What are we to do with the Pope’s latest offensive statement about non-Catholics? Yesterday’s Guardian wrongly headlines it as, ‘Dismay and anger as Pope declares Protestants cannot have churches’, when what it really means is ‘Protestants are not churches’.

Why do I care? For the following reasons:

1. This is all the ammunition that hardline Protestants need. It almost makes me feel like joining them. (I won’t.)

2. I’ve worked with Catholic priests who stretch the rules of their church every bit as far as they can to accommodate other Christians. Two have allowed me to take communion under their presidency. One said, ‘I wasn’t ordained to check someone’s membership’; another found a Catholic rule that said non-Catholics could take the sacrament if they couldn’t worship at their own church. Since we had closed that Sunday morning for a united service, he told us to come forward for more than a blessing.

3. My closest friend from schooldays (and who was also best man at our wedding) is a practising Catholic. This gets personal! I still remember him not being allowed by his priest to take communion at my confirmation service when we were sixteen.

The Guardian observes,

The Church of England reacted more cautiously than seven years ago when
Dominus Iesus was issued and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George
Carey, denounced it as unacceptable. The spokesman for the current
archbishop, Rowan Williams, said: “This is a serious document, teaching
on important ecclesiological matters and of significance to the
churches’ commitment to the full, visible unity to the one church of
Jesus Christ.”

I’m with George Carey here. His comments of seven years ago still stand, on thsi basis. Enough of the weasel words about serious documents. This is unacceptable.

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