Catholicity means we do not make our own rules. Our Anglican readiness to make new rules about who may be ordained a bishop shows that we have lost touch with the church in any part of the world. Our lack of concern for the rest of the world is a lack of love. Is it really all the same to us if we do kiss goodbye to the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church? For Rome, Cardinal Walter Kasper is saying that Anglicans and Episcopalians have put the movement we were making towards the unity of the Church into reverse because the started making new rules for Church order. We think we can make new rules, just for ourselves. But we may not make unilateral decisions for our corner of the worldwide church. The Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA) is only the Church when it is connected, not just to the United States, but to all the rest of the Church catholic – worldwide, historic and eschatological. In England, the Church of England is only the Church when it is connected to the rest of the Church not in England, and the Anglican church is only the Church by being connected to the non-Anglican Church. Our salvation is our being tied together, our connection, to these others, so that with them we make the whole universal body of Christ. If we loosen our connections to the rest of the Church, it is not just that we float away from the rest of body, but that the whole body starts to break up, and ceases to be that universal community of witness to God. By leaving we threaten the life even of those we leave, never mind what this does to our own life.
