Archbishop Hepworth's pastoral letter

Fr.  Anthony Chadwick has it posted in full over at The English Catholic.

I'm going to pick out some excerpts.  Go read it all, though, it is vintage Hepworth.

• Continuing Churches have a long history.  Some have been glorious, others are better forgotten.  They can never be permanent.  They must continue to relate to the Church from which they withdrew, to influence it for good, to make clear the reasons for their withdrawal “into the desert”.  To permanently split from the Church is schism.  To go into the desert to heal the Church is heroic.

• There is only one Church, one Body of Christ, one Vine.  Every ecclesial group must be able to show evidence of its oneness with the Body of Christ, the Church.  As soon as a group becomes permanently and comfortably alone, unacknowledged by any other part of the Church, believing itself to be the only perfect form of Christianity, and accepts and even welcomes that isolation, it has slipped into the schism of the sect.

• There is only one truth given once and for all by Christ.  The Church seeks to expound that truth in every age and to apply it to problems that are new, and to those things that have been challenges in every age.  It is not what the individual thinks; it is what the Church teaches.  The great ecumenical conversations of the past century acknowledged this fact and sought to define both the teaching authority of the Church and the truth that is taught.

• The past century has been a time of massive expansion of human conflict and of the instruments that undergird human conflict.  The permanent expansion of the instruments of conflict has created a world that is tolerant of conflict and human destruction.  Anglican Churches have adopted too readily the destruction of human dignity in all its manifestations – family, livelihood, vocation, community – to achieve ideological victory.  The far more difficult pathway of tolerance and love has been lost.

• The Apostolic Letter of the Pope to Anglicans has reignited dormant bigotry and anti-Catholicism, has forced people (even bishops) to examine the true nature of their faith and to assess the importance of the Catholic teachings that they cannot accept.

The present attempts to expel those who are working (often with exquisite difficulties) to test a vocation to fuse Anglican heritage with Catholic Communion, newly available and still in infancy, is not to be tolerated.