The Association of Catholic Priests The Society of St.Peter and Paul

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We believe that Scripture is the Word of God and that he gave us the Church Fathers, reason and experience to engage and wrestle with them. In 2019 Michael Kelly, editor of The Irish Catholic disputed the suggestion by the ACP that ordinating married men and women would reverse the decline in vocations for the priesthood, citing the steep decline in membership and vocations in the Church of England and mainstream Protestant denominations in Northern Europe, all of which ordain married men and women. I might add that Fortescue, partly because he identified so strongly with the Eastern-rite Catholics, tends to be contemptuous in his references to the Orthodox. Objecting to the image of heavenly food in principle strikes me as very characteristic of liberal theology - the hungry sheep look up and are not fed, - worse still, they are subjected to lectures on how spiritual starvation is a particularly happy and desirable state which must not be disturbed by gross materialistic imagery about food, whose existence has been disproved once and for all by Hans Kung. How exactly are the merely baptised to ‘consecrate the world’ if they cannot see themselves as ‘consecrated’ to that task unless they opt for celibacy?

The Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) should expand its role beyond being a voice of reform and become an agent of reform in the church, its annual general meeting was told.

In 2012 Fr Brendan Hoban, co-founder of the ACP, wrote in The Irish Times "If ever we needed to speak the truth as we see it, then surely this is the time. The Catholic Church, under severe pressure due to a shortage of priests, was dealt a further blow last year when it lost two of its best-loved characters, Fr Kevin McNamara and Fr Con Cronin. This is not only false, it would actually aggravate it (witness the number within Protestantism) unless the root causes are taken care of. Anglicans are organised through a sophisticated network of dispersed authority, meting out to individual dioceses and provinces what to Roman Catholics is a surprising degree of autonomy.

I would like to share below a recent leader article, "Time to move closer", from the Tablet -- I am sure Brendan would not mind us sharing it as we are told it is already shared with the Church Times. So, here in Edinburgh, where the modern ecumenical movement was born, there was little mention of Church Unity this week -- or, at least, I didn't hear much mention of it. Askel McThurkill: If you have a problem, BOM, with anything on this forum, you can make your case on the thread and not here in the shout box. The Society of Catholic Priests ( SCP) is a religious society of clergy in the Anglican Communion which draws its membership from Anglicans who consider themselves a part of the liberal Anglo-Catholic tradition.Writing in The Catholic World Report, founder of the Iona Institute and conservative columnist David Quinn [40] described it as a "sub-section of priests who want the Catholic Church to adopt the failed project of liberal Protestantism.

In the light of negative reactions to the Anglican introduction of same-sex blessings, and the Vatican’s publication of Fiducia Supplicans lifting the prohibition of the same, a cynic might observe that many in the Church do not wish to exercise the freedoms that they are offered – or, more precisely, do not wish others to exercise those freedoms. This intervention’, they say, ‘is unfair, unwarranted and unwise’ because, contrary to the claims of ‘some reactionary fringe groups’, the ACP is not ‘a small coterie of radical priests with a radical agenda’. If you look at today’s report of new dissidence in Austria, you’ll see yet another example of the Modernist abuse of the Second Vatican Council.

Traditionally, the Catholic arm of the Church has been at the forefront of serving and defending the poor and we have strong connections with parishes in disadvantaged communities. As it is the majority view among priests sees the ACP as radical and extreme, the word “soreheads” was mentioned at our meeting.