The Catholic offer to Anglicans last week suggests, to me, two beautiful possibilities.
The first is that there might be an Anglican Rite within the Catholic Church, as there are already many rites other than the Roman. The details of what this might be like are largely beyond my imagination, and the extent to which it is possible will depend on what the forthcoming Apostolic Constitution has to say. But the thought is appealing in many ways. It’s often said that the first thing Anglicans who have been received into the Catholic Church miss is English in the liturgy. This was certainly true for me, and even after thirteen years remains to some extent so. The English of the Roman Missal and the Liturgy of the Hours is, on the whole, not beautiful. These are matters of aesthetics, of course — important, but with a secondary significance.
The second thought is more important. It may be that the Holy Father’s initiative will find a response among a good number of Anglicans. If it does, it could be an important step in a new unification of Christians under Rome’s banner, the vexillum caritatis (Song of Songs 2:4) — and not just any Christians, but those who think of the Church as the world’s primary institutional reality and of theology as queen of the sciences. A unification of that sort is desperately needed.
