Sunday, October 25, 2009

Big News at the Vatican

Pope Benedict has made a tremendously important decision for the world.


The announcement of a new Apostolic Constitution which would allow Anglicans and groups of Anglicans, even groups of groups (say diocese) to move over to the Roman Catholic church and still keep their married priests, their Anglican ways of worship, and even their (unmarried) bishops...well at first this surprise was treated mildly. The Archbishop of Canterbury acted as though this was bad manners but no big deal. Others however, accused the Vatican of trying to steal the Anglicans away from their church. Eventually, some even saw in the "welcome" a sinister plot by the conspirators in the Vatican to infiltrate Protestantism and topple the Reformation!



Is everything seen as negative? This may be the most positive thing to have happened yet!



The Vatican's move is reported as a pastoral concern of the Pope for the thousands of Anglicans who have expressed to him their desire to become aligned with Rome if only they did not have to give up everything. Now, this kind of accommodation has been proposed before and the RC Church has refused. If you want to become Roman Catholic than it is a conversion and the individual will not be able to pick and choose. It's all or nothing.



Although this welcome to the Anglicans may have been in response to pleading from outside, and although it is only specific to the Anglicans, yet, if applied as a new theological, philosophical, practical policy it could heal the separation of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. It could be the catalyst for visible and organic Christian Church Unity and it could be the "fruit" of the last centuries ecumenical discussions- conversations that produced extraordinary agreements in doctrine and practice between the Roman Catholic Church and the main line Protestant denominations.

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