Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Australian bishops lead crossing to Rome

FOUR bishops, 40 priests and thousands of parishioners from the Traditional Anglican Communion will petition the Vatican by Easter to be received into the Catholic Church.

Archbishop John Hepworth of Adelaide, primate of the TAC, said 26 parishes in Western Australia, Tasmania, NSW, Victoria, far north Queensland and South Australia hoped to be united with Rome by the end of the year.

The move comes as 100 Anglican parishes in the US and some in Canada have announced their decisions to convert to Catholicism en masse, voting to take up an offer made by Pope Benedict XVI in November in his apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus (On Groups of Anglicans).

The initiative allows Anglican bishops, priests and entire congregations, if they wish, to join Rome.

Archbishop Hepworth, 65, who is married with three children, said the Pope had allowed for a continuation of Anglican practices, including a married clergy.

"In an age when the traditional family is under attack, the presence of a priestly family at the centre of parishes is a real gift," he said.

He said the motivation for the move to Rome was a desire for Christian unity and dissatisfaction with the secularisation of the Anglican church. This, he said, included the ordination of women and practising homosexuals.

Traditional Anglicans had also become disillusioned by radical bishops such as John Shelby Spong in the US publicly disbelieving the Gospel accounts of basic tenets such as the bodily Resurrection of Christ, he said.

"Under the process, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith accepts petitions, they are then referred to the local Catholic bishops' conference which gives advice, then an Ordinariate will be established," he said.

"I would like to think the process would be close to being finalised by the end of the year because the Pope wants results."

Australia's Cardinal George Pell said members of the TAC would be "most welcome" when the process unfolded. To ease the way, the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference has appointed Bishop Peter Elliott of Melbourne, the director of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family, to liaise with traditional Anglicans considering joining the Catholic Church.

"The papal offer gives traditional Anglicans the opportunity to be united in communion but not absorbed by the Catholic Church," Bishop Elliott said.

"The Catholic Church will be enriched by the very prayerful and dignified approach to worship and the sense of good taste and culture of traditional Anglicans."

Once the Ordinariate is established, ordinary Catholics will be free to attend its Masses.

Archbishop Hepworth acknowledged that some traditional Anglicans would opt not to join the Ordinariate "and they will need to be catered for".

The Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, Dr Phillip Aspinall, was in flood-affected areas of western Queensland yesterday and uncontactable.

But in a recent statement he said that the TAC "is a group of people who are not part of the Anglican Church of Australia nor in communion with the global Anglican Communion".

But at least two of the bishops involved in the petition, David Robarts of Launceston and Harry Entwistle of Perth, hold general licences within the mainstream Anglican church's Diocese of the Murray and are therefore in communion with Canterbury.

Dr Aspinall warned lay Anglicans if they wished to become Catholic "they will have to accept all the teaching of that Church including its moral teaching, for example, on contraception".

In Britain, Anglican and Catholic authorities are considering the financial implications of any mass conversions, including the possibility of church sharing or the Catholic Church taking out 100-year leases on former Anglican churches.
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