Relevant to our recent discussion on why ordination is impossible for women in the Church, Father Steele, who recently converted from Anglicanism, comments on Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ recent article:
When we look at the Second Vatican Council on Ecclesiology we do find the importance of the understanding of Church to include within its mission and charism the collaboration of all God’s people with the ordained priesthood. What Rowan seems to do is what radical Evangelicals do by giving priesthood a job description for the lay person that undermines the sacramental ministry. This is why I made the comment about Rowan’s ecclesial issues that gives me concern over whether Anglicanism has a sacramental approach to its ecclesiology at all.
The question that needs to be put to Rowan and answered by him is whether or not the conferring of Holy Orders to males only is by divine law or not.What a Catholic believes and teaches is that this practice of ordination is by divine law and belongs to the ‘substance of the sacraments.’ Therefore, JPII said that ‘the sacrament of Holy Orders definitively remains beyond the competence of the ecclesiastical authority, which governs within the framework of positive ecclesial law.’ It is for this reason that this issue is not given up to what can be defined as the democracy of a committee like the CofE’s General Synod. It is for this reason that there is such havoc facing the Anglican Communion at present. This is not to throw cold water on old friends and colleagues, it is simply an objective evaluation to what is presently happening in the Communion that operates on Rowan’s principle.
via de cura animarum.
