Historique ! Une prélature personnelle (diocèse sans frontières) serait offerte à 400 000 anglicans en pourparlers avec Rome

…et annoncée officiellement après Pâques à St-Paul-hors-les-murs :

  

 

Selon l’hebdomadaire catholique australien The Record, la Congrégation pour la doctrine de la foi offrirait à la Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) un statut de prélature personnelle. La TAC groupe 400 000 anglicans ayant rompu avec la Communion anglicane officielle « par fidélité à la foi et aux mœurs chrétiennes ». Ce mouvement est en pourparlers depuis 2007 avec le Vatican.

 

L’information du Record :

<< The TAC is a growing global community of approximately 400,000 members that took the historic step in 2007 of seeking full corporate and sacramental communion with the Catholic Church - a move that, if fulfilled, will be the biggest development in Catholic-Anglican relations since the English Reformation under King Henry VIII.  TAC members split from the Canterbury-based Anglican Communion headed by Archbishop Rowan Williams over issues such as its ordination of women priests and episcopal consecrations of women and practising homosexuals.

The TAC’s case appeared to take a significant step forwards in October 2008 when it is understood that the CDF decided not to recommend the creation of a distinct Anglican rite within the Roman Catholic Church - as is the case with the Eastern Catholic Churches - but a personal prelature, a semi-autonomous group with its own clergy and laity.

Opus Dei was the first organisation in the Catholic Church to be recognised as a personal prelature, a new juridical form in the life of the Church. A personal prelature is something like a global diocese without boundaries, headed by its own bishop and with its own membership and clergy.

Because no such juridical form of life in the Church had existed before, the development and recognition of a personal prelature took Opus Dei and Church officials decades to achieve.

An announcement could be made soon after Easter this year. It is understood that Pope Benedict XVI, who has taken a personal interest in the matter, has linked the issue to the year of St Paul, the greatest missionary in the history of the Church. The Basilica of St Paul outside the Walls could feature prominently in such an announcement for its traditional and historical links to Anglicanism. Prior to the English Reformation it was the official Church of the Knights of the Garter.

The TAC’s Primate, Adelaide-based Archbishop John Hepworth, told The Record he has also informed the Holy See he wants to bring all the TAC’s bishops to Rome for the beatification of Cardinal Henry Newman, also an Anglican convert to the Catholic Church, as a celebration of Anglican-Catholic unity.>>

 

 Si cette information se confirmait, ce serait un coup de tonnerre historique : autrement plus important que l’affaire des lefebvristes, ainsi réduite à sa juste proportion.