I am terribly tired at the moment as the new job has many new demands on my mind and time as I think about how best to serve the school community where I am now working as a chaplain for the next year. I feel bad about not having much time to write here lately but I will try to do better in the very near future.There have been a number of deeper reflections over the past five and half months as I have made my journey out of Anglican priesthood to full communion with the Catholic Church. One of the issues that I have been thinking about due to my deeper understanding of real communio is how we look at the Church eucharistically. What do I mean by that? First of all, I believe it is the basic understanding that the apostle is not the bishop of a community but rather a missionary for the whole Church. Now that statement begs all sorts of issues for my Reformed Protestant friends and Anglo-Catholic ones as well. I am afraid that an ecclesial understanding of apostle cuts to the core of the problem of ecclesial communities building false assurances of catholicity based upon the 'ownership' of their own leaders. The Holy Father spells this out quite lucidly in his book Called To Communion. Give these words some thoughts!
He [the apostle] expresses in his person the universal Church; he is her representative, and no local Church can claim him for herself alone. Paul carried out this function of unity by means of his letters and a network of messengers. These letters are an exercise of his catholic ministry of unity, which can be accounted for only by the apostle's authority in the Church universal. If one considers the lists of salutations in the epistles, one can further observe how mobile ancient society was; we meet Paul's friends now here, now there. For them being Christian meant belonging to a developing divine convocation that was one and the same wherever they found it....The Church cannot become a static juxtaposition of essentially self-sufficient local Churches. The Church must remain 'apostolic', that is to say, the dynamism of unity must also mold her structure. The epithet 'successor of the apostles' removes the bishop beyond the purely local and makes it his responsibility to ensure that the two dimensions of communio--the vertical and the horizontal--remain undivided.
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Not much on offer here, vis a vis Petrine supremacy and the claim to universal jurisdiction, episcopacy, and sovereignty. The very same Dr. Ratzinger noted that few Protestants appeal to Paul's asserted co-equality with all apostles in the Galatians correspondance. As for moderns, Ratzinger is correct. As for the Confessional Catholic Churches of the Reformation, he is wrong. Read Calvin's Book IV for one illustration, among others.
Can you offer a reference of your reading of Calving? For one, having read Calvin's book IV numerous times I know that he rejected the three-fold office of bishop, priest, and deacon as held by the Catholic Church and those 'Reformational' churches who maintained it such as the C of E.
One of the issues when I was discerning whether to become Catholic was the relationship of parishes to each other. I was baptised http://www.osp.org.uk/ and met professionally the rector at http://www.stmungos.org/sunday_service.htm, both in Edinburgh. Both were Churches in the Episcopal Church but in terms of beliefs, they shared much, but in others beliefs could not be further apart. OSP would view the Bishop in the Catholic sense, St Mungo's (I got the impression) more as a diocesan administrator. OSP take, as they call it, an 'inclusive' approach to sexuality, I would suspect as an Evangelical parish St Mungo's would take a 'biblical' line. I've been to many C of E / Episcopal Churches and just felt every one was different, higher or lower up the candle both liturgically / in belief and never the same.
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