Study Group Focuses on Ordaining Priests: Episcopalians, Roman Catholics Seek Harmony
Episcopal News Service. August 7, 1990 [90206]
Gerald Renner
The Rev. Gerald Gallagher was ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Church at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in 1967. In 1980 he changed course and became a priest in the U.S. Episcopal Church.
"Jumping through all the hoops" from one church to another took him about a year and a half, said Gallagher, rector of Messiah Episcopal Church in Rhinebeck, New York.
One of the hoops he did not have to jump through was reordination. The U.S. Episcopal Church, a branch of the worldwide Anglican communion, recognizes Roman Catholic ordinations as valid.
The Rev. George Greenway jumped in the opposite direction, and he has a different story. He was ordained in the Episcopal Church, but had to go through the ceremony again in 1987 to be accepted as a priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, Massachusetts.
The two have joined a rich flow of priests who have switched from one of the churches to the other through the years and have found themselves at home with a similar faith and liturgy. The churches have been estranged since the Church of England, under Henry VIII in the 16th century, broke from the papacy but not, Anglicans say, from the Catholic faith.
But differences have been intense and, in many instances, bitter. Ordination is a case in point. In the official Roman Catholic view, put forth by Pope Leo XIII in 1896, Anglican ordinations are "absolutely null and utterly void."
But maybe that is not quite the situation anymore, says a joint statement released last week by an official U.S. Roman Catholic and Episcopal study group.
The whole question is up for review now that "the two communions have entered a phase marked by serenity and cordiality," the statement says, dialogue having replaced polemic.
"The conditions of our times have become quite different from what they were in 1896," it says.
It suggests that the Roman Catholic Church might let bygones be bygones and accept Anglican ordinations -- at least for men -- as valid.
"The new context that is now in the making may make it possible to reach a decision for the future without passing judgment on the past," according to the statement.
The statement leaves for future consideration another more recent and emotional issue -- the ordination of women as priests and bishops in the U.S. Episcopal Church and other branches of Anglicanism.
The statement was issued by Roman Catholic Archbishop John F. Whealon of Hartford and Episcopal Bishop A. Theodore Eastman of Maryland.
The two prelates were cochairmen of the 16-member Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation in the United States that produced the 8,000-word statement: "Anglican Orders: A Report on the Evolving Context of Their Evaluation in the Roman Catholic Church."
The statement reviews where the churches stand after 20 years of formal ecumenical dialogue. It endorses the vision of a universal church of the future as "a communion of diverse types of communions." As "sister churches," the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches would hold onto their own traditions and organization.
The pope would be a symbol of unity, a "first among equals" among all the bishops, but not wielding authority over the sister churches. That position was endorsed in principle by the Anglican bishops at their Lambeth conference in England in 1988 and by 25 of the 28 national churches which make up Anglicanism.
But to move toward a universal church, Roman Catholics and Anglicans must reconcile differences, some bitter and going back more than 400 years.
Pope Leo's condemnation of Anglican holy orders is seen as "the most fundamental issue" that hinders mutual recognition of ministries.
The new statement "is an important contribution to what has been a major sticking point," said the Rev. John F. Hotchkin, ecumenical officer for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington.
A new path to unity has been suggested "short of all the Anglicans lining up and being ordained by Roman Catholic bishops," Hotchkin said.
Whealon, who is on retreat for several weeks, was unavailable for comment.
Eastman, too, said the statement was significant, in that it helps Roman Catholics to look in a new way at Pope Leo's condemnation of Anglican orders.
"One of the problems in the Roman Catholic system is that when the pope speaks authoritatively, it's so hard to undo that. Look at the Galileo case. It took them until the 1980s to deal with that," Eastman said.
The scholars who developed the new Anglican-Roman Catholic statement had access to documents made available for the first time in the Vatican archives which shed light on Pope Leo's position.
The pope, they found, believed that "Anglicans and Roman Catholics must be in one institutional community of faith" for Rome to recognize Anglican orders.
They said Pope Leo did not consider as central the question whether Anglican bishops were in an unbroken line of succession going back to Jesus's Apostles.
"History is not the question. Theology is the question," the new statement says. The pope's reasoning "implies agreement about the theology of sacraments and ministry, and some Anglican recognition of the papacy."
It says such agreement has been reached. It points to reform of the ordination ritual by Roman Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s that brought Roman Catholic understanding of ordination in harmony with that of Anglicanism.
Similarly, it said resolutions adopted by Anglican bishops at their 1988 Lambeth meeting "point to a convergence in theology of ministry and eucharist which brings to an end the era of polarization."
"One may ask if the prevailing mind of the Anglican communion is still as contrary to the Roman Catholic understanding of Eucharist, priesthood, and ordination as Pope Leo XIII believed it was," the statement says.
"A new context for the resolution of pending problems... is thus in the making," the statement says.
Theologians of both churches are invited to look anew at Pope Leo's position and how the new context "has also been negatively affected by the ordination of women in the Anglican communion."