That Which Is Ours, Is Ours Again!

I have many friends who are members of various jurisdictions in what is called the Anglican Continuum, that plethora of Anglican communities using different iterations of the Book of Common Prayer but rejecting the modernist excesses of Canterbury and the Episcopal Church USA. There seem to be three main streams within these splinter groups: Anglo-Catholics, Reformed Anglicans, and Evangelical Anglicans. One of them will soon fail – the Anglican Church of North America (part of the Evangelical branch that uses a new 2019 BCP) – because they have embraced females into the “priesthood.” They should just go full Episcopalian. For others, like the Anglo-Catholics who use the 1928 BCP, I have sympathy. The Reformed Anglicans are too Calvinist for my tastes. But the one common thing about all of them? They can’t agree on anything except that they don’t like Canterbury and the ECUSA and the 1979 / 2016 BCP.

Sidenote: I like the 1928 BCP. I have an Anglo-Catholic version with the Marian Prayers that I use daily. Simple, straightforward, no confusion. However, I have never liked the 1979 / 2016 BCP. The ACNA’s 2019 BCP is good, but I don’t use it. Obviously, I am very disappointed with the ACNA. As for the Orthodox Anglican Church (OAC), I personally knew their former primate – a good and holy man. However, I am not too keen about what is happening under the current one for reasons that I won’t go into here. There’s nothing really “wrong,” but I have been around long enough to see the signs of something suspicious. Bottom line? Anglicanism is dying and Roman Catholicism will follow unless she gets back to tradition. I don’t mean uber Pharisaical self-righteous, super pious traditionalism that’s nothing more than hypocrisy. Rather, I mean getting back to what the Church Fathers in the first few centuries after Christ taught. All this modern baggage of environmentalism, social justice, the common good, and peace at any price must be jettisoned for repentance and conversion, righteousness and holiness; otherwise, we will follow Anglicanism’s splintering.

I pray for my Anglican friends who are trying to remain true to the Gospel. We Romans can sit on our thrones and say, “Yes, but Apostolicae Curae!” And Anglicans will respond, “Saepius Officio!” That discord gets us nowhere. Pope Benedict XVI did the most to resolve this situation with the Anglican Ordinariate, but while my friend above who was an OAC primate had once been willing to consider it, when Francis the Worst took over, that idea got dashed. Francis did more harm both inside and outside the Roman jurisdiction than you can imagine.

LQC, Virginia has many very old churches that were in Colonial days Church of England. In the 2000s the congregations of Episcopal churches started dwindling because of senior members passing or joining Anglican churches. The changes to Common Book of Prayer, ordinations of female priestesses, gay and lesbian priests and liberal homilies drove people out. One might call it a schism. Locally the pastor for the Anglican new church pinned a letter in the local post offices introducing himself and explaining that the parish was pro-life and only weddings between a man and a woman were to be performed. South African Benedictines have a monastery about two years old. Not sure if they came to the US because of the S. A. Government anti-white program