Traditional Anglican Communion requests communion

By Deborah Gyapong
OTTAWA (CCN)

After more than a decade of informal contacts, the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) has made a formal request seeking "full, corporate, and sacramental union" with the Roman Catholic Church.

The TAC college of bishops met in a plenary assembly the first week of October in Portsmouth, England, where the 30 or so bishops and vicars general who are in charge of dioceses presently without bishops "unanimously agreed" to the text of a letter that was delivered to Rome the following week.

"The letter was cordially received at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)," said TAC Primate Archbishop John Hepworth of Australia in a statement posted on the TAC's Messenger Journal web site.

According to the statement, the primate and the bishops will not give interviews "until the Holy See has considered the letter and responded." The content of the letter has not been released.

The TAC, a worldwide communion present in 40 countries, represents about 300,000 Anglicans who broke with the Canterbury Anglican Communion over the ordination of women.

TAC member churches believe in seven God-ordained sacraments, apostolic succession, holy tradition, and the ministry of the Pope as Peter's successor and as sign of unity for the universal Church.

Its foundational document, the 1977 Affirmation of St. Louis, declared its intention to seek "full sacramental communion and visible unity with other Christians who `worship the Trinity in Unity, and Unity in Trinity,' and who hold the Catholic and Apostolic Faith."

The TAC includes the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada (ACCC), the Anglican Church of America (ACA), and churches in the United Kingdom, Europe, India, Pakistan, Africa, the Torres Strait, and Australia.

Approaching Rome `as a community'

When the TAC was still fairly small, some bishops and priests were invited by Bishop Pierre Duprey of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity for talks. Bishop Duprey advised them to grow, to develop good relationships with local Catholic bishops, and to avoid letting their episcopacy grow too large.

When Archbishop Hepworth was in Ottawa last January for the ordination of two auxiliary bishops, he told Salt and Light Television that while many Anglicans have decided to become Catholics as individuals, "we would prefer to approach Rome as a community."

Archbishop Hepworth said he did not underestimate the difficulty of coming into union with the Holy See. "The saying of Anglicans is that if you don't have one Pope, everybody is a Pope, because everybody can make up their minds what is infallible."

"What is important, and we are having to learn as a community, is to ask not what we think, but what the Church says, and five centuries of bad habits are going to die hard," he said, "but if you ask us if we accept the Magisterium of the Church, yes, and we all have the Catechism of the Catholic Church on our desks and many of us preach from it."