Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, retired archbishop of Westminster, said a forthcoming apostolic constitution to establish “personal ordinariates” should not be seen as an attempt by the Vatican to poach Anglicans disaffected by such issues as the ordination of women and sexually active homosexuals as priests and bishops.
The former Catholic co-chairman of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission made his remarks in the Richard Stewart Memorial Lecture at Worth Abbey, near London, Oct. 29. He said the canonical structures announced in Rome and London Oct. 20 were simply a generous response to requests over a number of years by Anglican communities that wanted to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of distinctive spiritual patrimony.
“There is much that has been written and spoken about this matter over the past week but I would just want to emphasize that this response of Pope Benedict is no reflection or comment on the Anglican Communion as a whole or of our ongoing ecumenical relationship with them,” said the cardinal, 77, the former president of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.
Actually, I’d say not only it is in fact such a reflection, but it’s also a reflection on CMOC.
With all due respect to His Eminence, I think he has been opposed to this from the start. He was clearly out of the loop in the Vatican and his opinion frankly sounds more like propaganda than a realistic assessment of the situation. The good Cardinal Archbishop is one of the dying breed of 1960’s kumbaya ecumenists who can’t grasp that Rome is not about to become Protestant.
In ICXC
John
I don’t think it is coincidence that those in Rome waited for His Eminence to retire before putting this plan in place. I believe he was known to be very much against anything that would have resembled this plan.
Bless his heart!
“There is much that has been written and spoken about this matter over the past week but I would just want to emphasize that this response of Pope Benedict is no reflection or comment on the Anglican Communion as a whole or of our ongoing ecumenical relationship with them,” said the cardinal…
Hard to believe.
Au contraire, Your Eminence, au contraire.