COMMUNION AND NONCHURCHMAN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21569, 15 February 1932, Page 8

COMMUNION AND NONCHURCHMAN

BISHOPS’ RESOLUTION ANGLO-CATHOLIC OPPOSITION. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, January 5. Resolution 42 of the Lambeth Conference is designed to make England a “ special area ” in which non-Churchmen should be admitted to Communion. A report published by the English Church Union (the Anglo-Catholic organisation) in its official Gazette, describes the bishops’ proposals as “flatly contrary to the existing law of the Church of England.” The Union calls upon the clergy of the Lower Houses of the Convocations to abstain from assenting to them and to request the bishops “to reconsider them in the light of the existing faith and discipline of the Church.”

The committee denies that England can be regarded as a “ special area.” The total result of the concessions would, says the report, “be a very wide and sweeping removal of the fences round the Lord’s Table, more sweeping perhaps than their originators realise, and calculated to provoke doubts whether it was worth while maintaining such fences as had not been levelled by these resolutions.” The report proceeds: ;

Such action in ordinary English parishes would cause great distress to faithful Church people, would create much confusion in the minds of many, and would increase considerably the difficulties of parish priests. There would be a question whether, having gone so far, the Church should not go further, and admit allcomers to Communion without question or test, whether that of Confirmation or any other.

An important section of the report deals historically and in detail with the claims of the episcopate to dispense from the law of the Church. “ There is not,” it says, “ a syllable hi the formularies of the Church of England—Prayer Book, articles or canons—which can be quoted to show that the bishops possess any general power of dispensing from the observance of the plain commands or prohibitions contained in its laws.” It is suggested that the Evangelicals are likely to oppose the bishops’ proposals as strenuously as the AngloCatholics, though for different reasons;