Anglican Reunion will Create "Huge Cultural Shift" to the Extreme Left in Anglican Church

By Hilary White
ROME
October 26, 2009

(LifeSiteNews.com) - By focusing on the issue of married clergy in the Catholic Church, the secular media has got the thin end of the story of last week's offer of reunion from the Vatican to "traditionalist" Anglicans. The more interesting story, says Fr. Philip Powell, a Dominican priest based in Rome and a former Episcopalian, is the "huge cultural shift" in the Anglican Church that it presages.

Fr. Powell gave his analysis of the move in an interview with LSN, saying that despite accusations from the left and from some quarters of the Anglican Communion, it was not an opportunistic grab for numbers by the Vatican preying upon the Anglican Churches. The decision, he said, is purely a matter of pastoral concern and a provision for people in real spiritual "distress."

"It was a request that has been made twice now by the traditional Anglican community in England and Australia and this is a very pastoral response," said Fr. Powell, a popular clerical Catholic blogger and a graduate student in philosophy at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.

"Cardinal Levada said it best, this is not an initiative on the part of the Holy Father; it's a response." the rest