Is the Pope Catholic?

The Pope's remarkable offer to Anglicans, to join the Roman Catholic church on a fast track, while keeping some distinctive aspects of our worship and ministry, has something wrong with it. I am sure the Pope was and is unaware of the defect. After all, he is not an Anglican, and you would have to be one to see it.

The people joining up under the Pope's offer are from the high church, and mainly the corner of it called Anglo-Catholic. The low church is not much interested.

The problem is, without those low church people, it isn't really Anglicanism. We need them, for they are a part of us, as surely as a thumb is necessary to a hand. The glory of the Anglican communion is our integration of all shades of orthodox* belief in one church. It looks to me as if Anglicanism's Roman branch will lack the very thing that makes Anglicanism great.

Links:

A news story about the American ordinariate
The Apostolic Constitution that frames the enterprise



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* Our habit of broad tolerance of people's views has been used against us, of late, to assert some things as acceptable that have no place in church tradition, except as things opposed by and to that tradition. Various strange ideas and enthusiasms have arisen in the church before, and we have gotten over them.

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