"We're just beginning to talk about it and see what is emerging as to the need, the numbers, and to look at the personnel," said Bishop Geoffrey Jarrett of Lismore, who was received into the Catholic Church in 1965 after he had already served as an Anglican priest.
Bishop Jarrett, secretary of the bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations, said "considerable difficulties" remain for Anglicans who want to join the Catholic Church, especially for dedicated pastoral clergy with great gifts and loyal congregations that will collapse if their clergy leave.
"What's especially difficult is they live in parishes and are very attached to their parish church, which is spiritual home for Anglicans as it is for Catholics," Bishop Jarrett told The Record, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Perth.
"The thought of having to leave it and go out into great uncertainty is a daunting prospect. What the pope is doing is providing a welcome for them," he added.
Bishop Jarrett said property also remains a sensitive issue because there would "understandably not be a great willingness on the part of the Anglican dioceses to part with property," such as homes and church buildings if entire communities decide to join the Catholic Church.
This presents a challenge for Australia's bishops to cater to such Anglicans in Catholic churches, he said.
The Australian bishops will discuss these and other issues at their Nov. 23-27 plenary meeting in Sydney. Melbourne Auxiliary Bishop Peter Elliott, who was raised an Anglican, also will provide some perspective.
The worldwide Anglican communion has been in turmoil over some member-churches' decision to ordain openly gay bishops and bless same-sex unions.
Bishop Jarrett said there are Anglicans, particularly clergy, who have felt very strongly that "the Anglican Church that we've known and loved is at the mercy of secular thinking and political correctness."
He said Anglican thought "in great parts of the world" leaves no place for inheritors or descendants of the original Tractarian movement, a group of Anglican academics in Oxford, England, who began publishing "tracts" in 1833 about their church's failure to appreciate its Catholic heritage.
These Anglicans, he said, have "hoped against hope for so long that the Catholic understanding of Anglicanism would be the one that would in the end be the strongest; but now they see it's that which is the weakest, and there's no comfortable space let for them within the existing Anglican structure."
On Nov. 9, the Vatican published Pope Benedict's apostolic constitution "Anglicanorum Coetibus" ("Groups of Anglicans") along with specific norms governing the establishment and governance of "personal ordinariates," structures similar to dioceses, for former Anglicans who become Catholic.
Bishop Jarrett said Catholics "should be generous in applying Pope Benedict's way forward and welcoming all those who now make their way home, bringing with them many gifts of faith and grace which I believe will further enrich the Catholic Church."
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