by Gavin Ashenden, National Catholic Register
COMMENTARY: If ecumenism is to have integrity, it must be built not on gestures that obscure reality, but on a shared submission to the truth Christ embodies.
However compassionate the Church is toward those who suffer from the mental illness of gender dysphoria, we have long recognized that we do people no service if we reinforce them in the illusion — particularly if the illusion is about something that really matters.
Reality is the surest route to sanity and a holy reordering. If that is true in the area of sex and identity, it is also true in ecumenical matters and in ecclesiology.
That is why so many people have felt a serious disquiet about the way in which the Pope has welcomed the Anglican Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally.
Apostolicae Curae made it clear why Anglican orders were null and void and how they always had been, while recognizing that this was in fact the original and deliberate intention of the Anglican ordinal and of the politicized ecclesiology of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The fact that Anglicans have since changed their minds and seek a degree of legitimacy from the Mother Church with which they are in schism does not change history or their credentials.
It does Anglicans no good to pretend that the longings of their ecclesial imagination can change the nature of reality.
The Journey of Sarah Mullally
We will come back to that in a moment, but first it might be worth spending some time on the character of the first woman Anglican archbishop herself.
Sarah Mullally has been on a journey. It’s not just been a journey from being a nurse to being a clergywoman. It’s a journey from conservative, evangelical clarity to progressive, fashionable liberalism.
In theological terms, one could say that she’s moved from Protestant biblical orthodoxy into the category of therapeutic deism.