Here's the text of an article written by Tim Drake concerning Rome's outreach to Anglicans troubled by the Anglican Communion's departure from historic Christian moral and sacramental theology:
As 2010 gets under way, many in the Church are anxious to see how last year’s apostolic constitution inviting disaffected Anglicans into the Catholic Church will play out.
While the expectation is that more significant numbers of Anglicans in Britain, Africa and India will accept the offer outlined in Anglicanorum Coetibus, observers say that the decree will impact traditional Anglicans in the United States, as well.
The Traditional Anglican Communion includes approximately 400,000 Anglicans worldwide. The American province, known as the Anglican Church in America, includes approximately 5,200 communicants in four dioceses. Over the next few months, all of the provinces will be holding synods to put forward the question of how they will be responding to the apostolic constitution.
“The expectation is that our general synod will accept the Holy Father’s offer,” said Christian Campbell, senior warden of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Orlando, Fla., and a member of the Standing Committee of the Anglican Church in America’s Diocese of the Eastern United States. “It is not so much a question of whether or not we desire to avail ourselves of the offer — inasmuch as it is a direct and generous response to our appeal to the Holy See. The question now is how the apostolic constitution is to be implemented. We have practical concerns, and we are presently working with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to resolve any outstanding questions.”
Campbell said that the first Traditional Anglican Communion provinces will be entering the Catholic Church within the next six months.
One example of a parish that stands ready to enter en masse is suburban Philadelphia’s Church of the Good Shepherd, an “Anglo-Catholic” parish.
“We’ve been praying for this daily for two years,” said Bishop David Moyer of the Traditional Anglican Communion. Moyer was one of 38 bishops in the communion who signed a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and petitioned Pope Benedict XVI in October 2007 for a way for disaffected Anglicans to be united with Rome.
“The majority of our members will be on board with this,” said Father Aaron Bayles, assistant pastor at Good Shepherd. The parish has approximately 400 members who could come into the Catholic Church.
Yet, many Anglicans will not be embracing the offer.
“The Episcopal Church will be only mildly impacted,” said Father Douglas Grandon, a former Anglican pastor who was ordained a Catholic priest in May 2008 and serves as associate pastor at Sacred Heart in Moline, Ill. “Most of those clergy and bishops have already left who had any Catholic sense. In the U.S., the primary ones who will consider this would be the Anglo-Catholics.”
Some Episcopal pastors and parishes upset with the direction of the national Episcopal Church (it has elected two bishops who are openly homosexual and has given the nod to blessing same-sex unions) have placed themselves under the leadership of more conservative bishops in the U.S., Africa or the Americas. For example, approximately 20 Episcopal parishes in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas and Canada have left the Episcopal Church to join the Southern Cone of the Americas, an Anglican province in South America.
For those seeking to accept the Vatican’s offer, examples do exist of communities that have already done something similar. Since the implementation of the Pastoral Provision in 1980 — which allowed for the Catholic ordination of married Episcopal priests and authorized the establishment of personal Catholic parishes that retained certain Anglican liturgical elements — several Anglican-use communities have been created in the United States.
San Antonio’s Our Lady of the Atonement became the first to enter the Church in 1983. At the time, it consisted of 18 people. Today, the Church has more than 500 families. Three Anglican-use communities exist in Texas. In addition, since the Pastoral Provision was made available, more than 100 Anglican priests have gone through the process to become Catholic priests.
The Pastoral Provision, however, differs from the apostolic constitution.
“The story of the Pastoral Provision is that of a hard-fought battle by a few courageous pioneers,” said Campbell. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t implemented in such a way as to bring a large number of people into the Church. It was perceived as being primarily a mechanism for the reconciliation of individual Episcopal priests. By comparison, the apostolic constitution is not about reconciling individuals, but groups of Anglicans in a corporate fashion.”
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
How Safe is America?
The botched Christmas terror attack making headlines in the news for failed security, intelligence, and counter-terror agencies is merely the recent-most act of war on America that began on November 5 with the Ft. Hood shootings. It was there that the psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan stormed the fort, screaming “Allah Akhbar!” and killed thirteen people while wounding thirty more (including a family friend of mine). While the current Administration has busied itself with labeling the attack a “tragedy” committed by a man who merely needs to be committed, the truth of Hasan’s terrorist motivations are becoming clearer and clearer. Former Democratic VP nominee Joe Lieberman went on record saying the Ft Hood attack was “the most destructive terrorist attack on America since September 11, 2001.” Ultimately the terrorism at Ft. Hood has led to our current situation in Yemen, which former GOP presidential nominee John McCain calls the new front in the War on Terror.
The connection between Ft. Hood and the second, albeit failed, terror attack on Christmas is the man Anwar al-Awlaki. Known as “the bin Laden of the internet,” al-Awlaki is a known al-Qaeda recruiter who recruited radical Muslims in the United States and is now helping to build a formidable al-Qaeda network in, you guessed it, Yemen. Furthermore, al-Awlaki preached to three of the 9/11 terrorists from a mosque in northern Virginia and was the personal spiritual advisor to Hasan, the terrorist shooter at Ft. Hood. But while the Obama Administration continued to pass off the Ft. Hood shootings as non-terror related, it began applying pressure on the Yemeni government while launching airstrikes on al-Qaeda camps in Yemen. Why would Obama do such a thing?
One word: Healthcare.
That’s right, Obama’s efforts to “fix” the economy have brought the unemployment rate above 10% while his efforts to “reform” healthcare has backfired at almost every turn. As the Ft. Hood terror attack took place, Obama was deeply entrenched in war on healthcare, not on terror. During his first year in office, the only new tactic the Administration has offered to fight terror is to close Guantanamo Bay, the prison where we are holding “enemy combatants” (i.e. the prisoners of war captured during the War on Terror thus far). As we shall see, the decisions to close Guantanamo Bay marked a shift away from fighting terror that has only helped terrorists while lead us to continued problems in Yemen.
What’s important to note is that the Ft. Hood terrorist continued to stay in contact with the al-Qaeda recruiter al-Awlaki since 9/11 and up until the attack in November. At the beginning of October, however, al-Awlaki announced the attacks coming the following two months when he said, “The simple answer is: America cannot and will not win, the tables have turned and there is no rolling back of the worldwide jihad movement and when this new front of jihad starts in Yemen it might become the single most important front of jihad in the world.” Shortly after announcing this to the world, Hasan began his final preparations for the attack on Ft. Hood while Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the attempted Christmas suicide bomber, called his father to let him know they would never speak again.
The fact is, America had plenty of warning regarding these attacks. Unfortunately our government is being run by those who seek to give more protection to terrorists than to its own citizens. Indeed, the strategy of closing Guantanamo Bay has been to treat the prisoners of war as if they were American citizens. This is exactly what has happened with the attempted suicide bomber, Abdulmutallab, who was speaking to authorities until the government sent in a lawyer to keep him from speaking to us. Now there are undoubtedly more attacks being planed against America by our enemies, but the government will not allow the military to conduct standard interrogations against captured soldiers at war with us. What’s worse, many of the prisoners kept at Guantanamo Bay are from Yemen and are scheduled to sent back to Yemen –then to be released back to al-Qaeda by the Yemeni government! Thus what we see is case after case of this Administration weakening America’s protection against foreign threats.
The connection between Ft. Hood and the second, albeit failed, terror attack on Christmas is the man Anwar al-Awlaki. Known as “the bin Laden of the internet,” al-Awlaki is a known al-Qaeda recruiter who recruited radical Muslims in the United States and is now helping to build a formidable al-Qaeda network in, you guessed it, Yemen. Furthermore, al-Awlaki preached to three of the 9/11 terrorists from a mosque in northern Virginia and was the personal spiritual advisor to Hasan, the terrorist shooter at Ft. Hood. But while the Obama Administration continued to pass off the Ft. Hood shootings as non-terror related, it began applying pressure on the Yemeni government while launching airstrikes on al-Qaeda camps in Yemen. Why would Obama do such a thing?
One word: Healthcare.
That’s right, Obama’s efforts to “fix” the economy have brought the unemployment rate above 10% while his efforts to “reform” healthcare has backfired at almost every turn. As the Ft. Hood terror attack took place, Obama was deeply entrenched in war on healthcare, not on terror. During his first year in office, the only new tactic the Administration has offered to fight terror is to close Guantanamo Bay, the prison where we are holding “enemy combatants” (i.e. the prisoners of war captured during the War on Terror thus far). As we shall see, the decisions to close Guantanamo Bay marked a shift away from fighting terror that has only helped terrorists while lead us to continued problems in Yemen.
What’s important to note is that the Ft. Hood terrorist continued to stay in contact with the al-Qaeda recruiter al-Awlaki since 9/11 and up until the attack in November. At the beginning of October, however, al-Awlaki announced the attacks coming the following two months when he said, “The simple answer is: America cannot and will not win, the tables have turned and there is no rolling back of the worldwide jihad movement and when this new front of jihad starts in Yemen it might become the single most important front of jihad in the world.” Shortly after announcing this to the world, Hasan began his final preparations for the attack on Ft. Hood while Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the attempted Christmas suicide bomber, called his father to let him know they would never speak again.
The fact is, America had plenty of warning regarding these attacks. Unfortunately our government is being run by those who seek to give more protection to terrorists than to its own citizens. Indeed, the strategy of closing Guantanamo Bay has been to treat the prisoners of war as if they were American citizens. This is exactly what has happened with the attempted suicide bomber, Abdulmutallab, who was speaking to authorities until the government sent in a lawyer to keep him from speaking to us. Now there are undoubtedly more attacks being planed against America by our enemies, but the government will not allow the military to conduct standard interrogations against captured soldiers at war with us. What’s worse, many of the prisoners kept at Guantanamo Bay are from Yemen and are scheduled to sent back to Yemen –then to be released back to al-Qaeda by the Yemeni government! Thus what we see is case after case of this Administration weakening America’s protection against foreign threats.
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