Pope Benedict has made unity among Christians—Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox, even among Catholics themselves—a major goal of his papacy. On October 20, 2009, he invited Anglicans to re-join the Catholic Church, an invitation which has its origin in the Vatican Council’s 1964 Decree on Ecumenism. (For the October 20 statements, see pages 16-21.)

The Decree foresaw a period of growing closer together through prayer, discussions and practical cooperation, guided by the Holy Spirit towards a clearer understanding of the nature of the Church founded by Christ through His apostles.

Unfortunately, while relations between the Catholic Church and various religious communities improved on the local level, secularism, relativism and hedonism undermined the moral as well as doctrinal discipline of these very communities, with the result that today, 40 years later, the gap between Catholics and the Reformation communities is wider than it was in 1965.

From 1930 onwards, when Anglicanism abandoned the age-old teaching central to the Christian understanding of marriage, namely, its prohibition of contraception, the unravelling of moral discipline has progressed rapidly as it and much of mainline Protestantism accepted abortion, homosexuality, divorce, sterilization, and pornography in the 1960’s and early 70’s. This decline was accompanied by an undermining of Holy Scripture and Tradition in favour of accepting the claims for equality in the church for women and the behaviour of homosexuals. For Anglicanism the consequence has been a fracturing of its structure into four parts, with its evangelical-Protestant and its Catholic-oriented wings fleeing in opposite directions away from mainstream Anglicanism, which then also lost its African communities because West European-North American Anglicans insisted on accepting homosexual behaviour as legitimate.

At the 2009 Lambeth Conference (held in England once every ten years for all Anglican bishops), Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Vatican’s Christian Unity Office, explicitly explained that the introduction of female priests and bishops represented a new and fundamental rupture in Christian unity with the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

At the same time, 230 African and Asian Anglican bishops who had absented themselves from the 650 bishops at Lambeth, met by themselves in Jerusalem where they rejected the Archbishop of Canterbury as the leading moral authority in Anglicanism. The issue was homosexuality. This action has created a new geographic division, with the departing Africans constituting the majority of the 80 million Anglicans worldwide.

This latest division then is in addition to those who began to separate in the 1970s, namely the Catholic-oriented groups known today as the Traditional Anglican Church (TAC), claiming some 400,000 supporters; and second, by those who left the Anglican communion in the 1980s, Protestant in orientation, i.e., “biblically faithful” Anglicans, known now as the Anglican Network, today under the umbrella of the Anglican province of the Southern Cone  (in Latin America), claiming some 100,000 supporters. The situation is further complicated by the existence of a group in England known as Forward in Faith, which is opposed to female priests; yet it is still part of the Church of England but nevertheless has its own two bishops.

How then should we interpret Pope Benedict’s invitation? It should be seen, I believe, as a final rescue and hope for Anglicans who are close to Catholic thinking in both doctrine and discipline. At their request the Pope is making available an Anglican rite, honouring a liturgy of prayer and music in the Anglo-Catholic tradition.  But doctrine and discipline will have to be fully Catholic, with none of the customary Anglican ambiguity. Applicants will have to express their faith in Catholic articles of faith; those seeking priesthood will have to be ordained as priests who re-enact the Eucharistic Sacrifice of Christ’s body and blood. The veneration of Mary, mother of Our Lord Jesus and therefore Mother of God, and that of God’s holy martyrs and confessors, together with other essentials such as belief in prayers for the deceased faithful in purgatory and acceptance of the Magisterium as the final voice in protecting the truths of faith, are part and parcel of our beautiful and precious religion, which is the salvation of the world.

Debate will end.  Peace of soul will come. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, “dogma satisfies a hunger.  For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind.  Dogma does not mean the absence of thought but the end of thought.”

The Church welcomes all those who will respond to the Pope’s dramatic invitation in years to come.