Saturday, May 13, 2006

What is Anglo-Papalism?

We could get very pedantic here. Technically, technically, I'm not an Anglo-Catholic, yet for simplicity my label (for what it's worth) comes under the umbrella term of Anglo-Catholic. What's the real difference? See here.

Seriously though, there's a tendency in the church to break us down into finer and finer labels. If Fr Marco Vervoorst and Mr Paul Goings are right then there are only 10 Traditional Anglo-Papalists in the world. I hope that's not true. The question is: have we now labelled ourselves too finely?

I don't think so. We exist in a sparse state: certainly Fr Vervoorst is in Australia and Mr Goings in the U.S., yet what we work for is unification, an undoing of the Schism of the 16th Century. It is the Anglo-Papalist movement that gave the Church the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We have valid orders, thanks to the existence of the Old Catholics, so we exist as a force for unity, even though that seems pretty hopeless at the moment.

A Traditional Anglo-Papalist regards the standard of liturgy to be as set in the 1955 English Missal, and the Anglican Breviary rather than the Novus Ordo or the modern Breviary . I have an awful feeling that I'm the only one in Blighty (i.e. the U.K.) to own one. If you do, please leave a comment.

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