Conger

The Anglo-Catholic movement has come to an end, the former Bishop of Fort Worth Clarence Pope told The Church of England Newspaper following his reception into the Roman Catholic Church.

The Catholic movement, which has been part of “Anglicanism from the time of the Elizabethan Settlement,” Bishop Pope argued, had “gradually dissipated” into a style of clerical dress.

Groups such as Affirming Catholicism are “simply using words which do not describe them,” he said. They “are not catholic” in a doctrinal sense but are “extremely liberal in their views while often dressing in catholic vesture.”

“Without the stable center provided by the Holy See of Peter” the catholic movement with Anglicanism will “ultimately die away.”

On Aug 6, Bishop Pope, the second Bishop of Fort Worth, wrote to US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori resigning from the House of Bishops. He is the second US bishop to join the Roman Catholic Church this year and the fifth bishop to leave the American Church.

The Anglo-Catholic movement had been hijacked, he argued, by political correctness. The leaders of the Oxford Movement had not sought to revive ritual, but were engaged in “an attempt to recover Catholic theology” for the Church of England and its daughter churches.

The triumph of “political correctness” over sound doctrine in recent years meant it was time for catholic Anglicans to go. The vision of corporate reunion “put forth by Pope Paul VI and Archbishop [of Canterbury Michael] Ramsey, can now never be realized.”

Bishop Pope urged the Church of England to think carefully about consecrating women to the episcopate. Should it proceed “it would end ARIC as there would be no hope for the discussions. Rome would consider men ordained by women bishops as invalid and, consequently, there would be a geometric progression of the problem.”

The underlying issue he said was one of authority and the “unbroken Tradition of the Church to which Anglicanism used to adhere. There is no assurance that the product of the decision to consecrate women as bishops will be authentic.”

His move to Rome was not a rejection of Anglicanism, he explained, but a culmination of a spiritual journey. “My love of Anglicanism is very deep,” he said and it had “shaped and brought to my present understanding” of the faith and was the “the final step for which this preparation was, I think, intended.”

His crossing the Tiber, Bishop Pope explained, was not motivated by hopes of creating an Anglican ghetto within the Roman Catholic Church free from the vagaries of General Convention, but “by a desire for wholeness and settlement in the home I believe God has erected.”