A thoughtful comment on Lambeth 2008

Blog by-the-sea has a very thoughtful post on the recently completed Lambeth conference. It is worth reading the whole post, and following the links to other sites used as sources for the post.

The first aspect of the post that is interesting is the discussion of the idea of dialogue, and the value of dialogue. This runs through the whole post.

Another aspect of the post I found particularly interesting was the idea that the Anglo-Catholics, though in their original inspiration claiming to be an expression of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church within the Anglican communion, do in actual experience, when the Anglican communion turns out to have no authoritative decision making process, end up being effectively just another "party" alongside others within that communion. Here is part of the post, in which Cardinal Newman is cited:

Even Anglo-Catholicism, the most “successful” attempt at catholic recovery, had to abandon its goal to transform the Church of England and settle for party status. Within the churches of the Reformation, catholicity remains, and will always remain, an expression of private judgment. In 1850 J. H. Newman pleaded with his former Anglo-Catholic colleagues to recognize the irrationality in remaining a part of the Church of England. He has never been adequately answered: "In the beginning of the movement you disowned private judgment, but now, if you would remain a party, you must, with whatever inconsistency, profess it;—then you were a party only externally, that is, not in your wishes and feelings, but merely because you were seen to differ from others in matter of fact, when the world looked at you, whether you would or no; but now you will be a party knowingly and on principle, intrinsically, and will be erected on a party basis. You cannot be what you were. You will no longer be Anglo-Catholic, but Patristico-Protestants. You will be obliged to frame a religion for yourselves, and then to maintain that it is that very truth, pure and celestial, which the Apostles promulgated. You will be induced of necessity to put together some speculation of your own, and then to fancy it of importance enough to din it into the ears of your neighbours, to plague the world with it, and, if you have success, to convulse your own Communion with the imperious inculcation of doctrines which you can never engraft upon it."

It is this living of an essentially protestant, or perhaps more fairly, a thoroughly Anglican, existence by those of Anglo-Catholic beliefs that seems to me to present the pastoral difficulty with suggestions that Anglo-Catholic parishes might be recieved as parish communities into the Roman Catholic Church. There is a genuine element of conversion needed, not in the sense of the rejection of the Anglo-Catholic heritage, but in the sense of acceptance of a living Magisterium, and the danger of corporate receptions is that this is not seen. That is not to say that such corporate receptions are not possible, but simply to suggest that they are not as simple as they look to be at first sight.