The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has named Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington to guide the incorporation of Anglican groups into the Catholic Church in the United States.
In this position, he is a delegate of the congregation and heads the U.S. bishops’ ad hoc committee charged with assisting CDF in implementing the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus. Pope Benedict XVI issued the document in November 2009 to provide for establishing personal ordinariates for Anglican groups who seek to enter corporately into full communion with the Catholic Church.
Update: Rocco has important comments on this:
Intriguingly, it bears noting that Rome’s choice of its US delegate has fallen to a prelate: 1. whose mentor, the late Cardinal John Wright, bore a particularly concerted devotion to the now-Blessed John Henry Newman… and 2. who is particularly well known to the most prominent leader of US Anglicanism’s breakaway traditional faction.
Bishop of his native Pittsburgh until his DC transfer in 2006, Wuerl shares warm ties with the Steel City’s former Episcopal bishop, Robert Duncan, who led much of his flock out of the Anglican Communion’s traditional American province last year to become the founding head of a parallel group, the Anglican Church in North America. (Duncan was accordingly deposed as a cleric of the Episcopal church.)
What’s more, after the 2003 consecration of New Hampshire’s Gene Robinson as the Communion’s first openly-gay hierarch — the watershed moment in Anglicanism’s long-simmering divide over hot-button doctrinal and moral questions — the roots for what’s become the ACNA were laid at a summit in Plano, Texas, which drew an eyebrow-raising letter from a lone ecumenical representative pledging his “heartfelt prayers” for the gathering as he observed that “significance of your meeting is [being] sensed far beyond” the South, and even beyond the walls of the Anglican Communion.
The buzzards are circling. No thanks to Rowan Williams for supporting good Anglicans in the US. Would that we had one such as the Pope as Archbishop!
It would appear too that release of this news was postponed until after the Pope visited Scotland and England and met with the ABC.
Does anyone know how many anglicans are expected to take up Anglican Coetibus? Members of the TAC appear to have somewhat mixed reactions to it.
#3, as a non-Anglican but sympathetic observer of Anglicanism for a few years, I can confidently predict the following: mixed reactions, tons and tons of discussion, quite a bit of squabbling, and a final uptake of somewhere between zero and lots, probably nearer to zero than to lots. Let me know if I’m wrong!