Church of Uganda yesterday said Vatican’s open invite to disgruntled Anglicans to embrace the Catholic Church for spiritual relief will have no effect on its following. Ms Alison Barfoot, the Churches external relations officer, said there are no Anglican-Catholic members in their fold to heed the Pope’s call.
Critics say the Apostolic Constitution or decree that Rome made public last month appears calculated to exploit the intra-Anglican divide and trigger mass defections over the issue of homosexuality and consecration of women as bishops. “It seems the Pope created the structure [of Anglican Ordinariate] to allow the disaffected, especially Anglo-Catholic, to preserve their tradition of prayers and liturgy while allowing them to be Catholics,” she said, adding: “We don’t think it’s going to have any impact here.”
So my friend Alison Barfoot+ doesn’t think there will be any signficant impact on the Anglican Church of Uganda since there are virtually no Anglo-Catholics there?
Surprise. Surprise.
And in further news, tomorrow is Wednesday and the day after that is American Thanksgiving.
That’s not a slam on Alison. Just maybe amusement that this paper thought this “revelation” about the Ugandan church was newsworthy.
David Handy+
David, I have been a Catholic, lo! these 20 years. Even longer ago I used to work for CMS, the major Anglican missionary society in Uganda, a strongly evangelical organization. (Just to remove any doubt: great Christians, who taught me much about discipleship, and whom I enormously respect.) Anyway, I once caused a frisson by referring to the altar in the CMS chapel. I was rapped on the knuckles and asked in genuine bafflement what I was to call it. It was, I was informed, the holy table. Yes – you are right – I don’t think that there will be any takers under this scheme in Uganda. But we might note the astonishing growth of the Orthodox Church in Uganda which is now under the Patriarchate of Alexandria and virtually entirely African-led right from the beginning when an Anglican, Reuben Mukasa, decided in 1919 after his own research that Orthodoxy was the most appropriate indigenous expression of Christianity. It’s a remarkable story.
Thanks, Fr. Tee. I had no idea about your CMS background or your time in Uganda. I have no firsthand knowledge of Anglicanism there, so your testimony carries much more weight. There are many places in the world where the deep divide between low-church CMS missions work and high-church (U)SPG mission work was, and perhaps still is, rather stark. South India would be one such place, Tanzania another. Fortunately, from what I’ve heard and read, once indigenous leaders took over, those imported churchmanship divisions have tended to fade.
As for that remarkable story of the emergence of an indigenous form of Eastern Orthodoxy in Uganda, I’m glad you brought it up. I once knew a former TEC priest in my hometown of Sioux Falls, SD, who had a story that was in some ways similar to Reuben Mukasa’s. That is, he was ethnically a Lakota/Sioux, but he eventually found the mysticism of Russian Orthodoxy more congenial to his Indian tribal roots than Anglicanism. But he didn’t succeed in starting a whole movement, like Mukasa.
I’m glad you chime in often here, Terry.
David Handy+