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The legacy of the past half century of dialogue between the different Christian denominations and the future direction of the ecumenical journey were under the spotlight here in the Vatican last night. Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams and Orthodox Metropolitan John Zizioulas joined past and present members of the Pontifical council for Christian Unity for a celebration recalling the founding of their original Secretariat by Pope John XXIII in 1960 in preparation for the Second Vatican Council.Drawing inspiration from New Testament texts, Dr Williams spoke of the three dimensions of unity ”“ with Christ, with each other and with the apostolic tradition ”“ which can underpin a new phase of ecumenical dialogue. Urging his listeners not to lose sight of the ”˜Ut Unum Sint agenda’, he called for shared reflection on the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed and, above all, on Eucharistic theology which he said has ”˜worn thin’ in many Christian communities.

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O God of peace, by whose grace the abbess Hilda was endowed with gifts of justice, prudence, and strength to rule as a wise mother over the nuns and monks of her household, and to become a trusted and reconciling friend to leaders of the Church: Give us the grace to respect and love our fellow Christians with whom we disagree, that our common life may be enriched and thy gracious will be done, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Teach me, O God, to walk trustfully today in thy presence, that thy voice may encourage me, thine arm defend me, and thy love surround me; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain”; whereas you do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that.”

–James 4:13-15

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In the Vatican’s dealings with the Anglicans, the detail of how Bishops, priest and congregations should be received into unity with the Catholic Church was properly a matter for the Catholic Church alone. The establishment of a secretariate to reflect on such questions as the criteria for deciding whether people approved for ministry in one church should be accepted into Catholic ministry, and how the new group should relate institutionally to other groups within the Catholic Church, was an internal Catholic decision.

But respect would seem to demand that public announcement of special provisions for Anglican congregations and clergy were preceded by consultation and proper communication. It is clear from Archbishop Rowan Williams’ response that this was not done satisfactorily. That the failure represented an older view of Catholic exceptionalism is suggested by the fact that the documents grounding the Vatican initiative maximised Catholic uniqueness.

Respect also normally demands reciprocity. This is germane in deciding whether congregations and other groups that move from one church to another should retain the use and ownership of their churches and other property. Under this principle, Catholic groups which decided to associate with the Anglican church would have the same rights to property as Anglican groups who wished to become Catholic.

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One in every five Chinese marriages now ends in divorce, double the rate a decade ago.

Beijing has the highest divorce rate nationwide, with 39 percent of all marriages ending in a split.

This trend is sparking concern. Experts fear that the divorce rate will continue to soar, particularly among the younger generation of Chinese born under the country’s one-child policy and during China’s explosive economic growth.

Six years ago, one of China’s most popular soap operas was called Chinese-Style Divorce. It was the tale of a struggling couple, wracked by financial stresses and misunderstandings that were never addressed. The cracks in their relationship grew into a gulf, then their marriage fell apart.

Six years on, that is not the story of today’s Chinese-style divorces. For China’s “me generation,” the latest trend is “lightning weddings” ”” or instantaneous weddings ”” which often end in correspondingly fast divorces.

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In a dramatic break with tradition, U.S. Catholic bishops on Tuesday (Nov. 16) elected New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan as their next president, choosing a friendly but assertive leader over the more conciliatory front-runner.

Dolan defeated Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, Ariz., 128 to 111 in the third and final round of voting. Kicanas has been vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, traditionally a stepping stone to the presidency, since 2007, when he defeated Dolan by two votes.

Tuesday’s election marks the first time since the 1960s that a sitting vice president was on the presidential ballot and lost the election, according to church historians.

Noting that two conservative candidates led the voting for vice president, observers said the elections show that the bishops’conference is moving sharply to the right — with consequences not only for Catholics but also for politicians who court a crucial swing vote.

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Five weeks after the Legislature passed a budget that promised to close a $19 billion budget shortfall, California has sunk back into yet another fiscal crisis, this time facing a $26 billion gap that is posing a major new challenge for the incoming governor, Jerry Brown, and seems almost certain to force deep cuts in a state already reeling from three years of financial turmoil.

The departing governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has called a special session of the Legislature for Dec. 6 to begin dealing with one part of the problem: a projected $6 billion shortfall in the $126 billion budget passed in October, a record 100 days late. Mr. Schwarzenegger’s aides said the governor, a Republican who has fought repeatedly with Democrats in pushing through deep spending cuts, will propose another round of reductions to get the state through the end of this fiscal year in June.

“There’s no more easy stuff to cut,” Susan Kennedy, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, said Monday. “We are cutting into bone now.”

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Willy Delsaert is a retired railroad employee with dyslexia who practiced intensively before facing the suburban Don Bosco Catholic parish to perform the Sunday Mass rituals he grew up with.

“Who takes this bread and eats,” he murmured, cracking a communion wafer with his wife at his side, “declares a desire for a new world.”

With those words, Mr. Delsaert, 60, and his fellow parishioners are discreetly pioneering a grass-roots movement that defies centuries of Roman Catholic Church doctrine by worshiping and sharing communion without a priest.

Don Bosco is one of about a dozen alternative Catholic churches that have sprouted and grown in the last two years in Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium and the Netherlands. They are an uneasy reaction to a combination of forces: a shortage of priests, the closing of churches, dissatisfaction with Vatican appointments of conservative bishops and, most recently, dismay over cover-ups of sexual abuse by priests.

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Kathy DeGrego’s T-shirt lets you know right away she isn’t an old-school librarian.

“Shhh,” it says, “is a four-letter word.”

That spirit of bookish defiance has guided the makeover of the suburban Denver library system where DeGrego works. Reference desks and study carrels have been replaced by rooms where kids can play Guitar Hero. Overdue book fines have been eliminated, and the arcane Dewey Decimal System has been scrapped in favor of bookstore-like sections organized by topic.

“It’s very common for people to say, ‘Why do I need a library when I’ve got a computer?’ ” said Pam Sandlian-Smith, director of the seven-branch Rangeview, Colo., Library District. “We have to reframe what the library means to the community.”

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As you know, there are three basic issues in the recent public debate. The first is empirical: does the current legislation permit the funding of abortion beyond the restrictions imposed by the Hyde amendment, that testimony to a faithful Catholic politician from Illinois that has been the firewall keeping public money out of funding almost all abortions and out of insurance plans that fund abortion? What we have is legislation that, by vote, first in the Senate and then confirmed in the House, explicitly removed the Hyde amendment restrictions from this federal law. Lay people who carefully analyzed the contents of the legislation as it was being torturously crafted freed us, the bishops, to make the necessary moral judgments. Some have protested that the legislation is complicated and we therefore shouldn’t pretend to judge it. If you will excuse my saying so, this implies either that no one can understand or judge complicated pieces of legislation, in which case it is immoral to act until sufficient clarity is obtained, or it is to say that only bishops are too dense to understand complicated pieces of legislation! In fact, developments since the passage of the legislation have settled the empirical issue: our analysis of what the law itself says was correct, and our moral judgments are secure and correct. Throughout this public debate, the bishops kept the moral and intellectual integrity of the faith intact, and I thank in your name those who helped us in exercising our obligations as moral teachers in the Church.

The second issue is ecclesiological: who speaks for the Catholic Church? We bishops have no illusions about our speaking for everyone who considers himself or herself Catholic; but that is not our job. We speak for the apostolic faith, and those who hold it gather round. We must listen to the sensus fidei, the sense of the faith itself in the lives of our people, but this is different from intellectual trends and public opinion. The faith has its own warrants in Scripture and tradition, and we consult them and listen to the apostolic voices of those who have gone before us as carefully as we must listen to those whom the Lord has given us to govern on our watch, in our day, as they strive to work out their salvation in the midst of contemporary challenges. The bishops in apostolic communion and in union with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, speak for the Church in matters of faith and in moral issues and the laws surrounding them. All the rest is opinion, often well-considered and important opinion that deserves a careful and respectful hearing, but still opinion.

The third issue is practical: how should faithful Catholics approach political issues that are also moral?

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The British Columbia Court of Appeal has dismissed appeals of a November 2009 Supreme Court of British Columbia decision. The decision had ruled that the Anglican diocese of New Westminster should retain possession of four church properties in the Vancouver area.

The legal dispute arose after four congregations voted to leave the Anglican Church of Canada to affiliate with the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC). The disagreement was focused on the issue of same-sex blessings, which have been performed in some parishes in the diocese of New Westminster for several years. Churches in ANiC do not allow the blessing of same-sex relationships.

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(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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Neither side in a long, bitter war over Anglican Church property in Vancouver and Abbotsford expects any Christmas services will have to be moved elsewhere this December.

But Vancouver-area Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham began moving Tuesday to replace the dissident priests at four congregations that have failed to obtain legal control of Anglican Church properties valued at more than $20 million.

Since the conservative priests have already resigned from the Anglican Church of Canada to work for a breakaway Anglican organization, the diocese said in a statement, those clergy “will need to continue their ministry in other locations.”

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There will be sovereign defaults in the eurozone, with a default by Greece now inevitable. Ultimately the thing that underpins any country’s debts is its ability to raise enough tax to service and eventually repay them. Greece cannot hope to do that. Ireland will be pushed to do so but probably can. I would, however, worry about the long-term credit-worthiness of Portugal, Spain and Italy.

So then you have to ask whether a default of a eurozone state breaks up the eurozone. I don’t think we know the answer to that yet. We do know that the Germans, who hold the cards, will do absolutely everything they can to stop such a default, even if they have to grit their teeth as they do so. My instinct is that a country defaulting would not of itself lead to that country leaving the euro, but if its costs and prices were totally out of line, that probably would be the least painful way of extracting itself. If that is right in the short-term, things will be patched up and the euro will come through this downturn intact. But the next downturn, in five or 10 years’ time? Surely not.

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Niceness may be enough to carry a measure through an inexperienced and supine General Synod, but it can hardly make the covenant a transformative consciousness raiser, let alone the turbine of a more mutually engaged global denomination. However the General Synod votes, the big issue for the covenant process thereafter will be securing buy-in, confronted by zealots’ disappointment and majority indifference.

It is often observed that individual Anglicans around the world recognise, like and enjoy each other’s company. They generally get on like a house on fire at local level. Their institutional quadrille is where the problems lie. Covenant afficionados may hope beefing up the formal denomination will improve informal relationships. Others fear beefier formalities will sour them.

One Conservative blogger announced this week, tongue slightly in cheek perhaps, that he had believed the covenant useless, until it had been drawn to his attention how much it annoyed Liberals. Et voilà. Even as a kicking foetus, the covenant is already annoying people. This doesn’t imply that once born it will only be used only to promote understanding and harmony. Nice people will use it nicely ”“ others won’t. Real copper-bottomed zealots will almost certainly carry on regardless. The god of unintended consequences will stand in the background, smiling.

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The covenant has been portrayed, and betrayed, by its detractors as a dangerous, monolithic innovation of regulatory control, which will stifle freedom and diversity. But forced assimilation is not on the table, and it is false witness to dress it up as such. Gregory Cameron (secretary to the group who produced the covenant) and Andrew Goddard (Anglican ethicist) have demonstrated that its detractors have seriously misconstrued the text and its intention.

The model of the covenant is drawn from family ties and kinship and bounded by mutually agreed norms of behaviour which benefit everyone. It is not a document of doctrinal specifications, like the conservative Jerusalem Declaration, drawn up mostly by those who boycotted the Lambeth conference. Nor is it a contract, as feared by its liberal critics. It is truly a covenant.

In his address to the Lambeth conference 2008, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, was pithily penetrative and perceptive in drawing out contrasts: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us’. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”

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To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything he has given us ”“ and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful man or woman knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.

–Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus and Geroux, 1956), p. 33

Holy God, our greatest treasure, who didst bless Hugh and Robert, Bishops of Lincoln, with wise and cheerful boldness for the proclamation of thy Word to rich and poor alike: Grant that all who minister in thy Name may serve with diligence, discipline and humility, fearing nothing but the loss of thee and drawing all to thee through Jesus Christ our Savior; who liveth and reigneth with thee in the communion of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace;
that is enough for me.

–Saint Ignatius of Loyola

For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering; for my name is great among the nations, says the LORD of hosts.

–Malachi 1:11

The outgoing head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops vigorously defended the bishops’ opposition to the health care reform bill, asserting that only bishops can speak for the church on matters of faith and morals.

“All the rest is opinion,” Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said on Monday (Nov. 15), “often well-considered and important opinion that deserves a careful and respectful hearing, but still opinion.”

George’s three-year presidential term ends Tuesday, when the bishops will elect his successor.

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Facing a drop in attendance and a shortage of priests, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn plans to close two churches, fold six parishes into three and impose strict budget constraints on all 198 of its parishes.

The move, announced from pulpits on Sunday, was described by church officials as the first phase of a broad consolidation that will result in further closings or mergers over the next two years, eventually affecting every parish in the diocese, which serves an estimated 1.5 million Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens.

Coming on the heels of the largest school reorganization in the history of the neighboring Archdiocese of New York, which announced provisional plans last week to close 31 parochial schools and one high school, the Brooklyn announcement underscored a sense of urgency in the church hierarchy about the financial impact of long-term population shifts, changing religious routines, aging church properties and a shrinking work force of priests.

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The spirit of Socrates will be evoked tonight in the IQ2 debate at City Recital Hall, where speakers will argue over the teaching of ethics in NSW primary schools.

Parents who believed their children would benefit from the state government’s ethics program at the expense of attending Special Religious Education were the victims of a populist and uninformed debate, the Anglican Bishop of North Sydney, Glenn Davies, told the Herald yesterday. He will speak in the negative to the proposal that special ethics education should be allowed for children not attending scripture classes.
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Simon Longstaff, the executive director of the St James Ethics Centre that devised the now completed pilot program, will step down from his usual position as IQ2 chairman of the debate to argue for the affirmative.

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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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The New Testament Reign of God welcomes non-Christians as common seekers after a truth fully revealed in Jesus Christ but experienced in different historical settings by other religions as well. The Kingdom was consistently made available to outsiders. Jesus said to a Roman centurion, “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.” (Mat.: 8:10) To a Canaanite woman he declared in healing her daughter, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” (Mat. 15:21-28). Jesus conversed with a foreigner, a Samaritan woman, (Jn. 4:7-15) who sought “living water” and elsewhere cited the example of the “good Samaritan” who had pity on a wounded robbery victim (Lk. 10: 29-37). Pagans, outsiders, or foreigners were consistently welcomed by Jesus, and at the final Passover dinner he told his followers he would not eat the Passover again “until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” (Lk 22: 16).

This, in broad outline, is a reading of what the Reign of God means. Many world theologians of recent decades understand the kingdom to be freely offered to both believers and members of other religions. If their lives and beliefs reflect what Jesus preached, they too are witnesses to the Kingdom in global settings. This moves considerably beyond Rahner’s “anonymous Christians” and the classic confines of Exclusivists and Inclusivists, and affirms that God’s loving reach extends to other religions, most of which the earthly Jesus would not have encountered in the Middle East of his time.

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Many things have already been said in the public arena about the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant. As Provinces around the world continue to discuss this important document I think it worth clarifying some points about it. I am not arguing here for or against the Covenant, merely pointing out that it should be debated fairly, with an accurate reading of the text….

The point of the processes outlined in the Covenant is precisely to encourage one part of the Communion, when seeking to respond responsibly in its own context in mission, to consider how that will affect other parts of the Communion It is not that one Province would exercise a veto over another, but that there would be collaborative discernment. In a globalised world, it is no longer possible (if it ever was) for one church to act entirely for itself; decisions have ramifications, and the intention is for these to be explored together.

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