Russian Orthodox Church denounces Church of England

Friday, 1st August 2008. 3:06pm

By: George Conger.

The Russian Orthodox Church has released a statement denouncing the Church of England, calling the July 7 vote by General Synod not to create legal safeguards for opponents of women bishops an abandonment of the true faith.

The decision taken by General Synod "alienates Anglicans from the Orthodox Church and contributes to further division of the Christian world,” the Moscow Patriarchate said in a statement released on its website on Aug 1.

The Moscow Patriarchate stated that it opposed the ordination of women to the priesthood as “such a practice contradicts centuries-old Church traditions dating back to the first Christian community. Orthodox Christians consider women bishops to be even more unacceptable," the statement said.

Tradition and the common witness of the church through the ages forbad any single church from taking a unilateral step in consecrating women. Bishops were the “direct spiritual heirs of the apostles” who had been given a “special blessing to lead the people of God and a special responsibility to maintain the purity of the faith and be symbols and guarantors of the church’s unity.”

The decision to permit the consecration of women was driven not by theological considerations, but by political correctness, Moscow said, “in our view, the decision of the General Synod of the Church of England” was “not dictated by theological or practical church needs, but by a tendency to follow the secular idea of sexual equality in all spheres of life."

This concern to appease the spirit of the age was unwise the Russian Church argued. The “secularization of Christianity” in an “unstable world” had led many “believers to abandon” liberal churches to seek refuge in those Christian traditions founded upon an “eternal and constant God” and possessing “firm Evangelical and apostolic traditions.”

On July 30, Cardinal Walter Kasper sounded a similar theme, telling the bishops at the 2008 Lambeth Conference “the ordination of women to the episcopate effectively and definitively blocks a possible recognition of Anglican Orders by the Catholic Church.”

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