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Ordination, Canon Law and Pneumatology: Validity and Vitality in Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2008

Norman Doe
Affiliation:
Director of the Centre for Law and Religion, Cardiff University1
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The subject of the sixth meeting of the Colloquium of Anglican and Roman Catholic Canon Lawyers in Rome 2005 was the Roman Catholic position that Anglican orders are invalid. The meeting employed a canonical framework to explore the status and terms of Apostolicae curae (1896) and the modern applicability of the canonical issues of intent, matter, form, and minister to the question of Anglican orders. The meeting did not examine pneumatological aspects of ordination. This article seeks to set alongside each other the ritual elements of the liturgy for the ordination of priests in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches in their respective canonical contexts. It proposes the value of a pneumatological approach for possible Roman Catholic recognition of the vitality of Anglican orders. A draft of this paper was presented to the seventh meeting of the Colloquium of Anglican and Roman Catholic Canon Lawyers in Johannesburg in February 2006, where it was favourably received.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 2006

References

1 I am indebted to Myra Blyth, Regents Park College, Oxford, to the graduates of the LLM in Canon Law, meeting at Magdalen College, Oxford, in September 2005, and to my colleagues on the Colloquium of Anglican and Roman Catholic Canon Lawyers for their comments on drafts of this study. An earlier version of this paper was submitted on the MTh in Applied Theology at Oxford University.Google Scholar

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