Thursday, October 22, 2009

West-West Unity: who gets the credit?

I'm a life-long Catholic, but this sudden profusion of claims surprises me as much as anyone.

5 comments:

A said...

Definately Cardinal Newman, he is becoming a saint next year.

But I'm still new to the whole saintly intercession business.

Michael said...

Like Cardinal Newman, I was (briefly!) an Anglican who became a Catholic after studying the Faith and its history.

Unlike him I am not a Cardinal or even very clever.

When I became a Catholic it did strike me as very obvious that there should be some sort of "Anglican Rite" within the Church though.

I had a brief phase of longing to join the Orthodox or Eastern Rite Church before realising that sticking with one's own tradition is the only way to make progress; however, the fact that a lot of Anglicans consider themselves sort of "English Orthodox" made me wonder, why not? And the new openness to the Eastern Churches made it seem quite plausible.

I can't claim any credit for this new step though, since foolishly I didn't write immediately to Rowan and the then Pope JPII to suggest this obvious move.

Fred said...

L'Innominato - so you're Anglican again? Maybe you can help me with a question. In Anglicanism, some folks hold to a position of Western Orthodoxy, as you say; others reject Holy Orders as a full sacrament, considering it instead a sacramental ritual. Can these two contradictory positions coexist, or will the Evangelical position necessarily cancel out the Anglo-Catholic one? Even Rowan Williams seems to side with the minimal view of the sacraments in that his recent defense of women priests argued from baptism and not holy orders...

You're right of course, that one makes progress by beginning with one's own tradition. I remember Newman saying something about this as well.

Michael said...

Sorry I was so unclear in my past comment!

I meant that before I joined the Catholic Church I briefly toyed with the dream of getting all the Catholic stuff without the troublesome concrete tradition of the West by becoming Orthodox or Old Catholic or something.

I chose to go into the Catholic Church because that was the only way to retain all that the Anglican Church had given me!

I don't think there is any chance of reconciling the Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical positions, no. That's pretty much why I did become and remain, Catholic.

Fred said...

ah, glad to hear it!

What's interesting about these personal ordinariates is that they are the concrete expression of the Vatican II recognition of the value of sacraments and pastoral structure in Protestantism. And these Christian elements which impel folks to unity can remain with them after they come into the Catholic Church as a help to them...