The ACC and the TAC: An Ecumenical Endeavour that Stalled

More than two years ago I volunteered to write a paper on behalf of the Anglican Catholic Church (ACC) outlining our ecumenical position with respect to the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) and how we thought progress toward reconciliation might begin.

After much consultation, the first draft was changed in various respects to reflect better the range of opinion within the ACC on certain matters. The final paper was duly sent to TAC Primate, Archbishop John Hepworth, who read it, made some preliminary remarks by email, and told me by telephone that an official response would be forthcoming.

It has been about two years since then and no further or official response has been received. To be fair, the following ameliorating factors should be noted. Firstly, the TAC's ecumenical priority has been Rome and this ecumenical endeavour has undoubtedly not only been time-consuming but has apparently hit some road blocks, perhaps slowing down everything else. Secondly, the recent "warning shot across the bows" of Forward in Faith (FiF) by Archbishop Hepworth may signal that the TAC is getting to closer to addressing some of our concerns about FiF, even though this action is not related to the paper's specific objections. Thirdly, there are public statements by individual TAC bishops rejecting doctrinal comprehensiveness, which is a step towards the official, corporate statement desired by the ACC in the paper.

Nevertheless, our present Metropolitan, the Most Reverend Mark Haverland, has been asked questions by TAC bishops in that time about what our position towards them is, implying they are unaware of the paper where these questions were answered. I believe it is time for it to become a matter of public record, and have been given permission by Archbishop Haverland to make it available on-line.

It may be found here. (An Addendum included with the original document has been deleted. The reasons for this are that the Addendum dealt with another jurisdiction whose relations with the TAC may have caused problems at that stage. Since that time developments have taken place which give hope for better things in the future in this regard. To include the Addendum would thus have been unhelpful and unnecessary.)

Before reading the paper, many will need some background on one the events spoken of therein. There is detailed analysis of the "Deerfield Beach consecrations". In brief, this was a Conditional Consecration of the bishops of the "American Episcopal Church" (AEC) (not to be confused with the mainstream Episcopal Church in the U.S.) and some bishops who had belonged to the ACC. Associated with this act was the voluntary re-association of these bishops into a new jurisdiction, the Anglican Church in America (ACA). This church then effectively replaced the ACC as the U.S.A. portion of the TAC, since joining the TAC was one of the primary motivations of the AEC for participating in these acts and since the ACC considered this whole sequence of events to be schismatic, rupturing its former relationship of full communion with the rest of the TAC.

The reason that re-consecrations occurred and a new church was created was that the ACC had already effectively rejected the claim of the AEC to be a Catholic jurisdiction with certainly valid Apostolic Orders and had also questioned the integrity and suitability for office of its Primate, Anthony Clavier. The ACC had thus indicated that the only way for the AEC to join the TAC was via conditional repetition of its ordinations and confirmations and acceptance into the ACC -- and the latter would not mean automatic acceptance of all AEC clergy into active ministry. There was a minority within the ACC that felt that its position was too rigid and so it appears they organised a way, in collaboration with the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada and the AEC, to get around this obstruction.

Finally, there is one TAC defence of the Deerfield Beach Consecrations not addressed in my paper that I will briefly address here. The fact that ACC bishops, who the consecrators said they had no doubts about as to the validity of their episcopal orders, were nevertheless conditionally reconsecrated, has been justified by Archbishop Falk (in Deerfield Beach Revisited) on the grounds that the ACC succession included early consecrations that were not " 'normal', 'canonical', or 'regular' " and that "one widely recognised good reason for conditional ... consecration ... has exactly been the matter of 'regularising' Orders". The problem with this defence is that it is absolutely incompatible with another defence by Archbishop Falk and others of Deerfield Beach -- that the uncanonical lack of warrants there didn't matter since there were none at the Denver Consecrations at the beginning of the ACC either. You cannot justify a re-consecration on the grounds of making up for irregularities in prior consecrations and simultaneously excuse irregularities in the reconsecration because they are no worse than those in the original! As it happens, the lack of warrants was a smaller (and relatively trivial) problem compared to the more fundamental one at Deerfield Beach: the jurisdictions/sees to which the men were to be appointed did not officially exist at the time they were consecrated: in other words they were, strictly speaking, not explicitly consecrated for a specific ministry. The sees were not created till the next day when the ACA was constituted. This serious mistake was not one made at the original Denver Consecrations which gave bishops to the "Affirmation of St Louis"-based Continuing Church. Nevertheless, when it comes to the question of validity rather than regularity, I believe we can be morally certain of the genuineness of TAC Orders, including any conferred at or via the Deerfield Beach Consecrations. I will post on this matter soon, giving my refutation of the contrary position common in the ACC.