So What About The ACNA?

When I noted in passing the Anglican Church in North America, founded in 2009 due largely to objections to the 2003 election of openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire Eugene Robinson, it started a new train of thought. The ACNA, as I mentioned, has not completely decided on whether to ordain women, and my guess is that it will either never quite make the decision or defer it as long as possible, both traditional Anglican responses. (Since it already has women priests grandmothered in, as it were, a traditional Anglican response is all the more necessary!) In addition, it uses the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, which of course is anathema to "continuing Anglicans".

However, the ACNA has clearly seized the market for the next generation of dissident Episcopalians. It's very difficult for me to imagine a parish (much less a diocese) newly dissatisfied with The Episcopal Church on whatever grounds deciding to go into the ACA or any of the dozen or so other "continuing" groups from 1977. Consider the options of the traditionalist former Episcopalians in the Diocese of South Carolina, with their bishop. On one hand, as I understand it, the obstacle to their entering the ACNA as a body is that the ACNA already has a Diocese of South Carolina. On the other hand, consider whether Bishop Lawrence would remotely contemplate joining the ACA, where wannabes like Brian Marsh and Stephen Strawn would treat him like a second-class citizen!

I think this actually says a great deal about the future of the ACA, which is bleak indeed. The issues over which the "continuers" left The Episcopal Church are 40 years old, and, except among those same "continuers", now of advancing years, no longer controversial. The 1928 Book of Common Prayer is a fossil, like it or not, and the ACNA does not seem to see it as a serious option for general use. My own view is that the election of Eugene Robinson is too vague an issue on which to build a denomination, but that's my view -- and Episcopal priests whom I respect have said that, just as the issues that led to the Affirmation of St Louis in 1977 are no longer controversial in The Episcopal Church, the Robinson problem, even more vague, will fade as well.

Sincere people in the ACA (that is to say, not the bishops) will reply that of course this stuff isn't controversial in TEC, all the people who didn't like TEC have already been forced out. The problem there is simply that the "continuum" has been a miscalculation from the start: as Douglas Bess put it, the people who left post 1977 were few enough that TEC didn't notice, and certainly didn't change its course. I just don't see a future in Episcopal schism, even if Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori seems to be little interested in avoiding it. It hasn't been a recipe for success among the "continuers". It speaks volumes that they seem to be in complete denial about this.

The Other Little Thing

about calling yourself Catholic is simply the authority of the Pope, and this is critical. I've been through two sit-downs with priests to determine if my catechism took before I could be received. One was in January 2012, after the ACA stirred up all the trouble with St Mary's entering the Ordinariate, and Msgr Stetson came to a meeting of the parish to assess how well we'd been catechized. I was wondering if it would be something like PhD orals, but no, there was just one question -- how did we feel about the authority of the Pope? Transubstantiation, the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, mortal sin, all those things, it seems, were less important.

Same thing, the week before my wife and I were finally received at Easter, we met with Fr Mott at Our Mother of Good Counsel, and we chatted about various things, but the one issue he finally steered us to was the authority of the Pope. I don't know if priests do this with catechumens who haven't been baptized, but my guess is that it's a good thing to probe with "continuing Anglicans" -- look at the little dance all the TAC bishops did over signing the Catholic Catechism at the Portsmouth meeting. "Well, all we meant was that the Catechism is the most complete expression of Christianity. Didn't have anything to do with the authority of the Pope, after all. We're just gonna keep on keepin' on here, thanks very much!"

It seems pretty clear that in the view of actual Catholics, one of the key identifiers is to accept the authority of the Pope. This, again, is part of the general unreality among the "continuing Anglicans" who want to confuse small-c catholic with capital-C Catholic. You can say you believe all sorts of things: transubstantiation, the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, mortal sin, the importance of Confession, the need to attend mass, no ordination of women, but none of those makes you Catholic without accepting the authority of the Pope.

Or, for that matter, Fr Mott in a different context recounted the story of a professor he had in seminary, a Jew, who nevertheless taught New Testament and apparently understood St Paul as well as anyone Fr Mott had ever known. The problem was, Fr Mott said, that the guy didn't believe a word of it. This accounts for some part of the distaste I feel for "continuing Anglicans" and all their works. They'll sign the Catechism, but when push comes to shove, they don't believe a word of it.

The Chronology For Main Line Protestant Ordination of Women Priests

puts into perspective what Douglas Bess called the miscalculation by "continuing Anglicans" that great numbers of Episcopalians would defect and join their dissident denominations when The Episcopal Church began ordaining women in the 1970s. Other Protestant denominations had been ordaining women since the 1930s, and it's worth pointing out that these other Protestants were friends, neighbors, co-workers, schoolmates, clients, colleagues, and fellow alumni of Episcopalians.

On top of that, I lived through the national debate on whether women should be admitted to a wide range of jobs in the early 1970s; the subject of women police officers was particularly contentious in Los Angeles. The upshot, of course, was that women police officers worked out just fine. IBM, an archetype of the corporate mentality, sponsored a scientific study on whether women could program computers as effectively as men, and the conclusion was that they could.

So as a personal matter, I've got no problem with women in nearly any profession, and I had no problem with The Episcopal Church's decision to ordain women, which was still fresh when I returned to it in 1980. Beyond that, the country as a whole had no problem with it, and this was at the root of the "continuing Anglican" miscalculation. Pastor Susan showed up at St Edward's, everyone greeted her at coffee hour, and life went on.

"But Mr Bruce," people may say, "you're neglecting the question of sacramental validity," and insofar as I speak as a recovering Protestant, indeed I am. Protestants don't see the sacraments the same way Catholics do. I feel fairly confident that if we were to receive an audience with the recently installed Pontiff and posed the following questions to him, we would almost certainly have something like the following dialogue:

Your Holiness, are Episcopalians Catholic?

No.

So they're Protestant?

Yes.

But there are former Episcopalians who've left that denomination and have formed their own little denominations that don't ordain women, and they say that makes them Catholic. Are they actually Catholic?

No, although my predecessor set up an Apostolic Constitution whereby they could become Catholic. . .

But if they haven't availed themselves of the Apostolic Constitution you mentioned, are they somehow still Catholic?

No.

And there you have it, from the horse's mouth, as it were. Anglicans of the unreconstructed sort outside of the Ordinariates are not Catholics, whatever they may claim themselves to be. Small-c catholic is not capital-C Catholic, as Catholics and Protestants will both tell you. This is the snake oil that "continuing Anglicans" have been peddling with little success since 1977, and nobody's buying, not even, significantly, the ACNA.

A refusal to ordain women doesn't make you Catholic. Use of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, which contains the specifically Protestant Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, makes you definitively not Catholic. Oddly, the 1979 BCP, which distances itself from the Articles by placing them in a "Historical Documents" category, is regarded as heretical, although in this matter it ought to make Anglo-Catholics more, rather than less, comfortable.

Protestants simply don't see the Sacraments the way Catholics do; that's reflected in the Articles. Consequently, Protestants have no problem, and basically ought to have no problem, ordaining women. If you want to question the validity of Sacraments conducted by women, you should probably find an option not involving being a Protestant.

The vast majority of main line Protestants seem to have recognized this at some level, including Episcopalians in the 1970s. This is at the root of the "continuing Anglican" miscalculation, which it seems to me derives from either sincere confusion, not so sincere self-deception, or outright mendacity. Of the "continuing Anglican" leadership, my personal assessment leans toward the latter.

I Did A Quick Search

to see what the overall status of women's ordination is in main line Protestant denominations, and whether there have been significant breakaway groups (e.g., "continuing Lutherans") as a result. I'm more convinced than ever that "continuing Anglicanism", defined as denominations formed as a result of the Congress of St Louis in 1977, denominations that are in communion with them, or denominations derived from them, is a unique phenomenon. "Continuing Anglicanism" sees itself as opposing the ordination of women and the 1976-79 revision of the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer. (The ACNA is uncertain on the question of women's ordination, currently has women priests, and uses the 1979 BCP.)

The Wikipedia entry on Ordination_of_women_in_Protestant_churches contains repeated statements to the effect that "The ordination of women is now non-controversial within [insert name of denomination]", which includes Lutherans (ELCA) and the United Church of Christ. In addition, "The Presbyterian Church (USA) began ordaining women as elders in 1930, and as ministers of Word and sacrament in 1956. By 2001, the numbers of men and women holding office were almost equal." Also, "In 1956, the Methodist Church in America granted ordination and full clergy rights to women."

It is correct to say that most Protestant denominations have splinter groups that may or may not ordain women, although such splinter groups were often formed during the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century, and their reasons for either leaving or not merging into main line denominations are diverse and not specifically related to the question of women's ordination. As far as I can determine, there is no movement corresponding to "continuing Anglicanism" in any other main line denomination. Wikipedia has an entry for the Continuing Anglican movement, but as far as I'm aware, no equivalent entry covering such a movement for any other main line denomination.

It is also true that dissident groups broke away from The Episcopal Church in the 1960s mainly due to the denomination's stance on Civil Rights, but elements of these groups later allied themselves with the more prominent post-St Louis factions.

I'm still pondering what this means. As I've said, I don't believe that more conservative strains of Protestantism dating from the Second Great Awakening are comparable to "continuing Anglicanism". However, I'd be interested to hear of any main line Protestant groups that are not ex-Episcopalian and broke away from their denominations since, say, the 1950s specifically over the following:

• Ordination of women as priests and bishops
• Modernization of liturgy, insisting on retaining some earlier version of a book of common worship.

A Noted Academic Observer Of The Continuum

sent me an e-mail in response to the question I posed on Monday. He didn't specifically request that it be kept confidential, though in other e-mails, he's expressed discomfort with the idea that people may think he visits this blog, so I'll leave his name out of it and paraphrase his e-mail.

He suggests that the other main line denominations differ from The Episcopal Church in that they have a more extensive history of breaking away and merging, and the idea that the Presbyterian Church USA (itself the result of merger by the Northern and Southern Presbyterians in 1983) is somehow a dog that didn't bark is misguided -- the Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, etc, are in constant flux. The Episcopal Church, on the other hand, except for the departure of the Reformed Episcopal Church in 1873, remained much more stable, and in fact as I've mentioned here, it managed not to split over slavery in the mid-19th century as many other Protestant denominations did.

Since I grew up in both the PCUSA (Northern) and PCUS (Southern) denominations, yes, I'm aware of that merger, though as the sources my correspondent cites indicate, the PCUS and PCUSA had been growing doctrinally closer for decades, and they both accepted the liberal National Council of Churches orientation of the main line denominations.

Still, the point I was making was that the "continuing Anglican" split is conventionally dated to the 1977 Affirmation of St Louis, which was specifically a result of TEC's ordination of women and the 1976 tentative revision of the Book of Common Prayer. There were earlier departures from TEC due primarily to its stand on Civil Rights, although my correspondent has been correct in emphasizing that those groups from the 1960s that later aligned themselves with the "continuum" were anxious to separate themselves from James Dees.

In fact, the earmarks of "continuum" doctrine from the Affirmation of St Louis to the founding of the ACNA in 2009 were specifically twofold: objections to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women. My point about the Presbyterians -- and in fact, I think that can extend to all or most other main line denominations -- was that we had no equivalent movement there based on the ordination of women or liturgical modernization. There were certainly (and earlier) defections based on the general main line adoption of National Council of Churches liberalism, but that is not the same movement.

The breakaway Presbyterian groups my correspondent cites left that denomination either in the 19th century or earlier in the 20th century over different issues. (Princeton University, by the way, certainly up to its secularization the most prestigious Presbyterian school, did not admit African-Americans until the 1940s, an example of the social conservatism that motivated some Presbyterians earlier and not related to the issues that led to "continuing Anglicanism".)

It's also worth pointing out that among the dozen or more "continuing Anglican" groups that unanimously affirm the authority of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and abjure the ordination of women, they seem remarkably fractious and disagreeable over many other, smaller issues of personality or liturgy. I would still say that the schism in The Episcopal Church is unique -- I'll certainly grant that TEC was in large measure cohesive until St Louis, although the actual relative numbers of "continuers" 1977-2009 also suggest that the movement has always been overrated (leaving the ACNA, which left over different, though perhaps even more vague reasons, aside).

The "continuers" are both a break from Episcopal and Anglican tradition, at least from the Restoration onward, and are also doctrinally unrepresentative of main line Protestantism from the 1950s onward.

Well, As I Thought,

Someone corroborated my suspicions about prayer book revisions:

Back when I was still a Deacon (c. 1996), I went to a birthday party for a very elderly lady who was a long-time Continuer who was a parishioner at All Saints (FV). . . I'll never forget these words of "wisdom" she shared with me. . .

We were talking about Episcopal Church history. . . and she said "You know, it all started going downhill when they revised the Prayer Book. . ."

I agreed: "I know what you mean. . . there are so many problems with the 1979 Book. Sacramental. Language. I don't know how anybody could use it!"

She looked puzzled and said: "No. I meant when they changed to the 1928 Book!!"

Here's A Question

My wife and I were chatting with our sponsors following our reception into the Catholic Church yesterday. I was reflecting on my upbringing as a Presbyterian and mentioned that in 2008, I returned to visit the Presbyterian parish I'd attended as a child. They'd since hired a lady associate, and during the communion service that Sunday, she brandished a baguette, although as usual, the actual bread consumed was little cubes of bakery slices.

Then it dawned on me that the Presbyterian Church USA, a denomination numbering over 2,000,000 as of last year and thus roughly twice the size of The Episcopal Church, not only began ordaining women in the late 20th century, but revised its book of common worship five times (!) in the 20th century, without provoking the schisms and general craziness that afflicted the Episcopalians. I note that a new Presbyterian breakaway body corresponding to the ACNA has recently emerged, but that's a response to the ordination of explicitly gay clergy, not the ordination of women or revisions of the prayer book, which was what is most commonly credited with causing the "continuum".

Now, that's peculiar. There's apparently something unique about Episcopalians here. But come to think of it, why wasn't there an Episcopalian revolt over the 1892 Book of Common Prayer, or indeed, why wasn't there a revolt when the 1928 BCP superseded the 1892 BCP?

Inquiring minds want to know!