The decision by the Catholic Church to create a formula to allow Anglicans to join the Catholic Church but keep some of their Anglican persona is a stunner.

Above all, because it represents the latest move in a Great Negotiation which has proceeded for some 500 years as between Rome and the English Church. Who answers to whom, and why? And who gets the valuable property portfolio? How best to effect this move itself has been the subject of learned theological manoeuvring for well over a century. 

But it is astonishing also because the current Pope performed this move in a crude but tough power-play sort of way.

He concluded that the current Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Church had lost authority to the point where the Catholic Church could ‘just do it’ by announcing both a plan and a quite new outcome, rather than painstakingly carry on haggling over it for, say, a few more decades.

Remarkable.

Try this beyond awesome line from the Times (emphasis added):

Meanwhile, the Church of England will recapture the moral high ground in the eyes of the secular, English-speaking world by consecrating women bishops. It might even liberalise its position on homosexuality.

Exactly.

The Church of England has decided – after generations of feebly trying to please everyone – to go for the Moral High Ground of the decadent and vapid secular English-speaking world which has no moral reference points at all and, indeed, specifically asserts that in principle no such moral reference points can exist.

Because it’s all relative, see?

But from that rather unlofty moral high ground vantage point rump Anglicanism will have a good but dwindling view as the Pope tidies up some loose ends to get the planet’s growing Catholic/Christian world in better shape to tackle the Muslim challenge.

Now that’s what I call a real Negotiation. With, say, another 1000 years or so to go before our distant descendants can decide who’s winning.

In the meantime, we have merely joy. And a forlorn Archbishop of Canterbury.

Yesterday I heard an exultant Catholic friend say that the Anglican Church now looked like a lollypop left in the sun on a park bench:

"Soon all there’ll be left will be a stick with a damp stain on the end".

Update: Have a look at the various links here at First Things where the Anchoress is following the issue much more closely than I ever can.

I like her reference to distinctions between the churches that teach the era throughout the faith, and those that teach the faith throughout the age.