Anglican and Catholic reunion if the Roman Church schisms?

With the numerous statements and accusations surrounding Pope Francis and the new issues arising from the amazonian Synod I've been seeing suggestions of a possible schism showing up more and more frequently in traditional Catholic circles. That got me wondering how the relationship between traditional Roman Catholics and the various groups of Anglo Catholics might change. I know the SSPX, FSSP, the Remnant and many other traditional minded groups consider the Ordinariate to be some of their best allies and speak very highly of many high church Anglicans and Anglo Catholics. If a schism in the Roman Church did occur and a large number of Roman Catholics were separated from the Vatican and Pope do you think it would encourage a closer relationship or even communion between the two traditions?

 

I see almost a kind of reverse-Ordinariate happening, where many from the RCC world enter into ACNA, which already has many familiar RC institutions like canons for religious orders, some practicing Franciscans, high church dioceses like Fort Worth — all based under Anglican theological principles of course. This last point is important, because those who split from Rome will have to make a serious decision: not only do whether they want to be in a larger common body, but wherever they want to keep ALL theological principles established by Trent. The fall of the Papacy should indicate that the principles of Trent were not all infallible or necessary. It should become obvious that at some point in recent centuries Rome has gone astray, long before Pope Francis or even Vatican II. I have heard some trads now rejecting Vatican I, because it established papal infallibility with which Pope Francis is now wrecking the RC Church.

If some principles of Trent were wrong, then what other church tradition retains bishops, priests, deacons, the liturgy, the sacraments, but establishes everything on the sure and solid foundation of Scripture?

In fact since RC doctrine paints bishops as mere lackeys of the Pope with no intrinsic office or authority, what church tradition enshrines a far *stronger* and more patristically accurate doctrine of Episcopacy?

 

Stalwart, you make some good points. But I think it is reasonable to say that Trent has been dead as the authoritative voice of the Catholic church since the first Vatican council and the subsequent Old Catholic schism.

To answer the OPs question: I don't see it. Not unless Anglicanism splinters further. And I think so because the evangelical wing is terrified of anything 'Romish'. The natural ally of the SSPX and others would be the Old Catholics, which have an on-again/off-again relationship with the Continuing churches; who are working through how much voice the evangelical party will have going forward. So all parties would have to take a couple of steps outside of their comfort zone before they could even have a productive conversation.

ACNA as an ally of traditionalist Romans is an odd proposition.

 

True, having a dyed-in-the-wool SSPXer joining ACNA is a stretch. One of my assumptions is that many in the RC trad camp will lose some of their foundational RCC theological commitments. If the Pope an err, then what else is up for debate? I don't know how you keep the entire pre-Vatican 2 theology intact in today's climate. Some may still clench their teeth and try to carry on in face of visible contradictions, but many (I would imagine) will look for an alternative, either Orthodoxy, or something in Western Christianity, ie. Anglicanism (both Continuing and ACNA).

 

I can see the average Catholic possibly joining the ACNA but I agree with Shane that the SSPX and other traditionalist would be very unlikely to join. I was actually thinking the Continuing Anglican churches would be more likely with the traditional Catholics.

 

I agree that the Continuing Anglicans are the most likely to be joined by the TLM advocates. The truly traditional RCC love the catechism of Trent tho, and I don't think they'll join anyone who won't agree with it!

 

The thing is, I don’t see how one can honestly look to Trent or anything Roman written after 1054 AD, after these last months and years.

If the idea of the Pope is over, then the era of Roman theology is finished. It’s over.

Nothing you could posit: condign grace, the treasury of merit, “10 million years in purgatory”, the 7 sacraments, nothing of what they invented in the middle ages, was affirmed with as much confidence as the Papacy.

In fact the “new” sacraments like “the Sacrament of Marriage” were explicitly created by papal fiat in the 1400s, without any say of the Universal Church. If there was no Papacy in the first place, then the Anglo Catholics and the SSPX are in real trouble regarding their whole worldview.

 

Schism inside our outside of Rome is not something we should cherish. The notion of ex-roman traditionalists finding home or comfort in ACNA fails to recognise on of the great tenants they affirm, notably the correlation of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church with that Church which is in communion with the ancient see of Peter. Ultimately their only way forward would be to see Francis I as an antipope and then find some way to recognise a true Pope. Given that we have not had an antipope since 1449 it is highly unlikely that this should happen. Whilst there are a good number of sedevacantists around, in reality this is marginal and fractional compared to the size and weight to the Roman Church - at the moment maybe one in a million rcc is sedevacantist.

The challenge they face is that after little over 100 years of speaking his word in infalible, they now find the Pope saying things they think are not simply fallible, but wrong, with the Pope himself probably not believing in his own infallibility.

The events that lead to the great schism are significant, when statements from the 1st Council of Constantinople giving an order of precedence to Constantinople 2nd only after Rome, came to have developed into a theory of the universal sovereignty of Rome, even over and above the statements of faith from the universal councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. Clearly I would reject any claim of the Universal Sovereignty of the Bishop of Rome.

I do however think to dismiss everything coming from a growing tradition with 1.2 billion adherents as entirely without merit for the last 1000 years may be an overreach. The latin tradition has been home to many faithful christians whose insight and witness to the light has been profound.

This statement needs to be considered. There has been a Bishop of Rome since the 1st Century. There is discussion about when the title Pope came to be of significance. Constantine held the Office of Pontifex Maximus while the Pope was Silvester. It seems sometime after the movement of the Capital to Byzantium the Bishop of Rome adopted the title Pontifex Maximus (meaning great bridge builder). Gelasius was the first Pope to expound his role as Vicar of Christ and I don't know that was widely embraced in the East. Two other Bishops use the title Pope, one being the Oriental Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria and the other being the the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria, though neither of them see themselves burdened with the universal sovereignty that the Bishop of Rome has claimed since the 11th Century. I can't see that this has any bearing on an Anglo Catholic world view, though it may be of some relevance to an Anglo Papist.

 

Basically I agree with you, the situation moving forward is literally unthinkable, whichever way it proceeds. Pope Francis is the Pope, and yet cannot be the Pope (by the traditional RC mindset). Since he has already made both material and heretical statements/actions, and has stacked the College of Cardinals with his adherents (at 52% as of 2019; more with each passing year), even traditionalists accept that his successor will be a Pope Francis II.

Thus the only two ways forward for a traditionalist are:
1. Sedevacantism. Go into the catacombs, and clench their teeth at all costs, to preserve the Tridentine worldview
2. Sacrifice the Tridentine worldview, and admit that it wasn't necessary, not based in anything foundational, but was born out of power, pride, and incalculable Spanish wealth power and gold of the 16th century. Think of the Jesuits, think of the theologians, books printed, schools founded, armies levied, baroque Churches with gold dripping from the ceilings -- all that impossible if the Roman side of the Reformation was improverished; but made powerful by the vast mountains of gold levied by the Spanish Empire.

If they go the 2nd route, the best home for them would be either Orthodoxy or Anglicanism, that's my thesis. (And we still have the majestic Baroque churches; just no gold dripping from the walls and ceilings.)

It's not the latin tradition that I mean. After all Anglicanism is also very much a Latin tradition, a Western Christianity. Rather, I mean the edicts and theological foundations of medieval Roman Catholicism.

All of those core tenets which I enumerated before (condign grace, the treasury of merit, “10 million years in purgatory”, the 7 sacraments, and others), were literally invented and forced on the Western Church by the Popes. Thus even if you're not an Anglo Papalist but a mere Anglo Catholic, your definition of 'Catholicism' will be largely colored by medieval/papal Roman creations: devotion to mary, purgatory, 7 sacraments, etc etc. The concept of purgatory and the treasury of merit was enumerated for the first time in the 1100s; St. Augustine would've had a laugh at the theology of people having "10 million years in purgatory". Transubstantiation was forced on the Church by the Vatican in 1215 AD. The patristic 2 Sacraments were added onto over the course of the middle ages, with eg. "Marriage" being imposed by Papal fiat in the 1400s. Mary was never seen as a 'co-redemptrix' and a 'mediatrix' of the graces by the Church Fathers. The idea that human beings were created with a "Bonum Superadditum" was literally invented by Thomas Aquinas, and unknown to St. Ambrose and St. Chrysostom.

Even if an Anglo Catholic doesn't see the Popes as having universal jurisdiction, he will still accept their products as valid Catholic teaching. However if the Papacy was false all along, then these doctrines will have to be seen as impositions, not only by a Reformation-minded Anglican, but by all.

If the Papacy was false all along, then everyone is a Reformation-minded Anglican.

 

Mostly, yes. The specific errors propagated by the Roman church include but are not limited to purgatory, the treasury of merit, created grace, absolute divine simplicity, papal supremacy, papal infallibility, the development of doctrine, the legalistic-forensic hamartiology, the soteriological model of Anselm of Canterbury, the privatization of the Divine Office as a devotion for priests rather than as the cycle of daily prayer of the church, which ideally should be congregational, the mandatory imposition of Roman ecclesiastical discipline in the form of celibate priests in the entire Western Rite, although they have backed down on this of late, communion in one species, Latinization, and the elevation of Latin, which was initially introduced into the Roman church as a vernacular language so less educated citizens of Rome could follow the services, to a status more exalted than the Koine Greek in which the Gospels were written, and the suppression of vernacular services, also the suppression of the use of leavened bread, which Rome backed off from when creating the Eastern Catholic (Uniate) churches (which are like the Anglican Ordinariates but for Orthodox, and are much older), but which had been a major controversy, denial of the Eucharist to young children, the penitential model of confession as opposed to reconciliation; I could go on and on...

 

Archbishop Leo I was the first Bishop of Rome to declare himself Pontifex Maximus. I am not a fan of his; there would not have been an EO-OO schism had he not meddled, but instead followed in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor St. Celestine. Regarding the title of Pope attaching itself to the bishop of Rome, the last such bishop I like had that title, that being Pope Gregory Diologos, also known as Gregory the Great, who had been a legate to Constantinople and was a great Patristic figure. I think it is possible the title Papem attached itself to the bishop of Rome owing to Coptic monastics from Egypt travelling to and establishing monasteries in Hibernia and Caledonia; we know this happened in the 6th century, and that is also when the Bishop of Rome started being called Pope. But the early Popes did not claim the authority their successors would; Pope St. Gregory the Great said that any bishop claiming universal jurisdiction was the precursor to the anti-Christ.

 

I had Roman apologists say that even though Gregory was a nice guy, if he didn't say it ex-cathedra, it didn't matter. They also say the term antichrist only meant gnostics and could not apply to Rome as it is often done in Revelation. The thing that should be pointed out is that some say Gregory believed or taught purgatory, so the question of whether or not he had an accurate understanding of theology is a point of contention. Was he right on antichrist and wrong on purgatory, or the other way around? It seems he knew enough of theology to say that the term antichrist did in fact possibly apply to people on a much broader scale than just the gnostics and I do agree that he was oblivious to the 'Rome has universal jurisdiction' claim from early times. Not sure how we should understand his alleged endorsement of purgatory though or if that is just an apocryphal story.

 

I agree with your reasoning behind both these options and agree that many Roman Catholics may take one of those two positions. I think there's a third position that may be even more likely for traditionalist.

3. The Papacy was truly instituted by Christ and has been a valid institution throughout most of Church history. The current events were prophesied by the Blessed Virgin Mary through apparitions like Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of La Salette and Our Lady of Akita as well as St. John Paul II, Pope Paul VI and the Book of Revelations. The Catholic Church would be infiltrated by Satan, bishops will fight with bishops, evil will be taught as good and good as evil and the Papacy will fall. The Catholic Church will survive though in the faithful who follow the true faith.

This position maintains Christ's promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. It also maintain the position of the Papacy and all the subsequent teachings that have come forth from Papal infallibility. Really the only teachings this would compromise are the ideas that the Church only exists through the successor of St. Peter (this can be explained away pretty easily as only connected to end times) as in this case the Church exist in the faithful holding the true faith. This position would also seem to upturn the idea that the Orthodox, Anglicans, etc are somehow "inferior" churches or outside of salvation due to schism (which would be a crippling blow to so many of the elitist cradle Catholics).

 

From what I've read, the Roman church has never seen an exodus from the church like it is experiencing now. It may even swell the ranks of the TEC.

 

Hopefully with traditionalists, vs. the ultra liberal “Cafeteria Catholic” set. A disgruntled traditionalist ex-RC block on the other hand could be exactly what was needed to restore order to TEC, assuming the laity would have enough power to counter the bishops (I am not sufficiently familiar with how the multi-cameral governance of TEC or other Anglican provinces works; in the Orthodox church, there is merely a Holy Synod consisting of some or all of the bishops, depending on the church, and therein is concentrated short term power, but the will of the laity tends to prevail any time they are sufficiently aggrieved, as the case of the Council of Florence or more recently the mass exodus of Ukrainian and Ruthenian Eastern Catholic immigrants to the US in the early 20th century, who, infuriated by the Latin Rite bishops demands their clergy put aside their wives, largely but not entirely joined the Russian* and Greek Orthodox churches, demonstrate).

*The Ruthenian Eastern Catholics who joined the Russian Orthodox Church, the portion of it which after Patriarch Tikhon effectively broke up the foreign misisons of the ROC to prevent complete Communist control, became a part of the Orthodox Church in America; the leader of these Ruthenian converts is commemorated as a Saint, Alexis Toth, I believe only the third saint from the continental US, not counting St. Peter the Aleut, who was an Aleutian Indian trader who was martyred at a Catholic mission in California during Spanish rule in the 18th century.

It is agreeable to me to think of a figure emerging from the wreckage of the Roman Catholic church to restore traditionalism to the Episcopal Church; the alternative scenario, in which the RCC capitulates in the same way TEC did, and thus one can be assured the two largest and most splendid cathedral churches in each major American city, are equally likely to be cases where one encounters the tragic desecrations currently present at, for example, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, is difficult to regard with equanymity.

 

This is an absurd remark to make about the prerogatives of the Roman episcopate, considering that Pope Honorius I was, post mortem, universally recognized as having been an heresiarch (Monothelitism, subsequently condemned at the sixth ecumenical council, considering that the Bishop of Rome was not styled as Papem until the 6th century, that Archbishop St. Victor was withstood not only by the autocephalous churches of the Eastern Empire but also by St. Irenaeus of Lyons when he attempted to compel a unilateral change in liturgical practice, and that St. Paul even withstood St. Peter to his face. This is not to deny the importance of St. Peter or his status as the first bishop of Antioch and of Rome, and also as the man who sent St. Mark the Evangelist to organize the Church of Alexandria, but the claim by supporters of Papal supremacy that the Bishop of Rome, even as the Patriarch of the West, a title renounced by Pope Benedict XVI, historically had anywhere near the power or prestige he now enjoys thanks to Vatican I, etc, is roughly as credible as the Venetian claim that their local bishop under the RCC, and not the Christians of Alexandria, was the legitimate heir to the apostolic throne of St. Mark on account of the Venetian Republic raiding Alexandria and spiriting away the relics of the evangelist, and using large numbers of lions in its heraldry.

 

What do you think of movements like this, Spiritus?
http://www.ourladyisgod.com/

 

Standard RC cop-out. This was of course adopted only after Vatican I, but it has the effect of de-legitimizing most sources of traditional RC (and traditional Christian) doctrine, and what is more, considering that Pope Gregory the Great did say that in official protest to the Patriarch of Constantinople John the Faster, who is not regarded as a saint, by the way, deciding to style himself “Ecumenical”, I believe we can assert it to have been declared ex-Cathedra.

That is utterly absurd; St. Gregory was referring to his colleague the Patriarch of Constantinople, Gnosticism being on the decline during the reign of Pope St. Gregory, with Manichaeanism the only large remaining Gnostic sect in close proximity to and influence with the Roman oikumene. However, in the case of the Book of Revelation, the word Antichrist is probably not referring specifically to Gnostics, on the other hand, elsewhere in the Johannine corpus, the word Antichrist probably is referring to Gnostics, for example, Cerinthus, and the Apocalypse (The Book of Revelation) does declare our Lord condemning by name the most vile of the early Gnostic sects, the Nicolaitans, founded by the hideous figure of Nicolas the Deacon, who unlike his six colleagues ordained in the Acts of the Apostles, such as the illustrious protomartyr St. Stephen, decided to establish an heretical sect.

Whatever Pope St. Gregory Diologos wrote was sufficiently different from the doctrine of purgatory anathematized by the Orthodox Church to prevent his own anathematization, or at least, to be set aside. But in the event, saints are not infallible, and so it is possible for a great pious Father of the Church to be right about most things but still have left in his writings a great error. For example, St. Irenaeus and Chiliasm, or St. Gregory of Nyssa and Apokatastasis. But Pope St. Gregory Diologos was right to condemn the idea of a universal bishop for the same reason that St. Gregory of Nyssa was right to condemn homosexuality, this being the true faith of the Apostolic Church.

 

Those are neo-Marcionist heretics who are not a part of the Roman Catholic church I think asking Roman Catholic members like @Spiritus what they think about it would be very offensive, equivalent to asking an Anglican his feelings on the utterances of Joel Osteen, or an Orthodox about the doctrines elucidated by the Molokans or the Living Church in Russia, as though a heretic like Osteen who is of no relation to Anglicanism other than being Protestant, or a heretic like the leaders of the Molokan sect (who were a bit like Seventh Day Adventists only to a more extreme extent) or the Living Church (a heretical entity Stalin authorized to seize control of Orthodox churches in Russia, whose doctrines were similiar to those of say, the United Church of Christ or other ultra-liberal Protestant churches in the US, had something to say about Orthodoxy by virtue of being of a predominantly Orthodox nationality.

The members of the movement you linked to (if there are any; I have heard a rumor that site is a hoax) are not Roman Catholic except by the most superficial of unsanctioned associations, that being, an attempted identification with the Roman church via Fatima. So really, they are as Roman Catholic as Rasputin was Orthodox; strange persons, believing in strange and dangerous doctrines, and anathema to the bishops.

 

I definitely agree!