Hello! I'm a Roman Catholic from Poland. I would like to know more about the Anglican faith. I found it really interesting that the Anglican Church has an open communion and that there are Anglican nuns. Anglo-Catholicism is especially interesting for me as I haven't heard about an Anglo-Catholic church before. Do you pray the Rosary and go to a private confession? Blessings to you all
Hi Dominika. The Anglican church is Catholic but Reformed in that it split from the Roman Cartholic church during the Reformation but retained its priesthood, a lot of its liturgy and much of the better parts of its doctrine. (We Anglicans hope that the Anglican Church did not 'throw the baby out with the dirty bath water'. It is a very broad minded church though and is home to both Protestant Style Evangelical Puritans and Mass Observing Old Catholics (as long as they stick to the doctrines which can be upheld and proven by the 66 books of scripture). If I have got any of this wrong I'm quite sure there are others in this forum who will correct me. Welcome to Anglicanism. I like to think we are a church that first tries to LOVE or neighbour, and then consequently espouse the Christian doctrines formulated from the scriptures, and the Holy Spirit, that enable it to LOVE most effectively. .
Most Anglicans don't pray the rosary. You can I you want as an Anglican though. We do have private confession but it is not mandatory. We have a general confession with an absolution. We retained Apostolic Succession and believe in the Real Presence at the Eucharist.
Glad you are here! My father's father came to the US in the 1890s from a farm near Suwalki. I was baptized and raised in the Roman Catholic Church. Anglicans look to the Bible as our primary authority, and secondarily we look to the first four Councils and the first 500 years of the church to inform our understanding and interpretation of the Bible. We try to stay faithful to the 'roots' of the church; the further in time one progresses from the Apostolic era, the more opportunities existed for errors to creep into church practices and doctrines. (After all, the Apostles heard it from Jesus, and that generation heard it from the Apostles, but the following generation heard it 'third hand,' and the generation after that received it 'fourth hand,' and so on; over many successive tellings, a message can become garbled.) With regard to private confession, we often say, "All may, some should, and none must." Personally, when I did some reading on the subject of the history of auricular confession, I found that the early writings don't indicate a practice of private confession in the first centuries of the church. The Bible does not set forth any information about private confessions or personal absolution of sins by priests. No mention of private confession or of penance is made by Clement of Alexandria, Polycarp, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, or in the Didache. The "Apostolic Constitutions," written in the late 4th Century, set forth in considerable detail the principles of church conduct, liturgy and organization, yet those treatises made no mention of the practice of private confession. Augustine covered the subjects of Christian ethics and duties quite thoroughly in his writings, but he did not write about private confession or priestly absolution. Everything I've found indicates that those practices came about later than 500 A.D. As for the rosary, I am aware of a few Anglicans who pray with a rosary, but it has less beads and the prayers are different from the RC rosary. In fact, the praying of the rosary is more flexible in that the significance of the various beads doesn't always have to be the same exact prayers. Most Anglicans tend to not pray the "Hail Mary" prayer, either. But one might find a very small minority of Anglicans who actually do pray the same rosary as the Roman Catholics.
Ahoy! Anglo-Catholicism is heavily associated with the Oxford Movement of the late 19th century (1800s) and John Henry Newman. Being new to exploring Anglicanism myself, I'll tell you what I know. It's my understanding that praying the Rosary is permitted in the Anglican Church overall but is not required. While Anglo-Catholics are comfortable adopting liturgical traditions of Rome, they are not likely eager to join the Roman Catholic Church, in large part due to disagreeing with certain beliefs seen as medieval, such as the doctrine of Purgatory. They tend to favor a positive view of the Reformation and generally do not believe in the infallible authority of the Pope. Though, they'll hold the Pope in high regard as being a good representative of/for Christianity. Generally speaking, Anglicans see tradition as playing a subordinate role to Sacred Scripture. Presumably, doesn't the RCC recognize Scripture and tradition as being equals, with the whole magistratum? I don't mean to make a false assumption, which is why I ask. Some trivia: In the United States, Anglo-Catholic churches east of the Mississippi River tend to be found in the big cities of the Bible belt located in the southern U.S. I'm not sure how common they are in the northern part of the country. Besides this, they can be found more in the west (desert states like New Mexico). Almost all of them, to my knowledge, are affiliated with the Episcopal Church (TEC), the main American body within the worldwide Anglican communion.
In brief, our piety is focused on God completely and solely. This is what distinguishes Anglican piety from the Roman Catholics or the Eastern Orthodox. While both of those also say they focus on Our Lord, in practice very little thought is actually given to God when you have only 24 hours in the day, and honor must be given to Mary, you have to pray to St. Anthony and dig him into the ground, you've got to pray to your patron saint, the feast days are having you pray to saints 1, 2, and 3. So in practice, neither the Romans nor the Greeks focus too much on Jesus. A similar issue arises in relation to Scripture: both the Romans and the Greeks on the surface will give a lot of honor to Scripture, but in practice you will almost never see them reading it or knowing minor details of the Old Testament, and being able to answer trivia like why is it called the festival of Purim, what was Haman doing for Ahasuerus. Some people even make basic factual errors like confusing who was in the mouth of the whale, Jonah with Noah. Was it actually a whale, when the underlying hebrew word is behemoth (where we get our English word). In short a deep love for the New and especially the Old Testament is rare among the romans and the greeks, when they have to learn about papal encyclicals, and distinguish beteween Quo Primum, Satis Cognitum, Unam Sanctam, and Haec Sancta. Who has time to read the Old Testament when you have to learn what's said in these documents? So in short, what makes Anglican piety distinctive is its focus on God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, to the exclusion of everyone and everything else that gets in the way. We do have feast days and saint days (we have a very rich liturgical calendar), but even on those days we pray to God, and use that saint's life to direct us back to God. Thus we do not have piety to the saints. This is one of the biggest reasons traditional Anglicans don't use the Rosary, because it elevates Mary to a similar level as Jesus and takes time away from Him. There are forms of Anglican piety which use a Jesus Rosary, namely the similar format with the beads but all the prayers are exclusively God-centered, and that's cool. As for private confessions, while they can be of use on an individual basis, we also fear they've been terribly abused by lecherous and concupiscent priests. Being such an overwhelming spiritual danger to the priest and to the penitent, our default form of confession is the General Confession during the liturgy, when we are invited to inwardly make an act of contrition, and then receive the words of absolution. As for nuns and religious orders, that's somewhat novel but I happen to think it's fine, so yeah you will find a good amount of Anglicans (depending on the nation of course) who will attach their life to a religious order, either as members or more often as third order.
Thank you all very much for your replies I need some time to think about them and reply because I'm not very good at writing in English, even though I understand almost everything. I wish you a happy Easter, full of the blessings of the Risen Lord.
Tiffy, let's not comfeusse... I mean, confuse Dominika! Dominika, I neglected to answer your question about open communion. In the Roman Catholic Church, no one should receive the Eucharist who does not believe that they are receiving the fullness of God the Son (physical body, soul, divinity, everything). So, it's a closed communion. Anglicans believe that in the Eucharist we receive Christ in a spiritual manner, but that the physical elements of bread and wine remain bread and wine. You've observed that in Anglican parishes (most of them, I think), open communion is practiced. Our parish, for example, states that all baptized Christians (people who believe in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, God the Son) are welcome to partake. The reason is that we see all baptized Christians as brothers and sisters in the Lord and children of God, and excluding them from the Eucharist would be somewhat of a disrespect and a rejection of their faith in Christ. At its root, the difference lies in how we see other Christians. As I've said, Anglicans look at baptized believers, people who've placed their trust in Jesus Christ, as brothers and sisters whether they be Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, etc. All of these people believe the word of God that "we are saved by grace through faith and not by works" (Eph. 2:5-9, Gal. 3) and that good works are a result of the Holy Spirit accomplishing things through us (Philippians 2:13) as we obey Him in humility and willingness. By contrast, the RCC officially declares that it is extremely difficult and unlikely for anyone to receive eternal life without being a member of the RCC specifically, and that good works (such as performing penances and giving alms) are contributors to our reception of eternal life. The Canons of the Council of Trent, Session 6, pronounce anathema upon the rest of us for understanding the Bible as we do. So it's only natural that we would be excluded from the RC Eucharist.
Some, probably most, Anglicans believe this but it is not the only belief in our churches. And it is not the only acceptable belief.
And a few might lean toward memorialism. It's a broad spectrum, but we are all brothers and sisters in Christ.
I like that the Anglican church is a really broad minded church and first tries to love others. This is what Jesus wants us to do and it's the most important thing in Christianity. I would like to quote one of my favourite verses of the Bible here: "My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit - fruit that will last - and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other." John 15:12-15 NIV