Let all who believe be welcome in the true Church

There is great rejoicing in Catholic and traditional Anglican circles this week, over the news that Pope Benedict XVI is promulgating a new apostolic constitution which will permit entire Anglican communities to be received into the Catholic Church should their members so wish.

The papal document allows for the creation of "personal ordinariates" to be headed by priests already ordained as Anglicans. This would include married priests, but presumably not openly gay priests.

The new "personal ordinariates" would be integrated into national Catholic episcopal conferences, but encouraged to preserve the distinctive aspects of the Anglican tradition. It is unclear whether the new Anglo-Catholics would be required to accept and declare their belief in Catholic dogma.

Over the course of the four and three-quarter centuries since Henry VIII split with Rome in order to get the first of his many divorces, the Anglicans have rejected Catholic positions on such major issues as transubstantiation, the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in salvation, and the supremacy and infallibility of the Pope.

In any case, the creation of the new structure has been loudly applauded in most quarters. It is heralded as a triumph of ecumenism, and a precedent for the eventual embrace by Rome of what remains of the Anglican church as well as the schismatic Orthodox churches.

Most Rev. Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, and Dr. Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury and primate of the Anglican Communion, issued a joint statement calling the new apostolic constitution "the fruit of years of ecumenical dialogue".

Acknowledging that recent developments in the Anglican communion have complicated the quest for reunion with Rome, the joint statement nevertheless insists that both the Vatican and the Anglican communion remain committed to the ecumenical process.

Of course there are dissenters. There were bound to be. The phrase "sheep stealing" has been bandied about. And voices of the old Tory establishment, in Britain and the colonies, are already decrying the weakening of a church which has been described as "the Tory party at prayer".

The editors of The Globe and Mail, Canada’s self-styled national newspaper, have lashed out at the Vatican’s decision.

"The Vatican's welcome of some Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church is a Trojan horse," they write. "In the face of an inflexible hierarchy, liberal Catholic voices have had little effect; the grudging loyalty of those who remain is in jeopardy. The Vatican announcement will make the Catholic Church more conservative and the Anglican church more liberal. Is that what ecumenism is meant to accomplish?"

If the result is as the editors predict, Walt is all for it. Let those who believe in the traditional Catholic Faith -- the Faith handed down to us by Our Lord Jesus Christ through the Apostles and the doctors of the Church -- come within the embrace of the Church. And let those who reject that Faith remain in the outer darkness.