Episcopal/Catholic Conversion Is a Two-Way Street

The following is excerpted from an article that originally appeared on the InsiderCatholic.com website. Read the entire article here.

An announcement that the Roman Catholic Church was creating a new structure for Anglicans to convert en masse grabbed the media’s attention last year. Married Anglican priests could swim the Tiber all while keeping their liturgies and worship forms mostly intact, affiliating with new Roman Catholic “ordinates” of their own that looked strikingly similar to Anglican dioceses. Many conservative Anglo-Catholics, especially those in Britain, were delighted with the offer.

The developing story of the new Apostolic Constitution for Anglicans continues to unfold in the media, boosted by the Anglican Communion’s instability due to the Episcopal Church and their co-revisionists in the Anglican Church of Canada. Less reported has been the equally well-trafficked path away from Rome and toward the Episcopal Church.

In 2009, Episcopal bishop and gay celebrity Gene Robinson crowed that his New Hampshire diocese was brimming with disaffected Catholics, drawn to the promise of a more inclusive church. While Bishop Robinson’s celebration was premature (his New Hampshire diocese reported 1 percent growth in membership that year, after a decade-long decline of near 20 percent — but continued to lose weekly attendance unabated), he was not misrepresenting the source of some new pew occupants.

“Pope Ratzinger,” Bishop Robinson declared, referring to Benedict XVI by his given name in a late-2005 speech, “may be the best thing to happen to the Episcopal Church . . . . We are seeing so many Roman Catholics join the [Episcopal] church.”

Roman Catholics and Episcopalians have swapped places for years, easily facilitated by related liturgical forms and practices. Unlike other Reformation-era churches, the Church of England, then a geographic arm of the Roman Church, maintained the forms and hierarchies of its parent. The Anglo-Catholic wing of Anglicanism is the closest to its source, in many cases conducting services that are more recognizably Catholic than the post-Vatican II Mass. Some American conservatives see Rome’s embrace of theological orthodoxy — reasserted by Benedict and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II — as a compelling alternative to an increasingly listless Episcopal Church.

Similarly, liberal Catholics tied to their forms of worship enjoy the option to embrace the Episcopal Church’s “Catholicism Lite” without the inconvenient frowning upon birth control, abortion, or whatever the latest sexual lifestyle innovation might be.

 Read the entire article here.