Per Christum Catholic Blog

One would expect the reaction from liberal Anglicans to Rome’s offer would be less than positive, but many conservative Anglicans have also been up in arms about the offer, including bishop Don Harvey of a network of conservative Canadian Anglicans associated with ACNA (Anglican Church in North America). Personally, I find the generous response of evangelical Anglican Matt Kennedy to be better. His response is basically, “even though I don’t agree with the pope, this is a generous and courageous offer for those Anglicans that do happen to agree with the pope.”

Bishop Harvey is not so impressed, and lets his frustration be known:

“Apart from being an intrusion at the very highest levels of one major church into the internal affairs of another, under the guise of being ecumenical, this invitation offers very little that is new,” Bishop Don Harvey, moderator of the Anglican Network in Canada, told the group’s annual synod Thursday morning…

“I find the words in the official joint communique referring to ‘the Catholic Church and the Anglican Tradition’ offensive in the extreme and reporters who suggested that this may be a solution to the Network’s needs are not really aware of what we truly profess,” he said.

I do understand why some conservatives would dislike this offer. Even though the pope’s offer to Anglicans was precipitated by a request by the Traditional Anglican Communion, it still can be seen as “cutting in” on the game of traditional Anglicans, who, let’s face it, are not exactly unified in their response to TEC’s liberalism. There are various options available to those who oppose TEC, which include joining ACNA and staying in TEC. Adding another option, from Rome no less, into the mix, cannot be great news for conservative bishops who are having trouble shepherding the faithful.

On the other hand, Bishop Harvey and anybody else who speaks of ecumenism these days need to understand a certain reality about ecumenism: the old way of doing ecumenism is dead (except perhaps in some quarters of the Academy and in the offices of some church administration buildings). Spending loads of money and time to utter niceties to one another, coming up with nebulous statements of common belief, is out. Watering down churches’ beliefs until no church believes anything meaningful anymore, is the way ecumenism used to be done. It is not the way postmoderns do ecumenism, because it isn’t very genuine.

Serge has a good take on ecumenism, and I wrote about my approach a few years ago which is very similar to his (which I call “blog level ecumenism”). Personally, I would much rather do “on the ground” ecumenism with an Orthodox Christian who tells me he wants me to join the true Church (in his eyes, the Orthodox Church), than an official mainline ecumenical officer who will feed me some line about what they believe, only to publicly deny such a belief later. I respect churches and faiths that stand for things (peacefully and charitably, of course), whether Catholic, Orthodox, Calvinist, or whatever. Bishop Harvey  needs to understand that Rome does ecumenism differently, which is to say, we view ecumenism as both evangelization and working toward unity. It’s not the way the mainlines do it, but then again, Catholics aren’t mainline Protestants.

So basically, I understand the negative reaction to this offer, but on the other hand, I would not be offended if Calvinist Anglicans made a similar offer. After all, if Calvinist Catholics (!) approached the head of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church about accommodating them, I would expect the head of that church to help them out, and would not be offended because of that.