Friday 13 December 2013

"They can lead to self-righteous schism".

Fr John Hunwicke has recently aired a post originally written in 2010 - before joining the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham:
"...We Anglican Catholics know what Intermediate Primacies can lead to if left without a check or a balance. They can lead to the mess that the Anglican Communion finds itself in. They lead to the concept of the Infallible Local Synod whose heretical decisions are irreformable.
They can lead to self-righteous schism....".
In the western Anglican world, without exception, 'The Infallible Local Synod' (not to mention the 'self-righteous schism' it has engendered) is precisely what we have now come to. Can an Anglican claiming any kind of sensus Catholicus owe such a body his (or her) allegiance? It would be hard to argue that the recent development of such a chimera has not, if not altogether negated the vows of 'obedience' we, as clergy, have made to the predecessors of those who are now, seemingly,  happy to regard themselves as merely the executive servants of these bodies, at the very least radically changed the way we in conscience are able to view them.
For many of us, being 'a loyal Anglican' entails such a degree of scepticism and resistance both towards the direction our Communion has taken (irrevocably, it would seem) and the structures now claiming an authority to sit in judgement on both the Christian tradition and Holy Scripture itself - something which, of course, they cannot possess .... or, for that matter, were ever intended to possess when, mistakenly and with such tragic consequences,  they were brought into being. 

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