Where Does Ecumenism Lead on from Porvoo?

Tim Cohen in an interview said that probably it would be rather Jorge Mario Bergoglio than Justin Welby who became the head of a reunion. Rome disposes of more souls than Westminister.

However, when it comes to content, it is to be feared Anglicanism, which is further gone into apostasy, will take the lead, if not in all issues still dividing, at least in many. And Bergoglio coming after Ratzinger (in pseudo-papal state) is a step in that direction. A certain Calvin Smith said, accepting gay marriage is a step into apostasy. But 1930's Lambeth Conference accepting contraception is a step into apostasy. And Bergoglio seems a bit too cool with that. Have you heard of "Rabbit-Gate"?

A young lady who used to be my friend (she never allowed me to call her "girl-friend" and so I never did), after the remarks Bergoglio may have taken over from the Anglican Tony Palmer, remarked "what's w'wong with wabbits?"

Porvoo, in Swedish Borgå* assembles part of the Lutheran and also Anglican Denominations, I thought also Methodists and Moravians, but they seem to at least not be official signatories of the original document.

Signatories

1994

The Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church, The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lithuania, The Church of Norway, The Scottish Episcopal Church, The Church of Sweden

1995

The Church of England, The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, The Church of Ireland, The Church of Iceland, The Church in Wales

2001

The Lusitanian Catholic Apostolic Evangelical Church (Portugal), The Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church

2010

The Church of Denmark – The Church of Denmark voted in December 2009 to join the Porvoo Communion as a full member and signed the "Porvoo Common Statement" declaration on October 3, 2010.[6]

2014

The Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church Worldwide, The Lutheran Church in Great Britain

Observer(s)

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia, since 1994[7]

Knowing what I know of the Swedish back then State-Church, and of Justin Welby, and the development which somewhat belatedly drove Calvin Smith out of the CoE, it is pretty safe to say, the Porvoo Communion is basically a communion of apostates. If the Porvoo communion is joined by Rome, it won't be Rome pulling back the reins and telling "no, you actually have to believe in transsubstantiation and abhor contraception" - it is more like that "Rome" would accept Porvoo type statements on the real presence (but stated in more diffuse terms than transsubstantiation and sacrifice of the mass), and accept that anti-conceptive acts of divers types "belong to the forum of individual conscience" ... note, by "Porvoo type statements" I do not refer to declarations in the unifying document, which is worded in abstract, but taken at face value conservative, terms, but to statements like the member churches did in 1930's Lambeth conference or diverse statements by the Church of Sweden.

For instance, the Swedish Lutherans that reject Women Priests are not in the Porvoo communion ... "we" had Bertil Gärtner and the Free Synod, as well as the Mission Province - and I say "we" in inverted commas, since I used to be among these, before my conversion to Catholicism.

The people behind the Porvoo communion were neither Free Synod or Mission Province, nor the Anglican counterpart Forward in Faith. They were David Tustin and Tore Furberg** - the latter seems a surprisingly conservative fellow, born in Nagpur, and having four daughters, his successor in Visby having a connection to "the Foundation"** - when it comes to David Tustin, one is left wondering whether his two children were a kind of two child policy ...

But let's check the view on Evolution. I have trouble opening an Anglican document, so here is a quote (final words) from a document from CoS:

Enligt dessa föreställningar om så kallad ”intelligent design” kan man vetenskapligt belägga gudomliga ingripanden i evolutionsprocessen.

Dessa teorier kan ifrågasättas både från teologisk och vetenskaplig utgångspunkt. Teologiskt eftersom den likställer Gud med inomvärldsliga orsaksfaktorer. Vetenskapligt eftersom livets och människans uppkomst kan förklaras – och kommer sannolikt att ytterligare kunna beläggas – på ett vetenskapligt tillfredsställande sätt.

Here is a rough translation. I admit I used google translate, not because I don't know both Swedish and English, but because "gudomliga ingripanden" and "inomvärldsliga orsaksfaktorer" is absolutely not my dialect of learned or abstract language.

According to these ideas about so called "intelligent design" one can scientifically prove divine interventions into the process of evolution.

These theories can be questioned both from a theological and a scientific point of vantage. Theologically, since it is equating God to causal factors inside the world. Scientifically, because the appearance of life and of man can be explained – and will probably furthermore be evidenced – in a way that's scientifically satisfying.

How shall we break this down? Well ... first of all, Catholic theology usually admits that the First Cause (God) is not on the "same plane" as Secondary Causes ... but even so, He is "in the same chain" in the original wording of St. Thomas Aquinas. In other words, in any causal chain of contemporaneous causes, you will find a most causing and least caused one, and that one is in its turn caused by the First Cause. In such a way it could not have been caused by any Secondary cause instead, and while remaining itself a Secondary cause. This nuance is glossed over, so you can get a kind of Kantian dichotomy between the First Cause (Thomistic term, but here treated as part of the Kantian "numinal"***) and Secondary Causes (also Thomistic term, but here treated as part of the Kantian "phenomenal"°), so that the analyses never converge to any point where the First Cause meets a Secondary Cause, very unlike what St. Thomas meant with those terms.°° This pseudo-Thomistic and gnesio-Kantian (but crypto-Kantian) view of reality and knowledge is then used as a complete theory of knowledge from which to rule out intelligent design, as somehow "un-Christian" ... That's the kind of Swedes who sign Porvoo Communion.

I try to open a page in connexion with the Anglican statements.

Church makes ‘ludicrous’ apology to Charles Darwin - 126 years after his death
By JONATHAN PETRE, MAIL ON SUNDAY REPORTER
UPDATED: 22:45 BST, 13 September 2008
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1055597/Church-makes--8216-ludicrous-8217-apology-Charles-Darwin--126-years-death.html

The Church of England will tomorrow officially apologise to Charles Darwin for misunderstanding his theory of evolution.

So, in 2008, CoE, another signatory to the Porvoo Communion, chose Holy Cross Mass to admit Darwin was "right, after all" ... the one good thing in it being, they also document that 126 years earlier, the CoE was not yet all that apostatic. The Daily Mail article quotes an article from CoE representative Rev Dr Malcolm Brown:

The Church made that mistake with Galileo’s astronomy and has since realised its error. Some Church people did it again in the 1860s with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Meaning, Rev Dr Malcolm Brown was apologising for Samuel Wilberforce, a man whose father helped abolishing slavery by 1830 in England and all dependencies, and a man whose brothers, at least two of them, became Catholics. A fit counterpart to Antipope Wojtyla's apologising for a judgement by Pope Urban's inquisitors inspired by the judgement on the theory and book made by St. Robert Bellarmine. And on top of that, Rev Dr Malcolm Brown did not even have the courage to admit he was attacking Samuel Wilberforce. That's the kind of turning away from light to darkness that both the Porvoo Communion and its presumable partners in Ecumenism (most of them) from the Catholic side can be feared to involve.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Stephen of Hungary
2.IX.2023

* The city is both Finnish and Swedish, since Swedish speakers are more than 10 %, as you can see here, stats from 2021:

- Finnish: 64,12 %
- Swedish: 28,34 %
- Other: 7,54 %

** No article available in English, so far.

*** Numinal = postulated as necessary substrate for for instance moral or other transcendant statements, not observed.

° Phenomenal = observed or deduced from observations in a purely mechanistic fashion.

°° Some Neo-Thomistis have called the tendency to disguise Kantian thought in Thomistic terms "Aquikantian" ...