This won’t help you at all but my friend was the only Lutheran in a sea of Catholics in some youth camp or something she was in. She was sad that she wasn’t allowed to go up for Communion, and expected me to sympathize. I said, shoot, Catholics not in good standing aren’t supposed to go up, let alone Lutherans.
Sticking to the U.S., since I’m unfamiliar with what Protestants overseas think of the Pope, I remember when backwoods preachers would call the Pope the Antichrist, but that was backwoods preachers speaking for nobody but themselves and their own congregations.
If some preacher that nobody’s ever heard of, other than their own flock, says something about anything, it’s of little concern to me. The opinions of the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, or Pat Robertson or James Dobson with their large TV audiences, matter because of the number of people who take their statements seriously.
Sunrazor, I can say pretty definitively that there was never a sanctioned intercommunion between the Roman Catholic Church and the Episcopal and Lutheran churches. There is, however, intercommunion between the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church, as well as a number of other mainstream Protestant denominations in the US. I know from personal experience that a number of RC priests played a bit loose with the rules in the 70s/80s, so unofficial intercommunion between some local congregations almost certainly happened, and that is likely what you experienced.
I recall back in 2004, some American RCC bishops were saying communion should be denied to any politician who supported abortion rights.
I don’t know if any was ever actually turned away from the altar.
Not that that was their goal, of course.
I dimly recall that, not too long ago, some (married) Anglican priests joined the RCC, and were regarded by the RCC as genuine working Catholic priests. Am I misremembering? And if not, doesn’t this somewhat contradict the above? (The RCC priesthood is Holy Orders, right?)
Look, if you sign up to be a Catholic, you’re signing up to believe a lot of horseshit. I dunno why this bit is any worse than all the others. That whole anti-abortion AND anti-contraception AND pro-censorship thing is much worse because they DO enforce it on non-Catholics where possible.
The Anglican priests who entered the Catholic Church were confirmed and later ordained in the RCC. Given the Church’s view that the Anglican Church does not preserve the Apostolic Succession, their reception of these two sacraments from the Anglican Church was considered invalid. Here is a cite from EWTN regarding the process per JPII’s 1980 letter.
I think people in the Middle East have a lingering memory of several Crusades ordered by the then Pope or Popes. (bolding mine, if it actually works.)
Which pro-censorship thing?
Oh, back in the 30s they were pretty much the main instigators in the Hayes Code that was in effect through to the 1960s, by all accounts.
Thanks for the cite. It is most informative, in that it makes no sense at all.
Their “particular circumstances,” of course, are their having been priests in the Anglican Communion. Given that the same preference hasn’t, AFAIK, been extended for centuries to married Catholic laymen who wished to become priests, the only possible interpretation is that their Anglican priesthood is treated as at least somewhat genuine from the RCC perspective. Otherwise they, as new lay Catholics, would be exactly and no more than that - new lay Catholics.
Actually, the Episcopal bishop of Utah was baptized as a Mormon and was not required to be re-baptized when she became an Anglican, and now she is even a bishop. I’m drawing a blank on her name.
It’s by no means without controversey in the Episcopal Church, though. But then again, what is?
Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, there was an active dialogue between the Anglican commuinion and the RCC regarding the theological description of the Eucharist. Each meeting produced statements from each side that we were not discovering any bar based on belief to intercommunion. This got a lot of folks (who were not quite paying attention to the whole situation) excited that intercommunion was just a few years (some really excitale folks were thinking in terms of months) away. Unfortunately, the theological descriptions of the Eucharist were not the only hurdle. The issue of Apostolic Succession, for example, was a long way from being resolved with only the earliest talks being completed or, perhaps, not yet scheduled.
Simultaneously, the RCC reconsidered some of its rules regarding the Eucharist at mixed marriages with some of the older rules being relxed for that one time special event. (I do not recall whether the rules were changed simply to permit a wedding mass (previously prohibited for mixed marriages) with only the Catholic receiving communion or whether there was actually a special permission given for the non-Catholic spouse to receive communion on that single event. In any event, a number of priests took it upon themselves (if they did not have their bishops’ permission) to allow the non-Catholic spouse to receive communion at the nuptial mass.
This practice further confused the issue from the perspective of a lot of people who did not read Vatican pronouncements.
Into the middle of this exuberant feeling that “we’re all one,” the Anglican communion ordained a woman to the priesthood. That act pretty much shut things down from the RCC side. As far as I know, the original commissions to investigate intercommunion were never officially disbanded, but they definitely stopped getting any support from Pope John Paul II (who had previously supported the commissions whole-heartedly).
So the current situation is that there is no (and will be no) intercommunion or any serious effort to explore the possibility until either the Anglican communion or the RCC reverse their position on ordaining women.
On the other hand, Pope JP II was sympathetic to the position of those Anglican priests who were offended by the ordination of women. Since the theological aspects of intercommunion had made such progress before they collapsed, he decided that an ordained Anglican priest would be eligible to become Catholic with a minimum of hassle. However, the Anglican would still have to go through the final year or so of the Catholic seminary (to make sure he had the correct instruction) and would have to be ordained, again, in the Catholic church. There was no provision for a simple transfer of powers from one unit to the other. The part of this that makes people giggle is that the pope rescinded the prohibition on marriage for those gentlemen, since many of them had already married. (If the Anglican had not married prior to the change, he is still bound by the RCC rule of celibacy.)
Meanwhile, we have priests in the parishes performing a little bit of intercommunion activity (limited to weddings) on their own.
Lotta 800-year-old people in the Middle East?
Sorry for duplicate info; I’ve been composing the post while I engaged in several off-line tasks.
The Archdiocese of Chicago has a page on Mixed Marriages in which they mention the possibility of the nuptial mass, noting, however, that Canon 844* is to be followed: this prohibits even the spouse from receiving the Eucharist in such a situation. (That would have been my guess, but I wanted some citable support. Priests who permit intercommunion are acting on their own.)
- Can. 844 §1. Catholic ministers administer the sacraments licitly to Catholic members of the Christian faithful alone, who likewise receive them licitly from Catholic ministers alone, without prejudice to the prescripts of §§2, 3, and 4 of this canon, and ⇒ can. 861, §2.
Hey, I’m Catholic and all, but I’m sure not defending mandatory celibacy or the current pope’s, shall we say, fondness for pre-Vatican II Catholicism.
Anyway, the permission to function as a married priest is very carefully hedged in every official pronouncement, and as a matter of fact has also been extended to some non-Anglican Protestant ministers who have converted to the RCC and received ordination. I just spent some time looking for numbers, and there’s nothing official that tracks the number of married Protestant ministers who have been ordained, likely because of the potential for friction with the (mandatory) celibate Latin clergy. However, while most have been Episcopalian there have also been a handful of others, including Lutherans and Methodists. In these cases there is not really a question of Apostolic Succession, so there is no implication that by the RCC extending this option to men who previously functioned as Protestant ministers that they are imputing a validity to their prior ordinations.
I once, in an Episcopal church, saw a plaque charting the pastor’s apostolic succession back to one of the Disciples. News to me the RCC doesn’t recognize that. I guess it can’t properly pass through a heretic bishop.
It’s not that. Leo XIII declared them invalid in the bull Apostolicae Curae because he claimed that changes in the ordination process by the Episcopalians in 1552 made those ordinations invalid, and the apostolic sucession was broken that way.