By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
An historic moment in the life of the Church took place today when the Vatican announced a new canonical structure that will allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.
According to a report by the Catholic News Agency (CNA), Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), announced at a press conference today that an Apostolic Constitution has been prepared to respond to “many requests” from groups of Anglican clergy and faithful who want to enter full communion with the Church because of the increasing liberalization of the Church of England.
The largest group of Anglicans requesting a formal structure to be corporately received into the Church has been the Traditional Anglican Communion, made up of an estimated 400,000 members worldwide.
An official Note on the arrangement released today explains: “In the years since the Council, some Anglicans have abandoned the tradition of conferring Holy Orders only on men by calling women to the priesthood and the episcopacy. More recently, some segments of the Anglican Communion have departed from the common biblical teaching on human sexuality . . . by the ordination of openly homosexual clergy and the blessing of homosexual relationships.”
These policies have caused severe fractures within the Anglican community, which led to ongoing talks with the Vatican over the years. This is what led to the new Apostolic Constitution, which “provides a reasonable and even necessary response to a world-wide phenomenon,” Cardinal Levada said, and will be a “single canonical model for the universal Church which is adaptable to various local situations and equitable to former Anglicans in its universal application.”
The new canonical structure will allow former Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Church while “preserving elements of distinctive Anglican spiritual patrimony.”
For instance, married Anglican clergy will be allowed to be ordained as Catholic priests much like what takes place in the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox churches. However, in the same tradition, those priests will not be allowed to be ordained bishops.
The Congregation also released an official Note today describing the new arrangement, saying that “Under the terms of the Apostolic Constitution, pastoral oversight and guidance will be provided for groups of former Anglicans through a Personal Ordinariate, whose Ordinary will usually be appointed from among former Anglican clergy.”
These Ordinariates will be similar to Military Ordinariates which have been established in most countries to provide pastoral care for members of the armed forces and their dependents, the Cardinal said.
Cardinal Levada said these groups “have declared that they share the common Catholic faith as it is expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and accept the Petrine ministry as something Christ willed for the Church. For them the time has come to express this implicit unity in the visible form of full communion.”
Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, the former under-secretary at the CDF, who helped draft the new structure, said: “We’ve been praying for unity for 40 years. Prayers are being answered in ways we did not anticipate and the Holy See cannot not respond to this movement of the Holy Spirit for those who wish communion and whose tradition is to be valued.”
Some technical details still need to be worked out. Full details of the Apostolic Constitution will be released in a few weeks.
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