What is 'Anglican orthodoxy?'

http://all2common.classicalanglican.net/

I enthusiastically recommend a new essay at All Too Common on the question of what actually defines and constitutes 'Anglican orthodoxy.' This appellation, now proudly owned by a multiplicity of Anglican groups and organisations of vastly differing theologies and practices, is bandied about today with such imprecision and generality that it is, one could certainly submit, a phrase or war-cry that means so many different things at once that it no longer means anything at all. Andy's essay deserves a careful reading.

My response is as follows:

Thank you for your astute and precisely-correct essay, which targets and high-lights the real central point at stake in the continuing dissolution of the Anglican Communion. Anglican Catholics have said from the beginning of the post-2003 controversy that, like the issue of homosexuality in the Church, the purported ordination of women is a 'salvation issue.' Many Global South leaders have used this phrase in reference to militant and unrepentant homosexualism, and so they should. Certainly a life in a state of mortal sin, unrepentant and unconverted, jeopardises salvation and the state of grace. But the loss of valid priesthood and valid sacraments because of the ordination of women equally jeopardises salvation because without the priesthood and sacraments there is no sacramental assurance, no covenantal means of grace, no guarantee of grace and salvation. As a wise priest once said to me on this subject, 'a male practising homosexual priest can repent, but a priestess cannot change her sex.' It is essential that Catholics re-focus the issue at hand on that which is essential to the life of Holy Church, the divinely-instituted means of grace given to us by Our Lord and the Apostles in the ministerial priesthood. Thank you again!

Or as Saint Ignatius of Antioch would proclaim to us today as he did in the second century: no Bishop, no Church! By extension this means, succinctly, no valid episcopate, no valid priesthood, no valid Eucharist, no Church, no means of grace, no salvation. Or as Saint Cyprian and Saint Augustine would say: Extra ecclesiam non salus est. Our Blessed Saviour in His infinite love for all men purchased an Universal Church for our salvation by the Blood of His Cross. The Seven Holy Sacraments are His legacy bequeathed to us, the treasury of His fathomless grace and merit, the New and Everlasting Covenant, and it is our bounden duty and service to receive His divine Mysteries in faith and to commend them to the generations to come unimpaired and unaltered. This, my dear friends, can be the only meaning of the phrase 'Anglican orthodoxy.'