Orthodox to Old Catholics: Choose Between Us and Anglicans
Episcopal News Service. October 17, 1989 [89196C]
In an ecumenical address at celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Old Catholic Union of Utrecht, Eastern Orthodox Metropolitan Damaskinos of Switzerland said closer relationships between Old Catholics and Eastern Orthodox are blocked by the relationship of full communion that already exists between parts of Old Catholicism and parts of Anglicanism. Nearly half-a-million people are members of Old Catholic dioceses, a church that is the result of three splits from Roman Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries over the understanding of papal authority. As a result of a 1931 agreement, much of Old Catholicism is in full communion with Anglicanism. In his address, Damaskinos said that the theology of recent Old Catholic-Eastern Orthodox texts "clearly differs in parts in important questions" from Anglican theological positions. In the mid-1970s, the Polish National Catholic Church in North America, the largest Old Catholic denomination, ended such relationships with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada after those Anglicans ordained women as priests.