The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Rev Andrew Burnham, is to lead his fellow Anglo-Catholics from the Church of England into the Roman Catholic Church, the Catholic Herald will reveal this week.
Bishop Burnham, one of two "flying bishops" in the province of Canterbury, has made a statement asking Pope Benedict XVI and the English Catholic bishops for "magnanimous gestures" that will allow traditionalists to become Catholics en mass.
As I see it, the Church of England is now fractured into three parts: a dying liberal Protestant sect that will align with its counterparts in the United States and Canada, (a subset of the liberal Protestants are the so-called "Affirming Catholics," vested Unitarians who are otherwise identical theologically and politically); second, a growing conservative and Protestant sect, the GAFCON group, that will go its own way, taking with it the more evangelical C of E Membership; third, conservative Anglo-Catholics who really have nowhere to go in the Anglican Communion save the myriad alphabet-soup of continuing Anglican churches. They, of course, are most likely to pope for the goodness of their souls.
These observations are hardly earthshaking. What might prove surprising, however, is the number of members of the C of E, never dreaming of describing themselves as "Catholic" or even "High Church" but also not caring for the snake-belly low Protestantism of the GAFCONERs, who follow Bishop Burnham to Rome; who conclude having a Pope and Magisterium keeping watch over the faith is the only sure way to keep it from veering into heresy. Should the Vatican establish some form of Anglican Use that permits use of the modified Prayer Book and Anglican Hymnody, the number might even be greater. Additionally, when those wavering Anglicans factor in the singular benefit of undisputed sacraments, we may well be witnesses to quite a stampede to Rome in the near future.
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