Posted by Leo
on 10/25/2009, 8:19 am, in reply to "Interesting Secular View from England"
The Brit novelist/columnist (??) really doesn't know what he's talking about. He points to exaggeration from the Right, while indulging in a fair bit of apocalypticism of his own! Catholics ordaining women in 20 years' time, when today they say women are biologically -- arguably genetically -- incapable of receiving the grace of Holy Orders? What's more likely is that a fortified, increasingly conservative and "English" * RCC in Britain will make trouble for "liberalism," abortion rights, Islamism, etc., and even reach out to that land's few U.S.-style evangelicals and fundamentalists ... all just like it's been doing increasingly here in the States. He says RCs there are already a bigger religious force than active Anglicans, so why not? Tho they will also drive out their own "liberals" to the C of E... leading to more disagreements with the Anglican Communion's more-evangelical Third World bishops.
The one Church's plans there they may frustrate, tho, is OURS!!! Rome's new 'English Rite' (if you will) offers more autonomy and familiarity to o/Orthodox-minded Anglicans than we're currently offering generally there... unless the Assembly of Orthodox Bishops of Great Britain and Ireland works quick to promote the Western Rite, unity, and true Autonomy/Autocephaly.... Else we may increasingly draw converts whose main motivating factor is "anti-[Roman]Catholicism" -- not a small factor still in the UK, and it still gets pretty ugly at times.
Another way to look at this is a very traditional English way, that the different denominations there are merely "parties" in 'the Church' ... in England: episcopalians, presbyterians, congregationalists, radicals (Quakers), methodists, nonconformists (most of these), recusants (Catholics), nonjurors (that's in Scotland), "orthodox-church-men" (as Quaker George Fox called a few of us he once debated), High Churchmen, Broad Churchmen, Low Churchmen, Anglo-Catholics, Anglo-Orthodox(!), Continuing Catholics, Tractarians, fans of various Prayerbooks, liberals, conservatives, charismatics, 'Celtic Christianity' devotees, etc etc etc. Yes, highly politicized or politicizing, partisan or factionalistic, but in times of relative or actual tolerance/emancipation, actively jostling for control or influence over the land's old Christianity. I'm not sure they're as denominationally "settled" as we are here, either, what with a bunch of them getting together into a "United Reformed Church" in recent years. So, while the columnist sees gross losses by the C of E as foreboding the end of English Christianity, it may simply be another change in some of that country's ecclesiastical arrangements.
But the MSM needs to hype "drama," doesn't it! This I know from my own journalism days....
--Leo
(*--"Sir Thomas [More], this isn't Spain!" OR "Eire," that speaker might add today!!)
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