initiative functioning in an initial stage during Epiphany 2010; and,
2. Sponsoring a large venue three day event in Dallas, September 23””25, 2010. This event will be for the purpose of encouraging, empowering, emboldening and equipping missionally focused individuals, congregations and dioceses, as well as providing resources to assist each other to be more effective in reaching their communities for Christ and his Church.

Dioceses presently involved in this Gospel initiative are Albany, Central Florida, Dallas, North Dakota, South Carolina, Springfield, and Western Louisiana.

“Norman Borlaug probably saved more lives than any single person in the history of the world. He probably improved the way more people live than any one in the history of the world.”

—Michael Specter yesterday on NPR (In case you missed it, we covered Norman Borlaug earlier on the blog–KSH)

As two former Episcopal dioceses hold conventions this weekend, they are beginning to incorporate congregations from across the nation.

The Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh will vote on welcoming Harvest Anglican Church, Homer City, Pa.; Church of the Transfiguration, Cleveland, Ohio; HolyTrinityChurch, Raleigh, N.C.; and St. James Church, San Jose, Calif.

The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth (Southern Cone) plans to receive St. Gabriel’s Anglican Church, Springdale, Ark., as a new mission station. It also will welcome two existing parishes: St. Matthias’ Anglican Church, Dallas; and Church of the Holy Spirit, Tulsa, Okla.

On Oct. 30, the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee went to court against St. Andrew’s Church, Nashville, which left the Episcopal Church in 2006 and has since announced its affiliation with the Diocese of Quincy (Ill.).

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MS. [Rachel] MADDOW: So to the extent that this is going to actually cut the deficit, to the extent that this is designed to bring health costs down, we’ve got to do something. And I think people who vote against it are going to regret it.

MR. [E.J.] DIONNE: And 98 percent of small businesses are exempt from the taxes in this bill. This is a millionaire’s tax, basically, the biggest tax in this bill. And that the other thing is there are a lot of benefits in this bill that kick in right away. There’s a fund for people who have pre-existing conditions to get coverage right away. There are a lot of other provisions; no more recisions, so you can’t discover that, “Gee, I’m not covered after all.” They were smart enough to put a lot of things that kick in as soon as the bill is passed.

MR. [David] BROOKS: Rachel’s right that doing nothing is not fiscally responsible. But doing something that adds onto our current system without fundamentally changing our current system is fiscally insane. The idea that this is paid for is a political mirage. That tax surcharge on millionaires, that’s dead, that’s going nowhere in the Senate. The idea that we’re going to cut $400 or $500 billion in waste, fraud and abuse from Medicare, that’s historically unsupportable. We will never make those cuts, we’re never going to pull the plug on granny, all this stuff. It–most healthcare experts think that this fundamentally does not change the problem with healthcare system, which is the fee-for-service system which has been driving up costs for decade after decade.

Caught this on the way home from morning worship–read or watch it all.

Ed Balls is facing legal challenges from faith groups and individuals over his announcement of mandatory sex education lessons for pupils before they reach the age of consent.

Religious groups reacted with anger to the move by the Schools Secretary, which will make it compulsory for all pupils aged 15 will learn about relationships, sex and drugs over the course of a year. The age of consent in the UK is 16. The Muslim Council of Britain vowed to mount a challenge to the new laws that it says contravene the right for children to be taught according to their parents’ tradition.

Shahid Akmal, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain’s education committee, said parents would be forced to break the law because of their beliefs. “It will cause difficulty,” he said. “I cannot condone people breaking the law, but it will be an individual decision and some parents will feel that it’s the only option open to them.”

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From an unnamed letter writer to Andrew Sullivan:

Why are you still a Roman Catholic? Why have you not started attending an Episcopal church? Familiar liturgy, similar theology, radically different morality. The US Episcopal church has committed itself to being a community where all people are members, where all people can be married and blessed and become priests and bishops. We in the US are paying a high price for our commitment to equality–a schism in the worldwide Anglican communion–but we are standing firm. We’ve got Anglican African bishops and Pope Benedict himself trying to poach Episcopal parishes. We’re tiny, we’re beleaguered, and we are standing up to the entire world and the entire Christian community to do the right thing.

I know that an Englishman named Sullivan is genetically indisposed to ever imagine attending a branch of the Church of England, but, man, we could use your help. This is where you belong.

…Benedict’s outreach to Lefebvrites and dissident Anglicans forms part of a trend I’ve described as “evangelical Catholicism.” One cornerstone is to reassert markers of Catholic distinctiveness — such as Mass in Latin, and traditional moral teaching — as a means of ensuring that the church is not assimilated to secularism. At the policy-setting level of the church today, this defense of Catholic identity is job number one.

Historically, “evangelical Catholicism” is a creative impulse rather than something purely defensive, with roots in the papacy of Leo XIII in the late 19th century and his effort to bring a renewed Catholic tradition to bear on social and political life. Nevertheless, fear that secularism may erode the faith from within is also a powerful current propelling evangelical Catholicism forward.

To over-simplify a bit, Benedict XVI is opening the door to the Lefebvrites and to traditionalist Anglicans in part because whatever else they may be, they are among the Christians least prone to end up, in the memorable phrase of Jacques Maritain, “kneeling before the world,” meaning sold out to secularism.

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With a donor-advised fund from Schwab Charitable, for instance, people can use up to 10% of the money in their charitable accounts to guarantee microloans — loans of a few hundred dollars or more made to needy people usually to develop or expand a small business. The program runs in concert with Grameen Foundation, a global microfinance nonprofit that provides capital to microlenders in poor communities.

It works this way: If one of the microfinance organizations being guaranteed fails, it gets a portion of the donors’ funds so it can meet its obligations. If the lenders don’t default, the money stays in the charitable account.

Another option: A number of microlending Web sites such as Kiva.org allow people to make small loans to individuals (of $25 and up), such as a Peruvian entrepreneur starting a local basket-weaving business. They get their money back within six to 12 months. Then, they can funnel the money into another loan, donate it to Kiva or return it to their bank account.

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Abby Johnson, who had worked at the Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, for the past eight years and had directed the Bryan business for the last two, resigned Oct. 6 after watching an ultrasound of an abortion procedure, reported the television station KBTX Nov. 1.

“I just thought, ”˜I can’t do this anymore,’ and it was just like a flash that hit me, and I thought, ”˜That’s it,’” said Johnson….

Johnson, an Episcopalian, has been meeting with the coalition’s executive director, Shawn Carney, and has prayed with volunteers outside Planned Parenthood. The world’s largest purveyor of abortion filed a temporary restraining order Oct. 30 against both Johnson and the Coalition for Life.

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The Strasbourg-based court, in a unanimous decision reached on Tuesday, said the presence of crucifixes “could be encouraging for [Christian] religious pupils, but also disturbing for pupils who practised other religions or were atheists, particularly if they belonged to religious minorities”. A chamber of seven judges (from Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Lithuania, Serbia, Hungary and Turkey) said: “The compulsory display of a symbol of a given confession in premises used by public authorities, especially in classrooms, thus restricted the rights of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions and the right of children to believe or not believe.”

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi called the decision “wrong and myopic”. He said it was “grave to try to marginalise from the educational system a fundamental sign of the importance of religious values in our history and in Italian culture”. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, said of the Stasbourg court ruling: “This Europe of the third millennium leaves us only with [Halloween] pumpkins and takes away our most precious symbols.” The CEI said the crucifix was not just a religious symbol but also a cultural sign, and part of the historic patrimony of the Italian people.

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One of the hardest things Ed Donaghy has ever done was leave his ministry as a Catholic priest. For months, he agonized over his conflicting desires to have a family and serve as a priest in the Sacramento Diocese.

In the end, Donaghy felt he had no choice. The priest, who served in Woodland, Calif., told his bishop that he had to leave.

That was four decades ago.

“It would have been wonderful to be married and be a priest,” said Donaghy, 73, now retired as an insurance agent. “I loved the work and would have continued.”

Donaghy is one of more than 75 men in the Sacramento area who have left active ministry in the priesthood to marry. Many of them, Donaghy said, “would have returned in a minute if the rules changed.” That is not likely to happen soon.

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For the most part, the new member churches were attracted to the diocese because of its more conservative theological views than the national Episcopal Church, said Bishop Robert Duncan.

“There has been a secular drift in the Episcopal Church in the U.S. and in the Anglican Church of Canada. It has caused the church to stray from core theology,” Duncan said yesterday at his diocese’s first convention since the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh split in two last year.

“There is a whole sense of freedom and joy here. We are not spending time debating differences,” said Peter Frank, a deacon at Grace Church in Mt. Washington.

For the Church of the Transfiguration of Cleveland, the realignment is an attempt to keep the church alive. The parish initially became interested in the Pittsburgh-based diocese when the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio said it planned to close the urban church.

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[On the Apostolic Constitution welcoming Anglicans who want to join Rome]

I think should be judged quite simply as what it is ”“ a generous response by the Holy Father to these groups of Anglicans who’ve been knocking at the door, particularly of the Holy Office, over these past years. Someone said to me “this is poaching”! That’s certainly not the intention at all. If these priests and lay people really want to become Catholics, then let’s have them, particularly if they’ve got a lot of lay people with them. Something like this is obviously going to be easier than receiving them one by one.

They’re attracted by being in communion with the Pope. Because they are anti the ordination of women to bishoprics, all right, that’s possible. But, deep down, it’s not just that. It’s the question: where is the authority that holds together the Church of Christ?

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