"Continuing Anglicans" Hunting for Unity
Episcopal News Service. June 30, 1983 [83129]
The Rev. Edward Berckman, Diocese of Indianapolis
INDIANAPOLIS (DPS, June 30) -- Bishops of three "continuing Anglican" churches, groups which defected from the Episcopal Church and were recently described as "characterized by almost unlimited fragmentation," declared themselves "in amity and intercommunion with each other" and promised to "strive for organic union among all similarly-minded and well-intentioned Continuing Anglicans" in a June meeting here.
The statement, subject to ratification by the churches' national or provincial synods, was signed by six bishops and a bishop-elect of the Anglican Catholic Church in the United States, Bishop Carmino de Catanzaro of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, and two bishops of the Anglican Episcopal Church in North America.
Bishop James O. Mote of Denver, senior Anglican Catholic bishop, said the bodies currently exist as separate churches, not from any doctrinal differences but "because in history we came at different times."
The Anglican Episcopal churches were formed "due to the Pike controversy," he said, and prior to the 1976 General Convention which led to most of the defections. (In 1966 charges of heresy against Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike led to a censure but not a trial by the House of Bishops.)
An organic union of the American groups could take place by October when the Anglican Catholic's Provincial Synod (equivalent to General Convention) meets in Florida.
Such a union is likely to produce the merging of congregations only in Nashville, the one city with a parish from each body.
Asked whether further union among continuing Anglican groups might occur, Mote answered affirmatively, saying there are "prayers but no plans yet" for such moves.
An article by Louis Traycik in the April, 1983 issue of the Christian Challenge, "The Continuing Church Today, Part III", identified "eight different jurisdictions, with a total of perhaps (at most) 20,000 souls" and said "unity is lost" among these continuing Anglican groups.
The Anglican Catholic bishops meeting in Indianopolis called the article "fiction" and "full of inaccuracies."
They took issue with Traycik's thesis of "three basic strains in Continuing Anglicanism: hard-line Anglo-Catholics ..., hard-line Neo-Evangelicals ..., and everyone else in the middle."
Bishop William Rutherford of the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic States said that Anglican Catholic churches in Virginia, traditionally a center of evangelicalism in the Episcopal Church, are all Anglo-Catholic. During the meeting at St. Edward the Confessor's Church here a Solemn High Pontifical Mass was celebrated for the Anglican Catholic College of Bishops, using page references to both the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican Missal.
Asked whether an eventual reunion with the Episcopal Church seemed possible, Bishop Louis W. Falk of the Diocese of the Missouri Valley said it was, "on the basis of the seven ecumenical councils, all the prayer books and the Lambeth Quadrilateral. In fact, I would feel conscience bound to come back under those conditions."
Bishop William F. Burns of the Diocese of the Resurrection said reunion with the Episcopal Church could happen "if they undo what they did in 1976." The actions referred to were the adoption of a new prayer book and what the Anglican Catholic bishops called the ordination of "priestesses."
Bishop Mote spoke of other "alterations in official formularies" such as changes in canons on marriage and confirmation.
The Anglican Episcopal bishops who signed the statement of amity were Walter H. Adams and Thomas J. Kleppinger.