“When someone is ordained in the Anglican Church and becomes a parish priest in a community, we cannot say that nothing has happened, that everything is ‘invalid’,” the cardinal says in volume of papers and discussions that took place in Rome as part of the “Malines Conversations,” an ecumenical forum.While I'm not a Coccopalmerio scholar, this reminds me of another widely quoted remark, which I found in Wikipedia:
Nevertheless, if I stop at doctrine, I don't see the people anymore. But if I observe that two people really do love each other, say they practice charity towards the needy...then I can also say that, while their relation remains illicit, in those two people there emerge positive elements.In both cases, he seems to be saying, well, if there's some good there, who's to judge? This of course violates the basic moral principle Bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu “An action is good when good in every respect; it is wrong when wrong in any respect”. Mr Foley, my 9th-grade English teacher in public school, taught me that. This is tangential to Fr Longenecker's concerns, but insofar as Coccopalmerio seems to represent some Bergoglian views, I think it's worth addressing the Anglican project from this angle as well.
I think Fr Longenecker comes closest to my worries here:
The liberals on both sides of the Tiber clearly think the ecumenical work is over. They believe we are all already united in a World Council of Churches kind of way. This is, of course, a lie, and The Tablet goes on to point out one of the pebbles in the shoe–or perhaps one of the Frankenstein monsters in the vestry…Oddly, while Fr Longenecker mentions the Pastoral Provision, he doesn't mention Anglicanorum coetibus, which is a much clearer lab experiment on how Anglican outreach is already taking place in the Church. It's a sleight-of-hand in many ways, one that I think Coccopalmerio would be pleased to examine: Anglicans with just about any level of formation are accepted with perfunctory remedial work. Those Anglican converts who supervise their formation have no experience as Catholic formators and don't strike me as especially intelligent -- our archdiocesan vocation director is in residence at our parish; I frankly don't think he'd take Fr Perkins seriously.Yet the major difficulty for the Catholic Church in recognizing Anglican clergy would be the perception of validating women priests, something that was strongly ruled against by John Paul II.I was going to say, “Add to that Anglican gay clergy and bishops” but realize we have already achieved a certain ecumenical unity on that issue. . .
Gays are clearly no problem for Bp Lopes or Fr Perkins. I go back to a Nazi-Germany analogy here, which I normally hate to do, but I think this one applies. One justification that's been reported that rank-and-file Germans gave for Hitler was basically, "Well, here we have particularly extreme Nazis, but they aren't the rule. In fact, if Hitler knew what these people are doing in the name of the Party, he'd put a stop to it." Sorry, Luke Reese and the Gilbertine gays aren't a bug, they're a feature.
I think Bernard Law had this in mind when he started the whole Anglican project, in fact. Law was a liberal. I'm not so sure about Ratzinger, for that matter.
