News and Commentary from Catholic Insight

Anglican doldrums and Catholic ecumenists By Editor and Staff Issue: April 2008

Vancouver—The largest Anglican congregation in Canada, St. John’s parish of more than 2,000 members in an affluent Vancouver neighbourhood, has voted overwhelmingly to leave the Canadian Anglican Church and put itself under the authority of a parallel conservative Anglican structure. St. John’s Newfoundland Bishop Donald Harvey is the moderator of the recently formed conservative Anglican Network in Canada, an umbrella group for the now 17 breakaway parishes.

It is expected that legal actions will ensue over which group owns the church lands that continue to be occupied by the conservative parishioners. The disputes, which involve canon law, property law, corporate law and trust law, could get tangled up in the courts for years, and even end up in the Supreme Court of Canada.

Meanwhile, Toronto Anglican Bishop Colin Johnson does not think the split is very serious: “Crisis in the Anglican Church of Canada? I think not” (Globe and Mail, 27 Feb. 08)! He derisively referred to the “ mere 17 parishes” (out of 2,300 Anglican parishes in Canada) that have voted to break away from the Anglican Church of Canada. Another spokesman for the Canadian Anglican community exclaimed: “There is no reason for anyone to leave … At some point we can’t be all things to all people.”

Comment:
To be” all things to all people” is exactly what the Anglican communion has been trying to be, in the course of which it has separated itself from classical Christianity both in Canada and in the American- European world.
Although, on the surface, the question is over same-sex unions, the deeper problem is that over the last 50 years the Anglican Communion has abandoned the understanding of Christian moral teaching, together with adopting an ever more liberal interpretation of Scripture. As a consequence, the once two million members of the Anglican Church in Canada of the mid-nineteen-sixties, have shrunk to fewer than half a million in 2008.

Meanwhile, some members of the Anglican-Catholic team in Rome seem to live in a world of their own. Monsignor Donald Bolen, a Canadian priest at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, recently printed once again the list of ecumenical documents signed by the clerical academics from both sides over some 30 years, implying that they represent a real advance in communications between the two bodies. (“Dialogue beyond the media sensationalism”, L’Osservatore Romano--English edition--February 13, 2008). But as Anglicanism in the West has been disintegrating since 1930, causing a splitting off from official national Anglican churches, this view seems highly dubious. Today, the “Traditional Anglican Church” community is a large umbrella for groups of Anglicans who broke relations with their national bodies as long as three decades ago.

Recently, their representatives in Britain asked for formal talks with Rome. The Church should work with them, not with the British/North American/Australian dissenting liberals whose intellectual and spiritual confusion is severing the last links with Orthodox Christianity.

Similarly, the Anglicans have split already worldwide. Contact should be taken up with groups in Africa and Asia who are defending traditional Christian doctrines against the rejection of biblical and moral teaching by the post-modernist secularizers among Western Anglicans. Canadian Catholic bishops, too, should discourage contact with dissembling Anglicans.