Rome

What about Rome?

The Roman Church is the Patriarchate of Western Christendom; she holds the primary Apostolic See in the West and has served as the central primacy and focus of catholic unity throughout most of Christian history. She is the largest Apostolic body on earth and the most influential Christian communion in the world. The Bishop of Rome is historically the First Bishop of the Church, the Primate and chief representative of the Church Catholic. These are all positive and endearing characteristics, from which neither Orthodoxy nor Anglicanism has ever formally dissented: the Roman Church deserves our honour and respect, and all due devotion and obedience as guardedly allowed and mandated by the Undivided Church of the First Millennium. We accord to the Bishop of Rome that which the First Millennium Church accorded his office. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons and Saint Cyprian of Carthage proclaim that the Bishop of Rome 'presides in love and honour.' Anglicans honour the Roman See as primus inter pares, first amongst equals in the undivided and consentient Catholic episcopate. But there are serious problems with the Roman Communion, impediments and barriers which forestall the possibility of Anglicans entering into the Papal Fold. We believe Rome fails the strict litmus test of universality, antiquity and consent, the Canon of Saint Vincent of Lerins, in several key areas of Christian doctrine and practice.

The Anglican Tradition, believing as it does in the 'branch fact,' that the Catholic Church on earth is divided by human history and sin into separate jurisdictions which may or may not be in full communion with each other, and often are separated sacramentally from one another, although all the branches are fully and truly parts of the One Catholic Church because they are sacramentally, dogmatically and eschatologically one with Our Lord and the Communion of Saints, does not believe, as Rome does, that the totality and completeness of the whole Catholic Church on earth is contained in and comprehended by the See of Rome. We cannot say, as Rome does, that the Papal Communion is coterminous and coextensive with the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

The Church Catholic is not identified with or synonymous with the Roman Communion in an exclusive sense, and yet this is precisely what Rome claims for herself. According to Rome, those Churches in communion with the Pope are the Church, and uniquely the Church qua Church. We find that proposition an inadmissible and flatly anti-historical claim. The Papal Church also professes that the Bishop of Rome is infallible ex cathedra, from St Peter's Chair, and exercises a ministry of infallible teaching in faith and morals apart from the consensus of the Catholic episcopate. Rome also contends that the Bishop of Rome possesses universal and immediate jurisdiction over every Church and Christian on earth, disregarding the ancient sees and dioceses which have historically constituted Catholic communion. We maintain that papal infallibility ex consensu ecclesiae and papal universal jurisdiction are contrary to Scripture and Apostolic Tradition. We assert that the Pope is not above Tradition and the Ecumenical Councils, and cannot legislate doctrine in opposition to received universal Tradition or the consensus patricum and consensus ecclesiae.

Rome also requires belief in the Marian dogmas as necessary to salvation, de fide tenanda, they must be held as belonging to the essence of the Catholic Religion: she holds that one must believe in the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady (1854) and the corporeal Assumption of Our Lady (1950) in order for one to be saved. Rome equates the value of these novel doctrines, defined in the last two centuries, with the dogmatic and Creedal dogmas of the Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. Again, we believe such a salvific necessity for the Marian dogmas is unwarranted by Scripture and Primitive Tradition. Rome also continues to require a belief in fire-purgatory, in which souls make expiation for the punishment due for sins committed in this life, a retributive and penal punishment for sin even after the absolution of sins through the sacraments of the Church. She adds 14 Councils to those which are held by universal Catholic Christianity to be genuinely Ecumenical and General. There is a plethora of other theological difficulties which I could add to this litany, but these examples are the most serious and suffice to demonstrate that Anglicans believe the Roman Church had added innovative and novel articles of necessary belief to the Catholic Faith of the Creeds and Seven Ecumenical Councils of the first thousand years of the Christian history. We love and esteem the venerable Church of Rome, but we believe as a matter of faith and conscience that we are more Catholic than she. Genuine Catholicism is primitive, biblical and patristic orthodoxy, ancient in faith, universal in scope, consented-to in authority.