How many Angles?

The media are all over the Roman Catholic-Anglican Church arrangement recently announced by the Vatican, so we should be seeing a lot of interesting reporting and analysis. But oddly, most of it is coming from one direction.

GetReligion comments on that, citing a National Catholic Register article that cites a bunch of secular media reports. So, it’s a snapshot of a composite picture of distortions. Sort of…

The relevant snip from the Register:

Venues such as National Public Radio, the London Times, and the Kansas City Star describe the Church as “poaching.” USA Today says the Church is “rustling.” Other media outlets used the term “luring.” Some question whether the move was a “hostile takeover.” And London Times’ columnist Libby Purves says that “converts may choke on the raw meat of Catholicism.”

Mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post have used the word “bid.” The Boston Globe uses both the words “lure” and “bid.”

No matter how you look at it, they’re all unsavory terms used by the secular media to describe the Church’s actions. Even some Catholic commentators have taken to calling the move “sheep-stealing,” saying that there’s an unwritten rule that the Church doesn’t proselytize other Christians.

Since when did the Catholic Church cease to be an evangelizing Church, bringing the Gospel to all peoples?

Terry Mattingly takes this opportunity to, once again, call religion reporters to a higher degree of aptitude with the issues they’re covering.

Once again, journalists face a basic question: Do the facts of this story suggest that Pope Benedict XVI sought out this contact with Anglican traditionalists or was it the other way around? Was this an invasion or a rescue mission, at the request of a flock of Anglo-Catholics who had, for several years, been requesting help?

The Economist writers answer those basics here.

SINCE the Church of England voted 17 years ago to admit women to the priesthood, disenchanted individual members of the 80m-strong worldwide Anglican Communion have been quietly converting to Roman Catholicism…

For years, the pope’s officials have been mulling over what to do about Anglican splinter groups which sought to join the Catholic church as a body. Foremost among these is the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), led by an Australian archbishop, John Hepworth….

But the papal decree goes much further. It enables not just the TAC, but any Anglican group—community, parish, even an entire diocese—to enter into communion with Rome without sacrificing its traditions. The so-called Apostolic Constitution (the highest form of pontifical ordinance) creates a new entity that transcends diocesan boundaries: the “personal ordinariate”, similar to the “military ordinariates” for Roman Catholics in the armed forces. In charge of each will be a former Anglican prelate…

Archbishop Hepworth declared himself “profoundly moved by the generosity” of Pope Benedict.

And though the piece makes the one point about Rowan Williams, head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, that’s circulating most in media coverage – with Williams claiming that he was only notified of this decision at a late stage – its context would be helped if they reported on what he said next. CWR does in this piece.

In a letter addressed to Anglican bishops, Williams lamented the fact that he was “informed of the planned announcement at a very late stage,” but stated that “this new possibility is in no sense at all intended to undermine existing relations between our two communions or to be an act of proselytism or aggression.”

Bishop Christopher Epting, deputy for ecumenical and interreligious affairs for the Episcopal Church in the United States, issued a statement saying that the Vatican announcement “reflects what the Roman Catholic Church, through its acceptance of Anglican rite parishes, has been doing for some years more informally.” Epting is referring to the “pastoral provision” approved by Pope John Paul II in the early 1980s, whereby several Anglican parishes in the United States entered the Catholic Church while continuing to observe Anglican liturgical and spiritual practices.

So there is great depth and breadth to this story. For more than a few angles.