Make no mistake, the Anglo-Catholics were done over at the General Synod in York in the debate over women bishops. This being the Church of England, their humiliation was accompanied by lots of hand-wringing, a good deal of guilt and a late attempt to stop the beating entirely, when the Bishop of Durham intervened like a worried boxing referee.
But it was bloody just the same. After nearly eight hours, all that the Catholic Conscience had to show for its pains was a motion that now indicates that it is the wish of a “majority” of the Synod for women to be bishops and the word “statutory” now stands in front of the proposed code of practice.
No structural provisions, no special arrangements, no statutory transfer, no flying bishops and certainly no super-bishops. I had thought that super-bishops were just flying bishops with special powers (“Is it a bird? Is it a plane?”) but it doesn’t matter what they are, because the Catholics can’t have them anyway.
[i]No structural provisions, no special arrangements, no statutory transfer, no flying bishops and certainly no super-bishops. … but it doesn’t matter what they are, because the Catholics can’t have them anyway.[/i]
“We don’t need GAFCon, because things like that don’t happen here”. (Anglican Bishop in England)
The C of E has schooled itself on ECUSA/TEC’s bag of tricks. It is the old Marxist model: DO the revolution, then create the ideology to support it.
Goodbye, Catholic Faith; Hello Spirit of the Age!
As I have just posted at *The Telegraph* website:
Here is the future of th Church of England, probably in less than a decade:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-09-032-f
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-02-036-f
and the synodsmen walked into this future with open eyes, the fools:
http://trushare.com/96may03/MY03COMM.htm
A Message from Bishop Edwin Barnes
President of The Church Union
Until July 2008 it was possible for members of the Church of England to claim to be part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. By the vote in General Synod on 7/7/08 that possibility was removed. Now catholic Anglicans are looking to the future without any real chance of remaining members of the Church of England.
Fifteen years ago, we were told we had an honoured place in that church, and that there would be no discrimination against any of us who believed in conscience that women could not be priests. Now, the majority in General Synod have reneged on those promises. They have sought to cover their naked ambition with the fig-leaf of a ‘code of practice’ but we are not deceived. The code of practice of the House of Bishops which accompanied the Act of Synod in 1993 has been either ignored or positively undermined by those in authority. The even-handedness which was promised us has been replaced by a determined and successful effort to ensure that no-one who believed women’s ordination might be against the will of God would gain any sort of senior office in the church.
For myself, this clear decision that the majority wants to be rid of us comes as a great relief. We can now begin to plan for a future which will not involve us in compromise. Our Fathers in God (the Provincial Episcopal Visitors, and the few remaining orthodox bishops such as Fulham, Chichester and a handful of others) will do their best to encourage us and keep us together, so that we can hold together. We believe our friends in the Roman Communion will do all they can to help us. Meanwhile, we must pray for one another and support one another – and pray for those who despitefully use us and want us gone. It is a sad time for the Church of England; but not for the Church of God. Great is the truth, and will prevail. God bless and sustain you – and in this interim the Church Union will do all it can to help you.
+ Edwin Barnes
And as Dom Gregory Dix so perceptively wrote 78 years ago:
From “The Revealing Church” by Dom Gregory Dix, *Laudate,* March 1930, pp. 24-46:
“It is because it leaves no room for faith, but ultimately only for opinion, that we have presumed to call this theory of the authority of a fallible Church impossible; it is because it has already broken down under trial that we call it reactionary. Queen Elizabeth’s renunciation of the title “Supreme Head,” with all that it implied, in favour of that of “Supreme Governor” is its exact equivalent. What the Elizabethan Church required, even under penalty of death, was obedience, not faith. Except for those doctrines upon which there was a general conventional orthodoxy at the moment quite apart from her dogmatic teaching, the English Church was to have no teaching and no revelation. Conformists might in their hearts believe what they willed of all the doctrines on which men differed –*– provided they conformed. It was the authority of a Church by its own Twenty-First article admittedly fallible most thoroughly enforced. and it is because she has continued to send men elsewhere than to herself for faith, to the “Primitive Church” or to “the consensus” –**– that the English Church for four centuries has been unable to assert her authority or to secure the obedience she has demanded. Because unless faith be the spring of obedience, in many things obedience is impossible. And now, after three hundred years of turmoil, we are presented with a resurrected Queen Elizabeth, busked in some scraps of Canon Streeters armour, and told that this is and ever shall be, not the Church of England only, but the whole Catholic Church of Christ. Non tali auxilio shall we end our troubles. It was she who first erected unreliability into a system and began them.”
* as, of course, we see today, and not least on this blog, with “reasserters” unable to agree on WO, divorce-and-remarriage, the nature of the Church, etc., — as Dix wrote, where there is no “general conventional orthodoxy,” even among “reasserters,” men may believe “what they will.”
** had Dix been writing today, he might have added “or to the fancies of feminist theology, lesbigay theology, the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion,’ the conformity to bien-pensant public opinion — all recycled versions of that ‘Erastianism’ that Henry and Elizabeth wrote into the genetic code of the institution that they hijacked and transformed.
WJT
[blockquote] It was the authority of a Church by its own Twenty-First article admittedly fallible though most thoroughly enforced. And it is because she has continued to send men elsewhere than to herself for the faith, to the “Primitive Church†or to “the consensus†–**– that the English Church for four centuries has been unable to assert her authority or to secure the obedience she has demanded. [blockqoute]
There it is and how true. Regardless of any claim to having Apostolic Orders, the “Churches” of the Anglican Communion have only been pretenders to the throne. We who are “Anglo-Catholics” in the Episcopal Church, CofE, etc., worship the Triune God according to the Catholic Faith and with the Catholic Sacraments, but we do so outside the Catholic Church–as novel as that may sound.
It seems to me, that Anglicanism has only ever been a structure where Catholicism may loosely abide, but has never been the Catholic Church, or “part of it” -whatever that really means.
I hope and pray that whatever en-masse option Rome might offer to the English Anglo-Catholics, they will generously offer to Americans as well.
I’m wondering how the English Reaction might be making other American Anglo-Catholics rethink their own situation?
Sadly, from either perspective….I somehow wonder if it was bloody enough.
Interesting, womens ordination soon followed by the train wreck of the church, could there be some connection?
I have some questions, among which are:
(1) If a person truly questions whether a woman cleric can validly preside as a priest or bishop over the Sacrement of Eucharist, does that make such a doubter a Donatist or something similar?
(2) If a person believes that bread and wine are not transformed into The Flesh and The Blood when a woman cleric presides over the
the Sacrement of the Eucharist, unless a participating male cleric is present, does that make such a believer a Donatist or something similar?
(3) If person believes that when a woman cleric presides over the Sacrement of the Eucharist, that the Eucharist is at best a ‘memorial’ and not a valid sacrement, is such a person a Donatist or something similar?
Based upon what the definition of Donatism found in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (third edition revised):
[blockquote]”Theologically the Donatists were rigorists, holding that the Church of the saints must remain ‘holy’ (cf. Novatianism), and that sacraments confered by [i]traditores[/i] were invalid/ A[art frp, tjeor demoa; tjat Felix of Aptunga was in fact a traditor, the Church maintained that the unworthiness of the minister did not affect the validity of the sacraments, since, as Augustine insisted, their true minister was Christ. The Donatists, on the other hand, went so far as to assert that ll those who communicated with [i]traditores[/i] were infected, and that, since the Church is one and holy, the Donatists alone formed the Church.”[/blockquote] page 503
So I believe the answer to all three of your questions is yes.
I think not. The donatists never questioned that the priests had been priests or bishops. Here they would deny that women are priests at all, but merly laypeople.
I too have some questions, among which are:
(1) If a person decides they have a right to re-interpret scripture, abandon tradition and act in defience of the vast majority of Christians down the ages and worlwide today – does that make them totally ill equipped to start using the language of heresy?
(2) Is a person who has consistently ignored theology, appealled to popularist secular opinion and used the language of inclusivity and justice whilst offering no inclusive provision whatsoever to those who were promised an honoured place – acting in a manner that honours Jesus Christ?
(3) If a person- realising how hurt traditionlists are feeling- being hounded out of their own Church for no greater crime than believing what that same church taught from childhood- then posts rather smug comments assuming some form of superiortiy – does this make them appear ungracious, crowing and uncharitable?
You tell me?
I would argue far from being a Donatist – I adopt the same position as millions of faithful followers including S. peter, S. Augustine, Mother Theresa, Pope Benedict, C S Lewis, Bartholomew the Ecumenical Patriarch, Maximilian Kolbe et al…..
…your list includes Katherine Schori…Christina Rees…
Enough said?
The answer is no, not yes. Donatists believed that bishops and priests lost the charism of their orders when they bowed to the enforcers of pagan authority. Those against WO believe simply that women have never had, and never can have, the charism of holy orders.
Have you seen this?
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/opinion/o0000261.shtml
Re #’s 9 & 10 above: The charge of Donatism as made by Revisionists continues to do little but demonstrate the ignorance of those leveling it. Anglo-Catholics such as myself who reject WO do so not on the Donatist grounds that moral terpitude obviates a previously a valid ordination, but rather that the Church has no authority to ordain women (oh, and incidentally, no one I know thinks it a sin to be a woman) into the Apostolic Succession without at least a General Council to seek her mind. There is also the fact that there are 2000 years’ worth of votes cast in the other direction and a truly Catholic Church cannot simply ignore the saints who have gone before. Even if there were a consensus in favor of WO (and there is nothing remotely close to one), no action should have been taken for at least two centuries. There is no injustice in the Church’s practice and no clear scriptural warrant for the change. It has long been clear that a growing majority of Anglicans world-wide have no interest in Catholicy. Revisionists in the west because they prefer mere “inclusiveness”, a shallow and vapid imitation, and most in the Global South because of their Protestant rejection of, inter alia, Catholic sacramental theology, as witness the GAFCON document “The Way, the Truth and the Life”. The latter at least have the advantage of being recognizeably Christian. As to the former, well, the less said the better. I’m not sure what the proper response for Catholics is. I currently incline to some variation of Lord Acton’s (admittedly overblown) response to the first Vatican Council: “Just because the Pope is no longer Catholic doesn’t mean that I am.”