Traditionalist Anglicans urged not to cling to 'illusion'

Traditionalist Anglicans who remain in the Anglican Church, against Pope Benedict XVI's offer of an Anglican ordinariate, are wasting "time and spiritual energy" clinging to a "dangerous illusion", said the Vatican's delegate for the Australian ordinariate, reports the Catholic News Service.

Melbourne Auxiliary Bishop Peter Elliott urged Anglicans at festival in Perth to take up the Pope's offer of "peace."

"I would caution people who still claim to be Anglo-Catholics and yet are holding back," he told The Record, Catholic newspaper of the Archdiocese of Perth this week. "I'd say 'When are you going to face realities?' because there's no place for a classical Anglo-Catholic in the Anglican Communion anymore."

Those coming into the ordinariates are the "last fruits" of the Anglicans' Oxford Movement started in 1833 by Blessed John Henry Newman to restore Catholic identity in the Anglican Church, Bishop Elliott said. But he warned that times have changed and events have taken a "new and confronting turn."

"These realities seem to be lost on some Anglo-Catholics who are tempted to make a desperate last stand by just staying where they are," he told the festival, which drew more than 100 people.

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