Cardinal's warning over Anglican disunity

Saturday, 17th May 2008. 6:30am

By: George Conger.

THE ANGLICAN Communion’s divisions over doctrine and discipline are a hindrance to Christian unity, a top Vatican official said last week. In an interview with the Catholic Herald, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the president of the Pontifical Council of Christian Unity, urged Anglicans to put their house in order.

The Roman Catholic Church would “work and pray” for clarity from the Anglican Communion on the divisive issues of doctrine and discipline that were dividing the church, he said. He urged this summer’s Lambeth Conference, where he will address the gathered bishops, to settle its disputes over homosexuality as it was “not sustainable to keep pushing decision-making back because it only extends the crisis.”

Cardinal Kasper said the divisions within Anglicanism were theological and structural. “It is a question of the identity of the Anglican Church. Where does it belong?”

"Does it belong more to the churches of the first millennium -- Catholic and Orthodox -- or does it belong more to the Protestant churches of the 16th century? At the moment it is somewhere in between, but it must clarify its identity now and that will not be possible without certain difficult decisions,” he said.

The Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Consultative Council, Canon Gregory Cameron commented that “most Anglicans have come to believe that it is part of the spirit of Anglicanism to be faithful both to the ancient tradition of the undivided Church and to the insights of the Reformation.”

“In every age, there have been those who have challenged us to come down on one side or the other. We need to take those challenges seriously because they point to real tensions arising from the quest for such a balance,” Canon Cameron told ReligiousIntelligence.com.

Cardinal Kasper’s comments follow up on a speech given on Jan 13, 2006, at Ushaw College in Durham. While the traditional doctrinal divisions between the Christian Churches were rapidly being resolved, Cardinal Kasper said that new approaches to ethical questions were pushing the churches ever farther apart such that “we are not able to speak with one voice on these issues to a world that needs to hear.”

"The dividing lines which have unfortunately become evident on ethical issues since the latter half of the last century are therefore not secondary or irrelevant for an understanding of the nature of the church," he said, as in “touching on holiness, they touch on the essential nature of the church itself.”

The decision by some Anglican Churches to ordain gay clergy and bless same–sex unions in the belief that they are prophetic actions that demonstrate God’s love and acceptance to all people, was not in conformity with the faith of the Gospel and the early church, he said. "We should not imagine that we possess more of the Holy Spirit today than the church of the early church fathers and the great theologians of the Middle Ages," he said.

By posing the question of what constitutes Anglicanism’s core, Cardinal Kasper asked the Communion whether it can be an ecumenical partner with the Roman Catholic Church. The goal of ecumenism, Cardinal Kasper told the Durham Conference was “a spiritually renewed church, in which the church in its concrete form becomes to the fullest degree that which in its undeveloped nature it always has been and always remains: the one, holy church we profess together in the Apostles' Creed."

If Anglicanism cannot add to the Catholic Church’s fullness by speaking with a common voice on hitherto universally agreed ethical standards, its value as an ecumenical partner was questionable, he said. However, Canon Cameron told ReligiousIntelligence.com the quest for balance within Anglicanism was not an impossible one, “since it is about taking both the history of the Church and the primary authority of scripture seriously,” and Anglicans do not wish to relinquish their “faithfulness to either of them.”