Healing Rifts

                                           Healing Rifts

Recently I have been interested to see a long-time Anglican community in College Park join the Catholic Church. They will maintain much of their traditional ritual and church structure under an Anglican diocese independent of the Roman Catholic bishop of Orlando, but subject to the authority of the Pope. While I have no clear understanding of the details of their reunion I presume that they will continue to have married priests, but not female priests. Whether their priests will be allowed to marry after ordination or whether they will ordain men already married I don’t know. What does interest me more is that they represent a traditional wing of the Anglo-Episcopal Church which went into schism and eventual heresy under Henry VIII and his successors. It has taken almost five centuries for them to find their way home.

On the other side of the process we are in negotiation with the Society of St. Pius X who split off after Vatican II, fifty years ago.  So far little progress seems to have occurred, but the Church moves very slowly. Efforts at reunion with the Church of England have been going on for almost two hundred years with these fairly limited results. It is almost 1,000 years since the Roman-Orthodox schism and it was only recently that Rome and Constantinople withdrew their excommunications of each other but got no further.

I also see some Christian communities that have exited their home denomination due to disputes over doctrinal issues which they consider essential. One with which I am familiar, along with their priest and most of their Church staff, left the Episcopal Church a few years ago over practices which they felt were contrary to Scripture. This week they are being formally accepted into the American Communion of the Anglican Church along with several similar groups.

Because I had known come of them socially when they were still Episcopalians, I have watched their progress with interest. They are a very close-knit group, possibly because they took a step into the unknown and supported each other in so doing.  They are open and warmly welcoming to visitors and newcomers. They left their former church without rancor. There are several who were former members of other churches, including the Catholic Church. Catholics would find the Liturgy familiar, with the spontaneity of post-Vatican II. They are an active and accepting community, fully  and comfortably integrated as to age, income  and race. They are committed to the social gospel and to evangelism..

God has blessed this group in many ways. I pray that they may continue to prosper His work in the community. It is my prayer that we Catholics may come to recognize that God works in other Churches too and that we may pray for and with them, learn from them and work with them. Hopefully we will eventually unite once more with them in doing God’s will: “that we all may be one”, both here and hereafter.