For years, I thought I was called to be an Anglican priest. My wife and I wanted to plant an Anglican church in Minneapolis. To that end, I attended a beautiful Anglican seminary couched in the forests of Wisconsin. There, surrounded by men and women much holier than myself, I was challenged to grow up in Christ. During the course of my studies and discernment, I came to believe that Christ intended his Church to be apostolic\u201d\u201dand also that Rome had greatly exaggerated Peter\u2019s role in the apostolic college. I had many opinions about the papacy, most of them clouded by exaggeration and fabrication, and considered myself to be more Catholic than the Catholics.
\u201cAre you Episcopalian?\u201d\u009d people asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I am Anglican,\u201d\u009d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut aren\u2019t Episcopalians Anglican?\u201d\u009d they asked.<\/p>\n
And I would try my best to explain how the Anglican communion is full of national churches and independent provinces that are out of communion with one another. By my senior year, I was tongue-tied.<\/p>\n
Schism\u201d\u201dhowever sincerely felt, conventional, or culturally imperative\u201d\u201dremains schism. Anglicanism has not essentially changed since the moment King Henry VIII had, in the most frightening sense of the phrase, an original idea. Time and habit\u201d\u201dtogether with popular acceptance and the enduring appeal of fresh breaks (I was in the ACNA, a break-off from TEC)\u201d\u201ddo not transform the Church of England into a \u201cbranch\u201d\u009d of the Catholic Church. Time\u2019s passage does not a Catholic Church make. In fact, just the opposite happens: the longer Anglicans remain out of communion with Peter\u2019s successor, the pope, the longer the principle of decay can take effect. As in the moment of the original break, the result of schism is something schismatic every single second.<\/p>\n
We should not mistake the gradual numbing of our awareness of schism with its disappearance or release from our ongoing responsibility for it; much less should we excuse such visible disunity by appealing to an invisible \u201cunity in Christ\u201d\u009d\u201d\u201dat least not while we\u2019re praying \u201con earth as it is in heaven.\u201d\u009d The Church is more than a surface-level illusion.<\/p>\n