Convergence

LONDON (CNS) -- A Catholic bishop said Anglican clerics opposed to the ordination of women bishops should not be received into the Catholic Church for "negative reasons."

Bishop Declan Lang of Clifton, one of England's leading Catholic ecumenists, spoke amid rising speculation that the vote taken by the Church of England July 11 to remove legal obstacles to the episcopal ordination of women would lead to mass defections of traditionalist clergy.

Bishop Lang, co-chairman of the English Anglican-Roman Catholic Committee, a group that meets twice a year to promote ecumenical projects and the joint study of theology, said mechanisms existed within the English Catholic Church to receive married Anglican ministers and even to ordain them as Catholic priests.

"When there was the ordination of women in the first place there were some Anglicans who applied to be received into the Catholic Church, and the same provision is there at the moment," he told Catholic News Service July 12. "But there is an understanding that you don't come into the Catholic Church for a negative reason.

"Those Anglican priests who were received into the church were received for positive reasons -- for example, that they accepted the teaching authority of the church," he said.
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Read the complete article Bishop says fleeing Anglicans must join church for positive reasons from Catholic News Service.

Just another article on the situation with the Church of England. Towards the end, the article looks a possible 'third province' provided by the Catholic Church for former Anglicans:

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Oddie, a former Anglican minister who converted to Catholicism in the 1980s, said that in the 1990s some disaffected Anglicans made contact with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, about a possible "parallel jurisdiction," and the future Pope Benedict XVI was said to have been sympathetic.

Such a parallel jurisdiction, Oddie said, would mean that the former Anglicans would be in communion with the Catholic Church but would be under the authority of their own bishop.
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The only question I would have on this idea is when all these bishops and clergy move to the Catholic Church, are they going to be bringing their parishes with them?

Regarding the previous post and a comment made about it, I would think that any kind of communion between the English and Roman Churches after some kind of crisis in the Anglican Communion would not be a bad thing insofar as bringing in elements that led to the Anglicans' current crisis of identity. The exact circumstances I don't care to predict, but such an event precipitated by a crisis I think would be an expression of a return to more orthodox (i.e. Catholic) doctrines) over all.