Ecumenism Behind Closed Doors. By Sandro Magister
ROME, February 2, 2015 – The ordination of the first female bishop of the Church of England, carried out in York last week (see photo), brought lively reactions from those who did not did not accept the breach and for this reason might even abandon the Anglican Communion and enter the Catholic Church, as others of them have already done.
The move from Anglicanism to Catholicism not only of individuals but of whole communities with priests and bishops was streamlined and regulated in 2009 by Benedict XVI with the apostolic constitution “Anglicanorum Cœtibus.”
By virtue of this constitution, the new arrivals have the faculty of preserving their former liturgical rite, while their priests and bishops, most of them married with children, are ordained priests in the Catholic Church and continue to lead their respective communities.
To this end, between 2011 and 2012 three “personal” ordinariates were created in the Catholic Church, for the care of faithful with no territory of their own, a bit like the military ordinariates: the first in England and Wales, the second in the United States, and the third in the Australia.
The innovation was received with relative tranquility by the leadership of the Anglican Church, so much so that in 2009 the announcement of it was made simultaneously by the two primatial sees of Rome and Canterbury, and in 2012 Benedict XVI and the Anglican primate at the time, Rowan Williams, celebrated vespers together at the Roman monastery of San Gregorio al Celio, which had and has as its prior a convert from Anglicanism, the Austrialian Peter John Hughes.
But with Pope Francis it is no longer a given that Anglicans who may want to enter the Catholic Church will receive encouragement from him to take the step.
As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio certainly did not espouse in any way the norms and aims of “Anglicanorum Cœtibus.”
We know this from the testimonies of two of his closest friends.
The first is Argentine Anglican bishop Gregory Venables, primate of the Anglican Communion of the Southern Cone of the continent.
The second is Bishop Tony Palmer, a member of the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches - which is not under Canterbury but is nonetheless part of the Anglican galaxy - a South African who moved to Italy with his Catholic wife and children, whose friendship and meetings with Bergoglio began during a trip to Argentina in 2011 and intensified after his election as pope.
Palmer died in a motorcycle accident in July of 2014. And with him Bergoglio lost one of his three dearest friends, among the non-Catholics and non-Christians. The two others are the Jewish rabbi Abraham Skorka and the Muslim sheikh Omar Abboud, both of whom he wanted alongside him on his papal journey to the Holy Land last year.
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