The pope: Playing the Anglican angle

“Not since the Protestant Reformation has Rome invited as many of its former children to come home,” said Diana Butler Bass in Beliefnet.com. Pope Benedict XVI last week launched a “massive sheep stealing campaign,” essentially raiding the Anglican flock by announcing he would make it much easier for Anglicans to convert to Catholicism. The Church of England split from Rome back in 1534, and the two denominations have kept an uneasy truce over the years. But the Anglican Church’s recent acceptance of female priests and openly gay bishops has offended many traditionalists, and Benedict obviously sees an opening. The Vatican will now allow disaffected Anglicans to retain many of their customs—including allowing priests to marry—if they recognize the pope as their supreme leader.

Look who’s the “cafeteria Catholic” now, said David Gibson in NewYorkTimes.com. The truly faithful, the church has long insisted, can’t simply pick and choose which tenets to follow. Yet here is Benedict “effectively carving out a special church within a church” whose adherents can have their own liturgy and music, and even non-celibate priests. Let’s not be naïve about why he’s doing it, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. Benedict’s conversion offer is not aimed at resolving any deep theological conflicts. Rather, it’s a “baldly political move” by Rome to snatch up as many disaffected Anglicans as possible. Most troubling, it rests on a “shared abhorrence of women priests and openly gay men”—which strikes me an appalling reason for changing one’s faith. “Churches are supposed to be about eternal truths, not an unfriendly takeover bid for a franchise.”

Maybe this isn’t how “well-mannered modern churches are supposed to behave,” said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. But then, Benedict has deeper concerns. Since the reforms of Vatican II, he’s watched hordes of Catholics decamp “to more assertive faiths,” such as Pentecostalism, or fall into “agnosticism and apathy.” Faced with a shrinking flock, he’s elected to replenish it by appealing to “conservative Christians hovering on the threshold of the church, unsure whether to slip inside.” It’s a bold if risky move, said Rod Dreher in Beliefnet.com. Even as critics insist that the Catholic Church can grow only by becoming more modern and more liberal, Benedict is wagering that it’s “Christian communities firmly rooted in tradition” that will lead its resurgence. Who knows? It may turn out to be a “brilliant strategy.”

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