Father Longenecker skrev på sin blog for noen dager siden om hvorfor han ble katolikk (han hadde tidligere vært anglikansk prest). Og han åpner innlegget sitt slik: I’m often asked why I left the Anglican Church to become a Catholic. Was it women’s ordination or some other issue? Well, the debate over women’s ordination was an influence. It made me re-examine the question of authority in the church. …
However, the more I think about the reasons for my conversion, the more I realize that the real problem was not women’s ordination, nor was it, at depth, the question of authority in the church. Women’s ordination was a problem and the authority of Rome was the answer, but there was a deeper, underlying problem with the Anglican Church as I experienced it. The problem is modernism — a philosophical and theological position which is deeply opposed to historic Christianity.
Han fortsetter med å fortelle om flere av sine anglikanske prestekollegaer som viste seg å egentlig ikke engang tro på Gud (les videre her selv). Personlig hadde jeg ingen slik opplevelser før jeg ble katolikk; faktisk var min kirkelige bakgrunn – både min oppvekst i den lokale kirke og skolelagsbevegelsen, min teologiske utvikling på Menighetsfakultetet (spesielt mht bibelkritikken), samt mine sist år som lutheraner i Den evangelisk lutherske frikirke – mer konservativ enn den (norske) katolske Kirke jeg gikk inn i i 1994. Heldigvis oppdaga jeg nokså snart at Kirkens magisterium var mer konservativt og oppegående enn jeg hadde våga å håpe på, og det har jo vist seg ganske så tydelig de siste åra at Den katolske Kirke er en av de få man kan stole på teologisk, filosofisk, moralsk, dogmatisk osv.
Father Longenecker fikk også ganske tydelig tilbakemelding på sist første innlegg, at alt ikke var så rosenrødt filosofisk og teologisk i Den katolske Kirke som han hadde gitt inntrykk av. Han skrev derfor et innlegg til, kalt Modernism and the Magisterium, der han også ser på problemene innenfor vår egen Kirke: «After analyzing the modernism in the Anglican Church it was pointed out that there’s plenty of modernism in the Catholic Church too. True enough, and because blog posts should be short and punchy, I left this issue for another day.
It is true that all the problems I outlined in the post on Modernism in the Anglican Church are present in the Catholic Church. In many ways the effects have been even more devastating. At least the Anglicans with their good taste have preserved beautiful liturgy, architecture and sacred music in the midst of the modernism. Many Catholics have been even more gung ho on the dumbing down of Christianity, the vulgarization of the liturgy, art and architecture that is the philosophical offspring of modernism. … ….
However, there are two distinct differences in the circumstances of Anglicanism and Catholicism. The first is that, while the Catholics have fallen into the same moral morass as Anglicanism, what they are doing has not been condoned and sanctioned by the Church.