2006 comments by Card. Kasper about Anglicans, women bishops, and ecumenical dialogue

Fr. Finigan at his fine blog, The Hermeneutic of Continuityhas a piece today about something Card. Kasper told Anglicans at Lambeth in 2006 as the then-President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Here is an excerpt:

It [viz. the ordination of women bishops] would, in our view, further call into question what was recognized by the Second Vatican Council (Unitatis Redintegratio, 13), that the Anglican Communion occupied ” a special place” among churches and ecclesial communities of the West. We would see the Anglican Communion as moving a considerable distance closer to the side of the Protestant churches of the 16th century.

In effect, dialogue could go on, but it would be on quite a different footing and for a different reason.

In other news, I see in WaPo that the Church of England is going to be under huge pressure from Parliament to knuckle-under and follow societal trends.  After all: that’s what State Churches do.

The CofE will be threatened with being stripped of the exemption from the Equality Act of 2010 which prevents gender discrimination.  You can bet that’ll be used on the Catholic Church as well… or not.  Perhaps the Muslim community, whom they don’t dare touch, will defend the CofE.

Otherwise, in that same WaPo piece, after an explanation that the CofE bosses might get around the problem of not being able to approve women bishops until 2015 by introducing the matter at a meeting in July, there is a quote from … :

A former archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, upped the ante when he called on church leaders to “rip up its rule book” and speed through the introduction of women bishops. He said it was “ridiculous” to assume that the General Synod could not reconsider women bishops until 2015.

Tear up the rule book!  That’s right!  Just tear it up!

This, friends, is what the National catholic Reporter wants for the Catholic Church.

Benedict XVI is the Pope of Christian Unity.

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10 Comments

  1. Johnno says:

    How can the Catholic Church continue to dialogue with a group of Protestants who will rip up their own rule book at any given opportunity? Time to end these pointless talks with the CofE, and spend more time talking to the common CofE man to point out why his CofE has fallen apart and why he should convert to Catholicism. Vatican II’s strategy of dialogue is a failure. Of course tht depends on how you prefer to interpret ‘ecumenism’, is it talks and compromises for the sake of niceties and peaceful relations and back patting? Or is it… oh… dialogue for the explicit putpose of CONVERSION of Non-Catholics to the full Catholic Faith? It is increasingly apparent that Christian unity will only happen with the total destruction of all false churches as its right headed members and clergy flee to the Ark of Catholicism. We’d be better served by just standing by, praing the rosary, and letting it all happen quite naturally.

  2. Burke says:

    I was surprised by Lord Carey’s comment, as he’s a conservative evangelical whom I’m told is not personally in favour of women’s ordination. Discussing this with a friend, he suggested that Carey might be playing the long game: women bishops in the CofE are going to happen; if it happens now because parliament stepped in, then who knows where the interference will stop? The next ‘big thing’ on the horizon for the ‘new orthodoxy’ is SSMarriages in church & LBDTQQ ordinations … something Carey is desperate to prevent.

    Bottom line: Lord Carey might be sacrificing the already lost pawn of a female episcopacy, to block the Queen of the homosexual agenda (sorry – I really couldn’t help myself with the ‘queen’ thing … )

  3. dominic1955 says:

    This bears out a saying I first saw at MCJ, First Law of Anglican Thermodynamics-Any joke you make about the Episcopal/Anglican Organization eventually comes true.

    I’m surprised Cardinal Kaspar said something like that, but truth be told once they “ordained” women to anything, they put themselves equally on par to organizations like the Church of Sweden or the Evangelical Church in Germany-wholly make-it-up-as-you-go Protestants. The Anglicans only managed to maintain the most Catholic-esque veneer for the longest.

    As to Lord Carey and the rest of the “moderate” or “conservative” Anglicans, I think their goose is well past done. Who cares if the Anglican Organization allows the homosexual agenda full force-they’ve already kowtowed to every other agenda of the World. The Episcopal Organization in America is already pretty roundly homosexualist and its Popess is hammering down on any remaining Christians of a biblical bent. Any folks who want to actually be Christian in the Anglican/Episcopal group need to buck up and join a real Church.

  4. dominic1955 says:

    PS-Rip up the “rule book”? That always works jolly well, right old boy?

    This also makes an interesting observation about Vatican II. When UR 13 singled the Anglicans out back during the time of the Council, things were vastly different than the reality on the ground in 2012. How much can change in 50 years-and how time bound some pastoral pronoucements can be! Now we have some Anglicans that went whole hog and joined us and some that went off into La-La Land.

  5. Nancy D. says:

    As the Pope of Christian Unity, will Pope Benedict perform the Consecration to Our Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Heart and heal the Schism from the beginning? To deny The Filioque is to deny that there is only ONE Spirit of Love between The Father and The Son.

  6. chcrix says:

    I always rather thought that part of the unstated and unacknowledged purpose behind WO for the Anglican world community was to put the kibosh on any reunion. Note also that many of the Anglican Evangelicals do not oppose WO AND they will be the most resolute against any Roman connection. Again I think there is something here to be said about deliberately nullifying any chance there might have been for any sort of a corporate reunion.

    All this, and they still moan about A.C. as ‘poaching’.

  7. Fr.WTC says:

    This whole issue of female bishops in the “church” of England is of monumental indifference to me. What care I if invalidity consecrated woman or men preside over a Counterfit church.

  8. William Tighe says:

    Burke said,

    “I was surprised by Lord Carey’s comment, as he’s a conservative evangelical whom I’m told is not personally in favour of women’s ordination.”

    Anyone who could say such a thing is extraordinarly ignorant about the struggle over WO in the Church of England, for Carey has always been a zealot FOR WO in the Church of England. It was his emotional speech in favor of the measure to ordain women to the Anglican “priesthood” at the November 1992 meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod that swayed enough addle-pated Anglican Evangelical laymembers to vote in favor of the measure, that it squeaked by in the House of Laity by just two votes.

    As to whether Carey deserves the characterization “conservative Evangelical,” readers may wish to read this book review to become acquainted with some other “conservative” beliefs he espouses:

    http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-05-046-b

  9. Nancy D. says:

    To deny the personal and relational essence of the human person, who, from the moment of conception, separate from all the creatures on Earth, has been created in The Image of God, equal in Dignity, while being complementary as male and female, to reflect Love, as we live our lives in relationship, in communion with God, as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters…is to deny God’s Revelation from The Beginning.

    Let no one deceive you. A human person can only conceive a human person. Nothing is added to or subtracted from the DNA of the human person from the moment of conception, thus every son or daughter of a human person, from the moment of conception, is wholly human.

    God desires that we respect His intention for creating us male and female, from the beginning. A girl cannot grow up to be a Good priest, for the same reason that she cannot grow up to be a Good Father.

  10. Charles E Flynn says:

    Shaky, Not Stirring, by Carl E. Olson, at Catholic World Report.

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