leters to the editor
No pick and mix
From Fr Bernard Sixtus
Mary Gough [‘Solve this one’, March]
is to be congratulated for puting with such admirable clarity and conviction what, I susect, many Anglo-Catholics think. She has described (if by way of a list of negations vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic Church), the kind of church she really seeks: a church run close to home by ordinary men and women of all ages, a church that in defining doctrine and moral teaching pays close and compassionate atention to real life and its pitfalls and victims, a church that understands and pracices eucharistic hospitality as a means of and road to unity (rather than its fruit), that ordains married men and that discusses openly and freely maters of fundamental change (such as women’s ordination). Tere is just one problem, and
I think we are all realising it only now: you cannot have such a church without it sooner or later behaving as the Church of England has in fact done. Women’s ordination in other words, is no accident (and neither are other changes): it is an (almost) necessary consequence of structural characeristics of precisely the kind that Mary Gough seeks. Have the church she desires in this day and age and society, and women’s ordination is (almost) a given. What Mary Gough really wants
– and I am sure she is not alone in this – is a time-machine (and that’s a tough one to ‘solve’). She would like to have the Church of England of the Seventies and Eighties back, a church structured and run much as today but one that had not (yet) changed Holy Orders. It is not going to happen – not through General Synod (or Governing Body/the Bench of Bishops here), not through Forward in Faith/Credo Cymru. Te heart of the crisis in this moment of grace is indeed this: our realisation that the real question is what kind of church we are called to belong to, and what the nature and structure of the Church Catholic of the Creeds really is.
In the light of this question those
who view us Anglo-Catholics from outside (be they fellow Anglicans or Roman Catholics) could just be right in saying to us, in effect: ‘make up your mind’. If the church Mary Gough wants is God’s will for you, embrace it warts and all, as it is and has become. If not, embrace the alternative just as fully and just as joyfully. In either case, however, it is a package deal: the days of pick and mix are over, and not just at Woolworth’s.
Bernard Sixtus
Holy Trinity Vicarage, Abergavenny NP7 5BH
Complicated? Surely not!
From the Bishop of the Northern Diocese of the Free Church of England
Lorna Ashworth’s motion at
February’s General Synod has commited the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to explore further how the Church of England should relate to the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). It is, however, not just the CofE which has to work out its relationship to the ACNA. It is a question that also needs to be addressed by the Free Church of England (FCE). One of the jurisdictions that have
entered the ACNA is the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC), which separated from the then Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA in 1873. In 1874 the REC established a federative union with the Free Church of England (which had already been in existence for three decades), then two years later consecrated bishops in the historic succession for the older body. Shortly aſterwards a branch of the REC was founded in the UK. Tis lived in parallel with the FCE until 1927 when the two bodies united to form the present-day FCE, whose legal title is still ‘Te Free Church of England otherwise called the Reformed Episcopal Church’. Since the 1870s the FCE and North
American REC have recognised each other. Tere have been mutual participation in episcopal
consecrations, and representation at each other’s governing bodies. On occasion clergy of one Church have occupied pastoral posts in the other. Te incorporation of the REC into the ACNA means, presumably, that the ACNA has inherited the REC’s recognition of, and intercommunion with the Free Church of England. Te ACNA has been recognised by
the GAFCON Primates. Te FCE’s doctrinal stance is fully consistent with the GAFCON Jerusalem Declaration of 2008. Moreover, clause 11 of that Declaration commits the heirs of GAFCON to ‘recognise the Orders and jurisdiction of those Anglicans who uphold orthodox faith and pracice’. Te logic of this would seem to be
that there already exists in the United Kingdom an Anglican Church with which ACNA is in communion. No doubt the FCE and ACNA will in due course work out the canonical niceties, but it would seem that there is a way for English Anglicans to be in communion with the ACNA without waiting for General Synod to decide on the mater.
+ John Fenwick
16 Windsor Crescent, Ulverston LA12 9NP
Wrong use of funds
From Mr Alan Bartley BSC, ARCS
Anthony Saville is far too naive,
accommodating and concessionary in his reflection on the extending of equal pension rights to the civil partners of clergy, as is being recommended to the Archbishops Council by the February General Synod [‘Only Equal in Law’, March]. Te whole idea of civil partnership is
a nonsense unless there is some secial covenant-type agreement between the two parties. It is sheer casuistry that this is to be excluded from the legal form. If it is not implicit then there is no reason to give them any secial privilege that should not be possible between any two members of society, whether married to others or not, whether of the same family or not,
April 2010 ■ newdirections ■ 21
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