Tag Archives: ARCIC

Diocese of New Westminster and Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver have “dialogue”

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The Diocese of New Westminster, having been instrumental in shattering what is left of unity in the Anglican Communion, is now desperately seeking it in the most unlikely place: the diocese is busy trying to find commonality with Roman Catholicism. It is only fitting that it is basing these conversations on a missive from ARCIC since, as former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has pointed out, ARCIC is irrelevant to most Christians.

The Diocese of New Westminster: blazing new trails through the wilderness of the irrelevant.

From here:

Meet Your Relatives – Grassroots Ecumenism
100 clergy and lay attend the first of three Anglican – Roman Catholic Dialogue events

On Sunday the 26th of January nearly 100 clergy and laity gathered at Saint Helen’s Roman Catholic Parish in Burnaby for the first of three sessions entitled ‘Meet Your Relatives: Grassroots Ecumenism’. This event has arisen after the clergy of the Archdiocese of Vancouver (Roman Catholic) and the Diocese of New Westminster (Anglican) met for a study day two years ago. The ecumenical officers and committees of the two dioceses were charged with crafting an event for laity and clergy to build upon the success of the clergy day.

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Their conversations have been based on ‘Growing Together in Unity and Mission’, a statement of the international Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. [ARCIC]

The important thing is unity

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Some interesting observations on ARCIC, the ecumenical gabfest between Anglicans and Catholics from the Catholic side here (my bold):

The trouble with ARCIC always was (as a former Catholic member of it once explained to me) that on the Catholic side of the table you have a body of men (mostly bishops) who represent a more or less coherent view, being members of a Church which has established means of knowing and declaring what it believes. On the Anglican side of the table you have a body of men (and it was only men, on both sides, in those days) the divisions between whom are just fundamental as, and sometimes a lot more fundamental than, those between any one of them and the Catholic representatives they faced: they all represented only themselves.

And they all, Catholics and Anglicans, quite simply belonged to very different kinds of institution. It isn’t just that Catholics and Anglicans believe different doctrines: it’s that there is between them a fundamental difference over their attitude to the entire doctrinal enterprise. I remember very vividly, in my days as an (Anglican) clergy member of the Chelmsford Diocesan Synod, a debate on one of the ARCIC documents followed by a vote on whether to recommend to the General Synod in London that it should be accepted. The document was accepted overwhelmingly. At lunchtime, standing at the bar with a number of clergy, I asked how they had voted; they had all voted affirmatively. I then asked them if they had read the document. None of them had; and most of them, it became clear, had little idea of what it contained. “Well”, I asked, puzzled, “why did you vote for it, then?”  “The point is,” one of them replied, “the important thing is unity. The RCs are frightfully keen on doctrine. You have to encourage them: so I voted for their document”. There you have it: what the late Mgr Graham Leonard, when he was still an Anglican bishop, once called “the doctrinal levity of the Church of England”.

And there you do have it: the important thing is the illusion of unity. The same affliction assails orthodox Anglicans who remain in the Anglican Church of Canada or TEC for the sake of supposed unity – the ACA, the ACI, the Wycliffe College bunch et al.: they are actually sacrificing their principles to an illusion.