Union Between Traditional Anglicans and Rome Nears

The Vatican has responded positively to proposals by the Traditional Anglican Communion to reunite with the Roman Catholic Church. An exchange of letters between Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Archbishop John Hepworth, primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, “shows warming relations between the two churches as they begin to consider proposals for corporate reunion,” the Catholic News Agency reported Wednesday.

The Traditional Anglican Communion is a group of churches with a worldwide membership of 400,000 people. It formed in 1990 from a dozen Anglican churches that broke away from the 80-million-strong Anglican Communion (of which the Church of England is the heart), mostly to protest the liberalism creeping into that organization.

In October 2007, the Traditional Anglican Communion sent a letter formally requesting “full, corporate and sacramental union” with the Roman Catholic Church, which has since been under review by the Vatican.

The Catholic Church has now responded with, in the words of Archbishop Hepworth, a letter “of warmth and encouragement,” written by Cardinal Levada and received on July 25. The July 5 letter, said the archbishop, was written to assure the Communion that the Congregation is giving “serious attention” to the “prospect of corporate unity,” as requested in the 2007 Anglican letter.

In a message to the College of Bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion, Hepworth distributed a copy of the cardinal’s letter and described his own reply to it. “I have responded, expressing my gratitude on behalf of ‘my brother bishops,’ reaffirming our determination to achieve the unity for which Jesus prayed … no matter what the personal cost this might mean in our discipleship,” Archbishop Hepworth wrote in the letter published by the Messenger Journal (emphasis ours).

Hepworth said he was “particularly thankful” to Levada for his “generous mention” of corporate reunion. The archbishop wrote that corporate reunion was a path “seldom travelled in the past” but one “essential” to fulfilling Christ’s desire for Christian unity, according to the Catholic News Agency.

Archbishop Hepworth admonished Traditional Anglicans to pray for the “Holy Father,” the cardinal and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “as we move to ever closer communion in Christ with the Holy See.”

Following the Traditional Anglicans’ request to join the Roman Catholic Church last year, Joel Hilliker wrote in his November 14 column:

It is now the Vatican’s call. If Rome accepts the proposal, it will open the way for hundreds of thousands of Anglicans to return to the Roman Catholic fold en masse—the largest such move since the Reformation. Half a million instant converts.And those in the Traditional Anglican Church (of England) will thus formalize the transfer of their allegiance from the sovereign of England to the bishop of Rome.The significance of this event is destined to grow with time. The [Traditional Anglican Communion], though now separate from the Anglican Communion, appears to be in the vanguard of a movement among many Anglicans who view the liberalization in the church as heading in the opposite direction from where they want to go. The Anglo-Catholicism that found earlier expression in the present queen’s overtures to a former pope is coming into fuller and fuller flower.

The Trumpet has followed this subject closely because of its prophetic significance. For half a century, Herbert W. Armstrong and his Plain Truth magazine expounded on biblical prophecies foretelling the unification of Protestants with their Roman Catholic mother church. The October 1961 Plain Truth, for example, wrote, “The pope will step in as the supreme unifying authority—the only one that can finally unite the differing nations of Europe. … Europe will go Roman Catholic! Protestantism will be absorbed into the ‘Mother’ church—and totally abolished.”

It is in this light that we view the increasing prospect of unity between the Traditional Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church. The eagerness of the Vatican to absorb the Anglican communion, and the lengths to which the communion is prepared to go to be accepted by Rome—“no matter what the personal cost”—is an indication of things to come.

Read Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s article “Anglicans Submitting to the Pope” and “Returning to the Fold,” by Stephen Flurry, to learn how full unity between the Anglicans and Catholics will finally be achieved.