A Continuing Anglican Bishop Gets It

The archbishop and metropolitan of the Anglican Catholic Church says that the Bishop of Rome has served as an unintentional instrument of unity among Anglo-Catholics in a way no one could have anticipated or the way anyone expected.

Archbishop Mark Haverland said Anglicanum Coetibus - the Pope's offer for Anglicans to reunite with Rome - galvanized Anglo-Catholics around the world to reflect on why they are Anglicans and what they believe, he told a world gathering of Continuing Anglicans at St. Paul's in Brockton, Massachusetts.

Haverland said the besetting issue, Women's Ordination, continues to bedevil Anglicans in North America and Africa. He also predicted it would force a realignment of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) if the issue of women being ordained to the priesthood is not examined and reversed. "My premise is that bad theology and bad morals drive out good theology and good morals. The toleration of erroneous theological and moral principles tends to increase acceptance of the errors that flow from those principles.

"Within the Canterbury Communion the ordination of women to Holy Orders has grown from an eccentric mid-20th century proposal into a widely supported proposal in the 1970s, then into accepted practice in North America and the Antipodes. In the 1970s opposition to the new view was officially protected with conscience clauses. While most of the Canterbury Communion did not adopt the innovation in the 1970s and 1980s, the bad theology that it implies was not definitively rejected by the majority through the explicit breaking of communion with the innovators and by the explicit breaking of communion with those who tolerated the innovation."

Haverland said it was not sufficient to refrain from communion with the error; one also must not tolerate communion with those who tolerate the error. Why? Because bad theology drives out good theology.

Read the rest here.
HT: John Larocque

A surprisingly good article.