A draft text for a common statement on ecclesiology and mission was discussed. The Council will present it to the Anglican and Old Catholic Bishops’ Conference and recommends that it be made the theme of the forthcoming International Old Catholic and Anglican Theological Conference in 2011.
Attention was given to the recently published document “Kirche und Kirchengemeinschaft” (Church and Communion) of the International Roman Catholic-Old Catholic Dialogue Commission (IRAD), as well as to the recent Vatican announcement of the Apostolic Constitution to provide personal ordinariates for Anglicans and former Anglicans.
Old Catholics: rump sect in Middle Europe; essentially their branch of the Anglican Communion (the American Convocation and the C of E diocese serving their respective diplomats and expats). I understand they’re tiny. I think they’re dividing rather like the Anglicans now as their more orthodox Eastern European churches (ex-RC priests who married) are in impaired communion with the more Episcopalian-like Dutch and Germans (women priests and, coming soon, gay weddings).
They seemed to have a pretty good claim to legitimacy in the beginning, to even being the real Roman Catholic Church as papal minimalists who objected to Vatican I. Obviously that’s not true; they remained a small sect in their heartland and never took off in America for example (they tried). They always had a Modernist strain but for most of their history were very conservative (the Tridentine Mass in Dutch). That all changed after the 1960s.
The Polish National Catholic Church, a small immigrant schism from 100 years ago, was long the lone American outpost of Old Catholicism (from 1946 until the PNCC ended it in 1977 they were affiliated with the Episcopalians) but a few years ago went one step beyond their similar Eastern European cousins and have left that communion; they’re entirely on their own now.
(Not to be confused with the [i]vagante[/i] flea circus that often pretends it’s Old Catholic.)