Tuesday 7 December 2010

What a friend we have in London!

From the horse's mouth: here, and some comment here
But I'm not sure anyone should be greatly surprised at this turn of events; it seems of a piece with the recent news from Fr Edward Tomlinson in another C of E diocese here 
The only sound advice is that of St David: "Be joyful. Keep the faith!"
And to remember that what is underway is far bigger than atavistic (or do I mean recidivistic?) tribalism.

The Anglo-Catholic Movement was always a very wide 'constituency'; we should not be too worried by the comments of those we perhaps once regarded as friends, who evidently believe that perceived disloyalty to the institution is worse than that institution's own manifest disloyalty to apostolic faith and order and its clear ecumenical bad faith.
For those who even at this stage were expecting a modicum of generosity and understanding from their Christian brothers and sisters (and Fathers in God), after being unceremoniously shown the door by recent synodical decisions, it is, I know, a bitter pill to swallow, but human nature itself and historical precedent were always going to be against the Ordinariates' being seen as anything other than a hostile development.
However, as anyone who cares to read Anglicanorum Coetibus can see, its provisions are far from hostile to Anglican patrimony and can even be regarded as considerably more faithful to the historic vocation of Anglicanism than much of the contemporary Anglican Communion itself, which has gone a-whoring after the strange gods of heterodoxy and relativism.
Yet 'establishment' Anglicans in whatever province of the Communion they happen to be, have to ask themselves this question: having deliberately either engineered or colluded in the ejection of one of their Church's historic traditions, can they quite so glibly and in good conscience regard themselves as other than entirely reponsible for what is happening?
The immanent setting up of the Ordinariates is indeed, as Pope Benedict has said, a "prophetic gesture," but the ways of the prophets  do have a habit of  disturbing those whose consciences are, shall we say, a little uneasy about their own past actions.

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