Monday 2 March 2015

Affirmations....

I am the (albeit-in-abeyance) Chair of Affirming Catholicism South Australia
Affirming Catholicism  is a movement within the Anglican Church (not the Roman Catholic Church) that affirms that traditional Catholic faith is and can be fully experienced outside the narrow confines of what is often called Catholicism.
Anglicans have long held that they are a Catholic Church, and indeed that what happened at the Reformation was NOT that the English Church ceased to be Catholic, but rather that we separated from the authority of Rome.
I would suggest that we have been justified in this separation over three centuries!
Orthodox Christians had done this some centuries before.

So you are quite likely, today, to walk into an Anglican Church and not see terribly much that differs from a Roman Catholic Church, or indeed a Lutheran, Presbyterian or Uniting Church
There will be minor details of difference....and at times we are tempted to say I am more right than you are but things are different today.
That is not to say we agree about everything (we do agree about quite a lot....but not about everything)
Affirming Anglicans accept the traditional Christian belief structure.
=> We also affirm that God has chosen both women and men to exercise the ministerial priesthood (Romans and the Orthodox do not)
=>We affirm that God doesn't discriminate on the grounds of sexuality or gender.....this of course is controversial in the Church. Though not, it would seem, in the community at large. Perhaps the Church needs the humility to recognise that it needs to learn from the world!

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