November 20, 2009 (Catholic education, Catholic schools)

Editor’s Note: Bishop John Shelby Spong’s bitter response to the Benedict XVI’s invitation to “traditionalist Anglicans” to join the Catholic Church can’t be shared through the “In the News” so I have chosen this method to share a part of it.  To access the full article you will have to register at Bishop Spong’s website.

Today’s Toronto Star has an article titled

Anglican downplays Vatican overtures; Archbishop in Rome for talks with Pope amid strained relations

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/728433–anglican-downplays-vatican-overtures

while The Hamilton Spectator described it as:

Top Anglican faces the ‘elephant’; Vatican’s shock invitation looms large as Archbishop of Canterbury meets Pope

http://www.thespec.com/News/CanadaWorld/article/676277

Generally, as one might expect, the Catholic press has lauded the invitation. Also as one might expect some in the Anglican community have not been so inclined. One such commentator is Bishop John Shelby Spong.

He produces a newsletter, available by subscription at his website. In a recent article titled “Canterbury and Rome: Ecclesiastical Kindergarten Games” he proposed putting the shoe on the other foot.  Because the article is not in a manner I can link to on the web I will quote only a small part where after criticising the Pope’s initiative and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s response he writes:

This is what I think the Archbishop of Canterbury should have said:

“Your Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, we are very pleased to transfer to you these fringe members of our church who still define women as subhuman and who regard homosexual persons as deviant and abnormal. We hope they will be happy in a church like yours. We Anglicans, however, must move on to engage our modern world. In the spirit of our new relationship, in which each church is free to offer solace through an invitation to those in our respective communions whose consciences are disturbed, we offer this new ecumenical initiative. We invite all gay Roman Catholic clergy who are tired of hiding in dishonesty to become Anglicans. To ease their transition we will allow some Roman liturgies to be used. We also invite all those alienated Roman Catholic lay people who can no longer twist their minds into first-century pretzels in order to assent to dogmas that the intellectual revolution of the past 500 years has rendered unbelievable to come now into a Church where they can explore truth with minds not fettered by the myth of “divine revelation.” We invite those lay people who believe in sexual equality and who have long favored both the marriage of clergy and the ordination of women to the priesthood to come to us so that they will no longer have to live with spiritual schizophrenia. We invite those Roman Catholics who choose to practice birth control as a moral choice in an overpopulated world and who can no longer tolerate being told that family planning is evil and therefore condemned by God, especially since they have no intention of refraining from doing it, to consider becoming Anglicans, which would mean that they could stop living a lie. We will also receive your clergy without the indignity of re-training or re-ordaining them. We might require them to undergo some classes in thinking for themselves, since they have had little experience in that, and we might ask them to undergo sensitivity training in human relations. In the western world we have learned that this kind of training is necessary both in business and in such things as police instruction to deal with entrenched prejudices.”

All I can say is “Ouch that hurts!”

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