Comment on "The bestowal of episcopal orders — the case of the Anglican Catholic Church"
Published by ☕,
Clip source: The bestowal of episcopal orders — the case of the Anglican Catholic Church · Anglican Ink · Disqus
The bestowal of episcopal orders — the case of the Anglican Catholic Church
Today, the 28th of January, the Ordo calendar of the Anglican…
anglican.ink
Dear Mrs. Wassen,
I pray that this post finds you well. I do keep you in my prayers.
I will not list my academic qualifications and awards. I do not find it necessary to do so. The quality of my scholarly work speaks for itself.
I must confess that I find your recent contribution to this website to be most curious, especially in light of your public - and highly petulant and vituperative - withdrawal from our discussion on this subject on this website. Fortunately, your withdrawal from that discussion is a matter of public record. Readers interested in our discussion about this subject can see my recent article on this website, which, I am led to believe, has suscitated at least a moderate degree of interest.
In accordance therewith, I state that I do not find it necessary to respond to your contribution, since you have already publicly terminated our discussion about the subject of Anglican Catholic Church Orders. As such, I have no doubt that you would simply terminate any further discussion I attempted to have with you whenever the facts got in the way of your doctrinaire perspective.
Furthermore, I want to make it clear to all readers, that I respectfully decline to engage in any discussion with any public representative of a "jurisdiction" that removes clergy:
without presenting canonical charges;
without notice;
without warning;
without due process, and;
without recognizing the canonical prerogatives of said clergy and their right to a canonical trial.
Therefore, if any additional representatives of the Anglican Catholic Church decide to write papers in response to my own, I will simply refer interested readers to my own paper which I am confident will function as a sufficient refutation of their arguments.
I want to state for the record, with more than a frisson of dismay, that I find your paper to be devoid of merit.
I cordially invite all interested readers to print out Mrs. Wassen's paper and to read it alongside my paper on the subject. I trust that any interested reader would be sufficiently intelligent to discern almost immediately that my argument, carefully constructed after serving on the G4 Doctrine Commission for two whole years, is far superior to Mrs. Wassen's argument, which, for the record, appears to have been "written on the back of a fag packet,"* as one might say in Scotland.
I will certainly be forwarding my paper and your paper to the Prime Bishop of the Polish National Catholic Church. I have no doubt that our two papers will be of great interest to him and to his fellow PNCC bishops as they seek to discern the suitability of the Anglican Catholic Church as a potential ecumenical and communion partner. I have my own opinions in that regard, but I elect to keep my own counsel at this time.
Our theological differences notwithstanding, please be assured, my dear sister, of my very best wishes to you and yours, in Christ.
Father Richard Cumming
* N.B. "Fag packet" is the Scottish vernacular term for "cigarette packet."