By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
The House of Bishops of the Canadian province of the Traditional Anglican Communion have sent an official request to William Cardinal Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to request entrance into the Catholic Church.
In a letter dated March 12, the Anglican bishops expressed their desire to “seek a communal and ecclesial way of being Anglican Catholics in communion with the Holy See, at once treasuring the full expression of Catholic faith and treasuring our tradition within which we have come to this moment.”
They affirmed: “We have all read and studied with care the apostolic constitution ‘Anglicanorum Coetibus’ with the complementary norms and the accompanying commentary. And now, in response to your invitation to contact your dicastery to begin the process you lay out, we respectfully ask that the apostolic constitution be implemented in Canada.”
The letter concluded, “It is our hope and prayer that these proposals may be useful in setting in train the process set out in the most welcome, gracious, and generous response of the Holy Father to our petition.”
The letter was signed by the Rt. Rev. Peter D. Wilkinson OSG of Victoria, as well as two suffragan bishops for different regions, Bishop Craig Botterill and Bishop Carl Reid.
On his website, Bishop Wilkinson explained: “It is no secret that now ‘Our Anglican Heritage’ — the Catholic Faith as we have received it — means different things to different people, especially in this time of great confusion when the Canterbury Impaired Communion is in such doctrinal and moral disarray, and many other Anglican groups are struggling, sometimes against one another, to make sense of what has happened.
“It seems to me that in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Anglican Communion, despite all its fine ecumenical words, decided to become just another liberal protestant denomination. But that is not how we, who have been baptized into Christ’s Holy Catholic Church, as the Catechism teaches, have learned Christ.”
Wilkinson and his flock are part of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), which has some 400,000 members worldwide. This branch of the fractured Anglican church sent a letter to the Holy See in October 2007 requesting full communion with the Catholic Church. They declared their adherence to Catholic doctrine, but expressed the desire to retain some distinct Anglican traditions.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded in July 2008 with the promise to consider this possibility.
The following year, the congregation’s prefect, Cardinal William Levada, announced Benedict XVI’s intention to create a way for these Anglican groups to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church and published the details of this process in “Anglicanorum Coetibus” which was published on Nov. 9.
The move by the Canadian TAC was made on the heels of a similar decision made by the leaders of the Anglican Church in America who announced on March 3 that they had formally requested implementation of “Anglicanorum Coetibus” in the United States.
© All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace® http://www.womenofgrace.com
