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The Orthodox take on Anglican claims
Point of information: If an Anglican priest or bishop converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, is he (a) received as a clergyman, or (b) conditionally ordained, or (c) reordained?
If he wants to be an Orthodox priest, he is reordained outright.
Here is the Orthodox take on Anglican claims to orders, in a nutshell.
In the 1920s and 1930s some patriarchates (including Constantinople and Romania) and the Churches of Cyprus and Greece made statements that some Anglicans wrongly interpreted as recognition of their orders. What the Orthodox really meant was: IF Anglicanism as a whole renounced its Protestant heresy and as a whole — the Anglican Communion — approached the Orthodox for admittance into Orthodoxy, these patriarchs would ‘economically’ receive these clergy in their orders (in other words, without reordination). Interestingly the former metropolitan of Kiev and founding first hierarch of ROCOR, Met. Anthony, believed in this (more). Until that happens, the patriarchates said, they would continue to reordain.
Of course, now that Anglicanism has moved even beyond its 16th-century classical Protestant origins away from the true faith (Charles Bennison, then its bishop in Philadelphia, has been quoted as saying, ‘The Church wrote scripture; we can change scripture’), this envisaged corporate reunion never will happen, so the question is moot.
• History and Statement: St Raphael (Hawaweeny) and the Episcopalians
• Links to Orthodox Statements on Anglican Orders
• Letter from Fr Alexander Schmemann to an Episcopalian
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