The Looming Question

Your Bloviator has been following with interest the saga of the Traditional Anglican Communion, a breakaway group of beleaguered Anglicans who would dearly love to come over to Rome. I last wrote of them:

Last year, one of the many breakaway "alphabet soup" Anglican organizations, the Traditional Anglican Communion, petitioned the Pope to be admitted, en masse, into the Holy Catholic Church. The Church has a tradition of moving glacially slow on requests of that sort but I suspect the TAC may receive a reply soon and that it will be positive.

There are now buzzings Rome may at last be turning down the sheets and fluffing up the pillows for those weary souls in the TAC. Comes this report from the National Catholic Register, via the website Clerical Whispers, that

discussions at the Vatican on devising a possible structure for the Traditional Anglican Communion to come into communion with Rome are understood to be nearing completion.

And that

during his May 5 meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, [Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan] Williams asked that any potential announcement be delayed until after the Lambert Conference.

Veteran observers of the Anglicans’ continuing identity crisis are not optimistic that it can be resolved, given the wide gulf that exists between liberal-minded Anglican hierarchies in Western countries and more orthodox bishops in the developing world.

Further:

Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, author of Anglican Orders: Null and Void?, believes that in the absence of a magisterium and under the less-than-decisive leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, there is “no chance whatsoever that the Lambeth Conference will settle the question of what — if anything — the Anglican Communion believes.”

If the TAC is brought into communion with Rome, that "possible structure" will likely take the shape of the Pastoral Provision and "Anglican Use," a creation of the Holy See in 1980 to permit disaffected Episcopalian priests (even when married) and parishes to be received into the Catholic Church but to continue worshipping in an Anglican manor, using an appropriately modified Book of Common Prayer and Hymnal. Despite being in existence for twenty-eight years, however, there are but six Catholic parishes in the entire country created under the Pastoral Provision, it having no fans among liberal Catholic bishops who would rather chew glass than see large contingents of conservative, traditionalist (and possibly troublesome) Anglo-Catholics coming into their fold. That could all change should the Vatican decide for the TAC and it could prove to be deliverance for traditional Anglo-Catholics in America, heretofore trapped in the apostate Episcopal Church, and, eventually, for Anglo-Catholics everywhere, also trapped, in the increasing number of apostate provinces within the Anglican Communion.

Should Rome decide favorably on the Traditional Anglican Communion's request for communion, the very day that decision is announced Anglo-Catholics in the United States and the rest of the world will be forced to ask themselves, respectively, what possible benefit is obtained by remaining loyal to to the utterly corrupt Episcopal Church and to the increasingly corrupt Anglican Communion; whether having a Pope, Magisterium and undisputed Sacraments is really such a bad thing after all.

(h/t those Shriners at Holy Whapping)