Vatican opens door to Anglicans
The Vatican eased the way Monday for Anglicans unhappy with the Church of England's ordination of female and homosexual clergy to convert to Catholicism.
The Roman Catholic Church unveiled a new juridical framework for the conversions in response to "repeated and insistent" petitions from Anglicans to join the Church, the Vatican said in a statement.
The move could attract thousands of Anglicans from around the world, including the United States, Australia and Africa.
Announcing the planned opening on October 20, the Vatican predicted that only between 20 and 30 bishops and a few hundred other individuals would seek to come across under the provision.
But the announcement sparked shrill headlines in Britain, with The Times of London describing the move as "potentially the most explosive development in Anglican-Catholic relations since the Reformation."
An Anglican official issued a low-key reaction, saying the Catholic overture "does not deflect us from either the continuing mission of the Church of England... or its longstanding commitment to seeking the unity of all the Churches, including the Roman Catholic Church."
Christopher Hill, Bishop of Guildford and head of the Church of England's Council for Christian Unity, added: "It will now be for those who... feel impelled to seek full communion with the Roman Catholic Church to study the (provision) and to consider their options."
The Anglican Communion split from Catholicism in the 16th century, when Pope Clement VII refused to grant King Henry VIII a divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
The Vatican's statement said: "In recent times the Holy Spirit has moved groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately."
Special "ordinariates" similar to dioceses will allow the new converts to preserve "elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony" while entering "full communion" with the Catholic Church.
However the new law "does not signify any change... in the discipline of clerical celibacy," the statement stressed.
The new "apostolic constitution" signed by Pope Benedict XVI and published in the Vatican's official bulletin on Monday says the admission of married men to the clergy will be considered "on a case by case basis."
The move comes as the Church of England, the main component of the Anglican Communion, confronts a growing split over the ordination of women and gay marriage.
Several conservative Anglican priests have defected to Catholicism since the ordination of women was adopted from 1984 in various branches of the Anglican Communion and by the Church of England as a whole in 1992.
Roman Catholic clergy are all male, which the Church believes obeys the directives of Jesus Christ, whose 12 apostles were all men.
The move comes less than two weeks ahead of a Vatican meeting between Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world's Anglicans, and the pope.
The previously scheduled November 21 meeting will coincide with celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Johannes Willebrands, a Dutch cardinal who was a pioneer in Catholic ecumenism and who died in 2006.
The Church of England is the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which has about 77 million followers. The Catholic Church counts some 1.1 billion faithful.
