With a joint letter of resignation, 5 Anglican bishops plan to join the Roman Catholic Church, according to the following article. One of the reasons may have been the permitting of women bishops and the blessing of homosexual unions that the Anglicans had embraced. The Vatican is making plans to welcome them
. . . June
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As bishops convert, Vatican moving on plan to welcome Anglicans
Catholic News Agency (CNA):
Vatican City, Nov 10, 2010 / 04:06 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Just weeks after a papal pilgrimage to England, the announcement that five Anglican bishops plan to resign by year’s end and join the Catholic Church is setting wheels in motion at the Vatican.
The Nov. 8 announcement seems to have caught Vatican officials by surprise. And the question of just how these bishops and other former members of the Church of England will enter the Catholic Church has quickly become an important topic of discussion inside the Vatican.
The bishops — Andrew Burnham of Ebbsfleet, Keith Newton of Richborough, and John Broadhurst of Fulham, along with retired bishops Edwin Barnes and David Silk — cited Pope Benedict XVI’s “generous” invitation last year to Anglicans who are seeking “full communion” with the Catholic Church.
In Nov. 2009, the Pope issued the invitation in an apostolic constitution, "Anglicanorum Coetibus.” The document proposed that former Anglicans could enter into “full communion” with the Church as members of specially-tailored jurisdictions, or “personal ordinariates.”
According to the Pope’s plan, these jurisdictions would be under the authority of local Catholic bishops, but members could maintain their “liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions,” including the traditional permission for priests to be married.
With the five bishops’ announcement, eyes are now on the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has yet to provide details on the final shape these ordinariates, might take.
But a timetable does seem to be on the horizon. The doctrine office’s head, Cardinal William Levada, will be leading a special closed-door discussion of the matter with the College of Cardinals on Nov. 19.
One of the resigning bishops, Bishop John Broadhurst, told CNA that his decision to leave the Church of England came after many years of hoping that the Anglicans would move closer to Rome.
Instead, he said, Anglicans have distanced themselves further by embracing such radical departures from Christian tradition as permitting women bishops and blessing homosexual unions.
. . . . In their joint letter of resignation, the five bishops said they were “distressed by developments … in Anglicanism which we believe to be incompatible with the historic vocation of Anglicanism and the tradition of the Church for nearly two thousand years.”
Read entire article
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Interesting. Do you think that the Church of England position of allowing women bishops and blessing homosexual unions is correct or the position of the Roman Catholic Church, which, so far allows neither. Please leave a comment.
June
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