Samtaler mellom høykirkelige lutheranere og Vatikanet på 90-tallet
Jeg leste nylig et interessant foredrag av Dr. William Tighe, som han holdt i kirken St. Mary the Virgin, i Arlington, Texas, under det man kalte The 2011 Anglican Use Conference. Dr. Tighe går gjennom de økumeniske samtalene mellom Roma og Anglikanerne fra midten av 60-tallet og til i dag, og ekstra grundig ser han på hvordan dokumentet Anglicanorum Cætibus ble til i 2009. Lenge ville Roma (og spesielt Enhetskommisjonen, PCPCU) samtale med hovedstrømningene i de store protestantiske kirkesamfunnene, og ikke risikere å ødelegge disse samtalene med å snakke dirkete men mindre, konservative «sær»grupper innenfor disse kirkesamfunnene – Troskongregasjonen gjørde likevel dette etter hvert.
I dette lange foredraget nevner han også Norge et par ganger, bl.a. slik:
The PCPCU under both Cassidy and Kasper seems to have been disinclined, to put it mildly, to risk the friendly and agreeable relations that it forged with “Canterbury Communion Anglicans,” as well as groups such as main-line Lutheran World Federation member churches, by dealing substantively with bodies that it may have seen as “splinter groups” from these denominational families. (I mention the Lutherans because there is a story to be told about how in the mid-1990s, about the time of the millennium of Christianity in Norway in 1995, when Cardinal Cassidy was the Catholic Church‘s representative at its celebration in Norway, a group of “Catholic-minded” Church of Norway Lutherans, many of whom in 1999 left the State Church there and formed the “Nordic Catholic Church,” a body now in sacramental fellowship with the Polish National Catholic Church of the USA and Canada, were repeatedly spurned when they made approaches both to the Catholic Church in Norway and to the PCPCU to alert it to the triumph of forces favoring the acceptance of homosexual partnerships in that body and the ordination of persons living in such partnerships.) While these conversations never came to a formal end during Cardinal Cassidy’s tenure of his position a the PCPCU, they seem to have gone nowhere.
