WELCOMING THE ANGLICANS: ONE LAST THOUGHT

I have read a number of commentaries in newspapers and on-line that have been grossly uninformed (deliberately so, it almost seems) about the Catholic Church. This is so much the case that if one were to rely on them to understand the recent announcement about the welcoming of Anglicans, one would almost need to reverse every statement made in order to get at the truth.

A case in point is the insistence that the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was kept in the dark about this decision and that it was sprung on an unsuspecting Anglican Communion. But if this is the case, how is it that on the same morning that the announcement of this new protocol was made on the Vatican's web-site, there was also a letter jointly signed by the Catholic Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster and the Archbishop of Canterbury? Their letter affirmed both that this decision would not impede ecumenical dialogue, and that it was in many ways the result of the fruit of the previous 40 years of dialogue between these two churches.
To write and sign off on a joint letter on a topic of which one was "in the dark" would have been an amazing accomplishment!

How this will play out in the long run in the relations between the Catholic Church and the Worldwide Anglican Communion remains to be seen. But we can pray that at least the reporting about these events will be based in fact and not fancy (or bigotry).