The Rev. William Franklin sees the humor in a headline like The Times’ “Desperate Bishops Invited Rome to Park its Tanks on Archbishop’s Lawn,” but he considers it one of the exaggerations in coverage of the Vatican’s plans regarding disaffected Anglicans.

“It doesn’t feel like warring armies here in Rome,” said Fr. Franklin, who has worked at the Anglican Center in Rome since 2005.

Fr. Franklin, an academic fellow at the center and associate director of the American Academy in Rome, also does not see the Vatican’s announcement as fishing for new clergy or trying to poach another communion’s members.

“It is an attempt to respond to questions from former Anglican groups, and maybe some current Anglican groups,” he said.

The Vatican’s decision was announced by the leaders of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Divine Worship. The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity was not represented.

Fr. Franklin sees this as significant, and for a simple reason: The Vatican’s conversation with groups such as the Traditional Anglican Communion is pastoral rather than ecumenical in nature, because it is likely to end in these groups’ assimilation into the Roman Catholic Church, rather than two churches achieving deeper unity without being fully united.

“I would say the scale and the significance of the moment is very hard to evaluate,” he said.

He sees hope in three signs, however:

• The Archbishop of Canterbury will fulfill a planned visit to Rome in November, during which he will honor the ecumenical trailblazer Johannes Cardinal Willebrands.

• Both Anglican and Roman Catholic leaders will gather on Nov. 11 to discuss a third round of ecumenical dialogue by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission.

• Another meeting in November will continue annual informal talks between the Pontifical Council and representatives of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

“Nothing in these 40 years has stopped the official dialogue” between Rome and Canterbury, he said, “or the hope that the official dialogue will continue.”

Fr. Franklin believes conservatives in the United States are kidding themselves if they entertain any thoughts of replacing the Episcopal Church as the recognized voice of U.S. Anglicanism.

This is how Fr. Franklin characterizes the Pontifical Council’s interest in Anglicanism, from conservative to liberal: “We want to know what it really is like, what it really thinks. We don’t want to deal with just one point on the spectrum of the Anglican Communion. We want to deal with the entire spectrum of the Anglican Communion.”

Similarly, he said, the Pontifical Council has expressed repeated support for the Anglican Communion’s covenant discussions, and would “see it as a negative if the Episcopal Church drops out of the covenant process.”

Douglas LeBlanc

Get the next 52 weeks of The Living Church Online, plus convenient access to more than a year of archived issues, all for just $25! Click here to start your subscription to the TLC Online Edition today!