I eagerly commend to your reading this excellent post by Christian Campbell regarding last evening's episode of The Journey Home on the Eternal Word Television Network. Mr Campbell adeptly corrects and discomfits two critical errors which were proffered as established fact on the programme, to wit:
1. Valid Apostolic Orders from undoubtedly valid Bishops in Apostolic Succession are invalid if they are conferred outside of communion with the See of Rome.
2. The Words of Our Lord, the Dominical Words of Institution and Consecration, do not validly consecrate the Blessed Sacrament if used in the Book of Common Prayer Canon of the Mass.
And I would add a third that needs roundly to be dispelled:
3. The reason for the offer of Anglicanorum Coetibus from Rome is merely because groups of Anglicans asked for it; there is no intrinsic catholicity or historical continuity in the Anglican Tradition as regarding the Liturgy, the Threefold Apostolic Ministry, of the substance of the sacramental system.
Theologically incorrect assertions such as these do not promote authentic Christian unity and ecumenism.
7 comments:
Father, I can't imagine what the author of the Anglo-Catholic blog means by: " This reality may yet be manifested in the ordination of our clergy sub conditione, but even if our ministers submit to ordination in forma absoluta for the sake of expediency, we have been made certain that the intention of the Church will be conditional."
Clergy who are validly ordained and who submit to ordination in forma absoluta "for the sake of expediency" commit a grave sacrilege. The fact that they do so for the sake of expediency makes it all the worse, like those clergy the Donatists condemned.
The intention of the Church is expressed in the sacramental forms. You can't have an explicitly unconditional ordiantion which is rendered conditional by the secret intention of the minister.
Jerry,
You may want to read about the jurisdictional aspect of Orders in the post, "A Matter of Fullness," on the Anglo-Catholic.
Blessings,
"Doc"+
It appears to me (without the benefit of any scientific study) that most Anglicans/Episcopalians who have gone to Rome are of the Evangelical wing and not Anglo-Catholic. They "tolerated" women priests and bishops but drew the line at practicing homosexual bishops. TAC is certainly Anglo-Catholic and has made direct contact with Rome but has any accepted the latest offer? It appears that Rome's offer will be more acceptable to Anglo-Catholics in England than in the USA. A true Anglo-Catholic may accept "conditional" ordination but never re-ordination.
"The condemnation of the Prayer Book Ordinal in 1896 by Pope Leo XIII in his Bull 'Apostolicae Curae,' wherein the claim is made that the Ordinal is defective both in its form and in its intentions of continuing the historic orders of Ministry as they have been received and understood by the universal Church, and that therefore the Holy Orders of Anglicanism are invalid, rests upon no foundation whatsoever. Not only does the Preface of the Ordinal state 'the intent' of our Church to be that the Orders of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons 'may be continued, and reverently used and esteemed in the Church,' but the recovery in recent times of the early third-century work of St. Hippolytus of Rome, the "Apostolic Tradition' shows unmistakably that the 'form' and 'matter' of the several rites of our Ordinal are more consonant with the practice of the universal, undivided Church of ancient times, and not least that of the Church of Rome itself, than are the rituals of the Roman Pontifical presently in use.
"The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary" Oxford University Press 1959
Father David wrote: "They "tolerated" women priests and bishops but drew the line at practicing homosexual bishops."
And in going to Rome they may not have women priests and bishops, but anyone who knows the Roman clergy at all, knows that what they will have to tolerate is precisely "practicing homosexual bishops."
Has no one read or noted the Ryan Report?
"Valid Apostolic Orders from undoubtedly valid Bishops in Apostolic Succession are invalid if they are conferred outside of communion with the See of Rome".
If this is true then every ordination and consecration in the Eastern Orthodox Churches since the first century are invalid. Has no one ever brought this to the front? I don't think even Pope Leo XIII would say this.
Anglicans need to remember that to be a catholic one does not have to be in communion with Rome, as witnessed by the Orthodox churches since the earliest antiquity. If this is so, why is Anglicanorum coetibus called by some "a generous offer". Is it "generous" to tell an Abnglican priest that he is just a layman because his orders are "utterly void". Come on, wake up.ulatup
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