New members questions concerning crucifixes and the Vaticans personal ordinariates for Anglicans
First question: Throughout the church I see “Christ the King” crucifixes. I also see “Catholic” style crucifixes in the items for sale. Is there an official or preferred style?
Second question: how do we view the Vatican’s personal ordinariates for anglicans?
ANGLICANISM
The Personal Ordinariates: are Anglican Rite dioceses under the Vatican created by Pope Benedict XVI beginning in 2011 for disaffected Episcopalians and Anglicans who wish to enter into communion with the Bishop of Rome and retain a facsimile or veneer of their Anglican liturgical heritage. To be perfectly blunt, they are fake Anglican churches, faux and counterfeit Anglicanism, pretending to be Anglican but really only temporary liturgical experiments created by Rome to lure Anglicans into the Papal fold. These dioceses allow married priests already ordained in Anglicanism to enter and be sacrilegiously re-ordained, but do not allow married laymen who join or are born into the Ordinariate to be ordained as priests going forward. An enforced celibate priesthood for those formed for the priesthood within the Ordinariate will end the tradition of married priests soon. The Ordinariates are only allowed to exist until the Pope decides to terminate the experiment.
These pseudo-Anglicans employ an authorised Missal which is a fusion of the American Missal, the 1928 Prayer Book, and the 1979 rite. And, of course, the Ordinariates are simply Roman Catholic dioceses with an Anglican sheen or appearance, so former Anglicans are re-confirmed and re-ordained, must accept the invalidity of Anglican Orders and Sacraments, and must accept entirely all Roman dogmas, including the heresies of Papal infallibility and Papal universal jurisdiction, the errors of the First Vatican Council 1870.
Anglicans still locate the essence of the Anglican Tradition in the ecumenical consensus of the Undivided Church of the First Millennium and therefore cannot accept the dogmatic decrees of Apostolicae Curae, Ineffabilis Deus, Munificentissimus Deus, and the I Vatican Council, decrees maintained unchanged in the modern Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. Anglicans who, as a matter de fide and of informed conscience, cannot accept the distinctives of the Papal Dogmas as currently defined and promulgated are not able to embrace the Ordinariate provision. The Ordinariate is about one’s full, unconditional, and unreserved acceptance of the totality of Roman Catholic papalist doctrinal and dogmatic teaching. Anglicans who cannot without reservation accept the Papal Claims in toto cannot join the Ordinariate.
The Malines Conversations of the 1920s between Anglicanism and Rome professed the desire for a ‘Church of England united not absorbed.’ But now we have just the opposite: a greatly loved and esteemed part of the Anglican Tradition, a part valued and treasured for its contribution to the full Catholic life of Anglicanism, has been absorbed, converted, not united. Blah.
Anglicans have no official crucifix, but as Anglicans, only those crafted in beauty and exceptionally good taste!
+Chad
