They worship in a former Catholic sanctuary, led by a former Catholic priest.
And if any congregation in Western New York were to take up Pope Benedict XVI’s recent landmark overture to Anglicans, it most likely would be St. Nicholas Anglican Church in West Seneca.
The small, “Anglo-Catholic” congregation uses a liturgy that mirrors a traditional Catholic Mass, adheres to a male-only clergy and has parishioners open to the possibility of entering into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.
“This would be very typically the type of congregation the pope is targeting,” said the Rev. Gene Bagen, rector of St. Nicholas.
I had understood that this congregation had only joined APA fairly recently. What happened to make them want to drop APA in favor of this new scheme? Or, is Grundorf in support of this and does he intend to bring the APA under Rome. It is rather unlikely that Rome would want to ordain former priests who had abandoned the Vatican and spent time within Anglican groups and I am sure there will be no place in the Apostolic Constitution for divorced or remarried clergy of whom there are several in the APA including Bp Grundorf, himself. The folks in the APA need to ask themselves where their leadership is taking them.
The APA is relatively low-church among Continuers and in any event is in the American Anglo-Catholic mould, that is, non-papal.
In any event the reporter should have read the Apostolic Constitution etc.: ex-RC priests won’t be allowed to serve in the ordinariate.
Also, the APA are not Anglicans (just like things and people not actually under Rome aren’t Roman Catholic). The Episcopalians are. An Anglican’s bishop is invited to Lambeth.
The story was worth writing but this seems another example of sloppy religion reporting.
Not ALL Anglican bishops are invited to Lambeth. Just ask the current Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire! I would suggest that what is and what is not Anglican these days is a bit more complicated than #3 suggests.
[Comment deleted by Elf]
Yes, not inviting Bishop Robinson made no sense really considering that all the bishops who approved and consecrated him were. The liberals’ outrage made sense. (He is obviously an Anglican bishop because the church that consecrated him is invited to Lambeth.)
Wonder what Mr Miller thought of Bishop Spong’s open call for women and homosexual RCs to convert.
(Normally Episcopalians and RCs don’t compete but the former have been trying to convert immigrants from the latter for years, from false-flag operations – [i]Parroquia Episcopal de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe[/i], etc. – to soup kitchens and other charitable work as a velvet glove with a hook in it. They tried to do it with Italians and now with Hispanics with the same negligible results.)
Yes, better to have honest opposition.
How does a bunch of English would-be RCs converting, clearing the way for C of E women bishops etc. which Mr Miller probably likes, affect Mr Miller or his congregation?
[Edited by Elf – please be careful how you express yourself]
One major problem with the story: Fr. Bagen won’t be allowed to come into the Ordinariate.
fatherlee is correct, and not just Fr. Bagen. Even though I was a RC layman and subsequently became an Episcopal priest, I’m excluded from the ordination process in the Catholic Church. Being ordained in another church is viewed as a very serious violation of conscience. I”m surprised the article didn’t pick that up.
7 and 8 are right. If a man was ever a Roman Catholic, he is automatically excluded from either the earlier or this recent offer of ordination for those ordained in the AC. (Of course women aren’t even in the picture)
So if the St. Nicholas’ parish does go to Rome, the rector will have to resign himself to being a layman, or leave the parish and go elsewhere.
Agreed, but I would vigorously dispute the claim of young fogey above in #3. Although his opinion is widely held, being Anglican and being a part of the AC are most certainly NOT synonymous (IMHO). But that all depends on what criteria you use for defining “Anglican,” doesn’t it?
And of course, that’s one of the major problems with Anglicanism, and always has been: the nature of Anglican identity has been fuzzy, with indeterminate boundaries. Were the non-Jurors who refused to submit to the “Glorious Revolution” under William and Mary in 1689 genuine Anglicans? Was John Wesley+ an Anglican, as he insisted he was to his dying day, despite his rebellion against the English parish system? Are the members of the REC truly Anglican, although they’ve been outside the AC since that group began over 130 years ago? And if not, why not??
One of the most significant things about GAFCON and the subsequent FCA movement is that we represent an attempt to redefine the basis of Anglican identity, focusing more on doctrine than on polity, although both are important. But GAFCON included bishops from outside the AC, and rightly so. As the Jerusalem Declaration implicitly insists, doctrine trumps polity, not vice versa.
In the end, of course, it all comes down to this all-important question, Who gets to make that decision about who is in and who is out, and who has the power to make that decision stick?
And as usual, that too is a disputed matter. There is no universal agreement about the answer. For the first century and more of its existence after the Reformation, the answer as to who had that authority was quite clear: the British monarch did as the Supreme Governor of the CoE. But those days are long gone, and the vacuum created by the reduction of the monarchy to a mere shadow of its former self has gone unfilled.
This untenable situation can’t go on. It’s high time to clear up the confusion and redefine Anglican identity authoritatively. But any acceptable solution will inevitably mean that lots of people currently in the AC will end up being excluded as heretics, and lots of people currently outside the AC will be welcomed back into the fold, as they have been far more faithful to the classical standards of Anglican doctrine, discipline, and worship.
David Handy+
LumenChristie,
That s how I understand Rome’s offer, that former RCs and divorced/re-married Anglican clergy will find themselves beyond the pale.
David,
How many divorced/re-married clergy do you think there may be currently in TEC and in ACNA? I recall, when I was a boy and even when I became Anglican, that divorce was verboten, particularly for the clergy; but as I indicated in my first comment the APA’s Presiding bishop is divorced and re-married. So any serious discussion that these groups are having about crossing the Tiber must entail facing the very real problem of divorce, especially for the clergy.
#3 and #6 seem to make contradictory assertions.
1. If it is true that an Anglican bishop invited to Lambeth (as #3 argues) then Bishop Robinson’s “Anglican” status seems as debatable as any ACNA bishop.
2. If it is true that true that Bishop Robinson’s Anglican status is not debatable because the remainder of his Province’s bishops were invited then the US bishops that are part of various African Provinces or the Southern Cone will argue they have a similar status.
The truth is that there is no agreed criterion for membership of the Anglican Communion which is hardly surprising since the various parties can’t agree quite what is the ecclesial status of the Communion. It seems to me that the only reason that TEC leadership has a view at all about which bishops can claim to be Anglican concerns the property disputes and the troublesome constitutional commitment to membership of the Anglican Communion.