Another slip-up in the Vatican.

Oops.

From the Tablet:

ROME (CNS) — A “breakdown in communication” led to permission being given to a group of Anglican clergy to celebrate the Eucharist in Rome’s Basilica of St. John Lateran, said Auxiliary Bishop Guerino Di Tora of Rome, vicar for the basilica’s chapter.

Anglican Bishop Jonathan Baker of Fulham, a suffragan bishop with responsibility for Anglo-Catholic parishes in the dioceses of London and Southwark that have requested not to be served by a woman priest or bishop, celebrated the liturgy April 18 as part of a conference in Rome for Anglo-Catholic clergy.

That is a serious violation, especially because Bishop Baker not only is divorced and remarried, he is rumored to be a Freemason, strictly taboo in Holy Church, which considers Freemasonry an enemy of Christianity (though that didn’t stop Mozart and Haydn, both observant Catholics, from joining a Masonic lodge in Vienna).

Ed Condon of the Pillar has some guesses how this mishap could have occurred.

Having asked around a fair bit, both in the U.K. and Rome, the best I have gleaned is that it seems likely the Anglican group presented itself to the basilica as a group of clergy on pilgrimage from the “Church of England,” rather than “Anglican Communion,” terminology certainly open to misunderstanding to non-native English speakers.

They might have even described themselves as “Anglo-Catholics,” leaving Italo-Catholics to conclude they belonged to the fully Catholic ordinariate for ex-Anglicans, rather than to the wing of the Anglican Communion which happens to like incense and nice vestments.

In other words, it really was a “misunderstanding,” which to this writer borders on the comical. What I  do not understand however is, since the celebration of the “mass” by the Anglicans must have taken a good long time (as a former Anglo-Catholic I can attest to their length), it’s surprising no one in the Vatican became aware of what was was going on in the basilica. Additionally, there would have been striking differences from the usual Catholic Mass, they being:

1) The celebrant and servers wore beautiful vestments which the Catholic Church shucked years ago, replacing them with those horrid smocks most clergy now wear;

2) While the mass was celebrated in the vernacular, English, it likely was the gorgeous Cranmerian English from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, rather than the bland, and uninspiring English Catholics must sit through every Sunday.

Didn’t anyone from the Vatican step into the church while the Anglicans were celebrating their mass? If he had, for the reasons above he would have instantly recognized something was very wrong and called a halt to it immediately.

Thanks to William J. Tighe.