Are there still Anglo-Catholic parishes in the Episcopal Church(TEC)?

Discussion in 'Theology and Doctrine' started by With_the_scripture, May 27, 2019.

  1. With_the_scripture

    With_the_scripture New Member

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    Are there still Anglo-Catholic (or just traditional and orthodox) parishes in the Episcopal Church(TEC)? If so, how do they reconcile their beliefs and the often contrary beliefs of their diocese. Why, also, do they stay?
     
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  2. Brigid

    Brigid Active Member Anglican

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    My brother goes to the only Anglo-Catholic (TEC) parish in the nw of the state. I don't know how they reconcile beliefs with those of this very liberal diocese, however, and I might be wrong here, but my brother is quite liberal both theologically and politically so maybe it's just a normal, amazingly liberal parish that happens to be Anglo=Catholic in liturgy.
     
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  3. Shane R

    Shane R Well-Known Member

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    There was a new term invented for liberal Anglo-Catholics: Affirming Catholics. They are basically high church folk with a favorable view of the sacraments who jettison most of the rest of the teachings of the historic church.
     
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  4. mediaque

    mediaque Active Member

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    There are a couple in my area of which one of those two I attend.
     
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  5. SirPalomides

    SirPalomides Active Member

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    The three grand A-C churches in the Philly area (St Clement's, St Mark's, and Good Shepherd) all remain in TEC. As far as I can tell they remain committed to orthodox, catholic Christianity- they just don't believe this includes banning women or gays from the priesthood.
     
  6. Stalwart

    Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    It is much more than gays in the priesthood. I know St. Mark's well: they have practicing homosexuals up and down the church staff. They play a big part in each year's Pride Parade. All of these churches openly doubt God's fatherhood and masculine attributes. They believe in, and accept, gender-neutral fascism and fluid pronouns. There is literally nothing in common between them and orthodox catholic Christianity, and would never object to this picture:

    20108357_1478762678849771_5785998523358756458_n.jpg
     
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  7. PDL

    PDL Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Yes, it sets my blood boiling when parishes describe themselves as Anglo-Catholic and then when you peruse their website it is clear they have no orthodox Christian beliefs. They forget the long established teaching of the Faith and instead just want everyone to feel good about themselves.
     
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  8. SirPalomides

    SirPalomides Active Member

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    You bear false witness.
     
  9. Stalwart

    Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Oh? Do tell.

    You mean if I go to Fr. Mullen, he will be happy to condemn transgenderism? Do you know of the LGBT 'ministry' at St. Mark's? I don't know if you really understand what's going on there, beneath the bells and smells.
     
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  10. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Dude as much as I hope you’re right, I have a feeling Stalwart knows what he is talking about here...
     
  11. Brigid

    Brigid Active Member Anglican

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    I was wrong about my brother and his AngloCatholic parish. He says he refuses to ever go to the TEC website and see what they are doing, it is too depressing.
     
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  12. Jeffg

    Jeffg Active Member

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    The one Anglo-Catholic TEC in Seattle is definatly liberal from what I've seen on the web sight. I would have thought being liberal and Anglo-Catholic would be kind of a dicotomy...but appearantly I'm wrong.
     
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  13. Brigid

    Brigid Active Member Anglican

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    Hmm. I'll have to ask my brother about his parish!
     
  14. Jeffg

    Jeffg Active Member

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    St Pauls on Queen Ann ???
     
  15. Brigid

    Brigid Active Member Anglican

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    Yep.
     
  16. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Strictly speaking it is a dichotomy, in that an Anglo Catholic who is doctrinally liberal is not an Orthodox Anglican, and is thus a Liberal Catholic, and not properly an Anglo Catholic except linguistically or in the famous derisory remark made by a character in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (which would apply to all Liberal Catholics but exclude Anglo Catholics).

    Except there still remains a problem of terminology. Because Catholicity does not mean Universal but rather “the Christian faith according to the whole” and is synonymous with Orthodoxy or the Russian word Pravoslavie, and this is best summarized by St. Vincent of Lerins, the late fourth century Father, when he wrote “That which has been believed always, by everyone, everywhere, is truly Catholic,” Liberal Catholics and many Roman Catholics are excluded automatically.

    So instead, the parish in Seattle that claims to be Anglo Catholic is not Anglican, and not Catholic. The most correct term for it would be Episcopalian Psuedo-Catholic or Episcopal Heterodox High Church. Most Liberal Catholics identify as Broad Church, but they actually aren’t, and it is only to sound inclusive.
     
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  17. Jeffg

    Jeffg Active Member

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    So the short answer is : They are not Anglo-Catholic . ?????
     
  18. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    It is my considered opinion that a so-called “Liberal Catholic” parish is not truly Anglican nor Catholic. If the worship or doctrine of an individual local church is indistinguishable from the Ecumenical Catholic Conference or the Metropolitan Community Church or the United Church of Christ, or in other respects avoids the creeds and traditional Christian morality or features women serving as priests, through ignorance or malice, which they ought not to do, the diaconate being available to them as well as many offices of far greater honor than the priesthood and episcopate, then that parish cannot be truly Anglican nor Catholic nor Orthodox nor a local church properly constituted. Rather it is a schismatic and blasphemous Episcopalian Psuedo-Liturgical Heterodox conventicle, which should be considered cut off unless it rights itself internally (or unless if a large number of organized outsiders joined it, they could with diocesan support, even if such support is tacit, remove the parish council or vestry, replace the clergy, disfellowshiping and trespassing the same, and then hold it, preferably with the bishop).
     
  19. Brigid

    Brigid Active Member Anglican

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    Are you saying that there is no hope, except for God changing it but not for people to change it, for the Protestant Episcopal church in the US to be Anglican again (if so I agree)? Do you feel the ACNA is going to follow soon in the same path, as many have said?
     
  20. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    No, I think we need to pray fervently for the deliverence of the Episcopal Church USA, as it is now called, and also that God, through the most pious Africans, will continue to thwart the efforts of heretics to destroy the United Methodist Church.

    And we must also act. We need to create religious orders in the Episcopal Church under the few remaining traditional bishops that would constitute a Church within a Church and represent traditional Christianity, and gain access to parishes on some grounds. Anglican Dominicans and Anglican Jesuits might prove useful now, in that we need friars and sneaky and subversive regular clergy to take over the ECUSA.

    The East also offers us some options. The ELCA and many Episcopalian churches will open their doors to Eastern Christians. In full communion with Canterbury is the very traditional Mar Thoma Syrian Church, and in full communion with that church is a Syriac Orthodox jurisdiction (one of three) called the Malankara Independent Syrian Church. These two churches could probably get access to most Episcopal churches in the country. Also, there is growing dissatisfaction on the part of the Maronites with the Roman Catholic hierarchy; I have called for the Antiochian Orthodox, who have a Western Rite Vicarate, to create a Maronite Rite Vicarate, and perhaps it will happen, but perhaps traditional Anglicans could also organize this, working with the Mar Thoma church. There is also a group of Anglicans in the US that want to be “Eastern Rite” and use the Byzantine Rite (Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Romanian Orthodox liturgy, the most well known one, basically), and several Episcopal parishes have accommodated them. And there are the Assyrians, who have always been allies of the Anglicans, and whose practices are very similiar (they also have open communion). Some Assyrian bishops want more vernacular services. And there is an actual demand for vernacular services in the Armenian Rite. These options all involve the use of a different liturgical rite, or alternately, one can celebrate them using the flexible Order of Worship nicknamed “Rite III” in the 1979 BCP, which is canonical but with restrictions (which go largely unenforced; Episcopalian parishes routinely trample all over the liturgy and get away with it, the worst offender being St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco*, but these Eastern liturgies and communities could pose a form of backdoor into parishes that would otherwise be closed to traditional Anglicanism.

    I do not see the ACNA going down the same road as the ECUSA; of the three recent moderate breakaway churches, (the others being the ECO Presbyterians and the North American Lutheran church, who split with the PCUSA and the ELCA over homosexuality), the ACNA seems most likely to be the first to defrock the misguided women who serve as priests contrary to divine ordinance. And when it does that, the Continuing Anglican churches will get more comfortable with it.

    But the entire enterprise of saving the Episcopal Church needs to be carefully managed. The Church of England benefits from traditionalist groups and traditionalist bishops who on some votes come within five points of a majority; the Society/Forward in Faith, the Prayerbook Society, the conservative Evangelical/low church group and so on. We lack that infrastructure here, and also there is not as much of it as one might prefer in Canada, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, the other provinces where the liberals are either dominant like in the US or pose a major headache (although Australia, uniquely, benefits from Sydney functioning as a haven for low church traditional Anglicanism, but traditionalists in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth or elsewhere are out of luck). In the case of South Africa the main problem is the theology of Desmond Tutu, who is properly admired for his contribution to the end of Apartheid, but who in other respects is not adequately Orthodox.