It’s being polite to Hans Kung to call him a dissident. A better term would be heretic. He is still trying to peddle his garbage, but there are fewer and fewer takers.
As it happens, I grew up Episcopal, and had the good fortune to go to a Church School where the Headmaster was High Anglican and the chapel was indistinguishable from a Catholic chapel. I haven’t been back in many years, but I’m afraid things changed. They brought in women priests, gave away the beautiful, life-sized Crucifix that had been behind the altar, and even organized a pro-abortion march on Washington which brought letters of protest from some of us alumni to the school newspaper.
But it was a wonderful education. Even the Sacrament of Confession—technically not a Sacrament in the Anglican Church, but permitted (though not encouraged) by the Book of Common Prayer, where it is mentioned in two places: before the service of the Lord’s Supper, and before the rites for the dying.
I subsequently became Catholic, not so much because I thought that Anglican teaching was false, but because it did not seem to me to represent the Universal Church, and because it was so clearly a niche in a Church that also included a lot of strange doings.
In fact, when I assisted at services with the Cowley Fathers in Cambridge, they spoke of the service as “the Mass,” and they genuflected to the Sacrament. But they had to remove the Sacrament from the sacristy and hide it when their bishop visited their chapel from Boston, because he refused to genuflect. Rather than argue with him, they just hid it away.
One of the huge stumbling blocks to conversion for me was the execrable ICEL translation. It's going to improve with the amendments . . . but not enough.
I hope the Tiber-Crossers get together and have a couple of good 16th century scholars re-translate the Words of Consecration for the AU Rite. Talk about a new patch on an old garment!!!!! Send forward the reweavers!
Your story is emblematic of the last 30 years. Many Episcopalians have used their heretical teachings to leave the church altogether: Blame the church and stay home to sleep in and read the paper on Sunday mornings. Many others have sought the safety of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Moscow or some combination of the same :).
We must appreciate the problem of geography when the faithful of the Anglican Communion found themselves with nowhere else to go during the radical changes. In the same way, in my area, many drive 40 miles past the local Vatican 2 RC Church to get to the nearest Trinitine Church.
I was recently on vacation and, as an Anglo-Catholic, attended the nearby RC Basilica the Sunday I was away (no, I did not take communion). I remember thinking, Wow, this is a Mass?? In short, everything Vatican 2 has done to the Mass that Anglo-Catholics have not was sad to see.
As to sacramental confession, the local RC Church offers 30 minutes of confession on Saturdays for a parish of 1000 family’s. Hmmm, that is one long stretch of mortal sin! The Anglican BCP has sacramental confession in both the 1662 and 1928 for the sick (not dying). The Anglican and American Missal has the Confiteor. The oils, the sacrament, and sacramental confession are the constant duty of an Anglo-Catholic priest.
It is time for the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church to respond to our Lord’s call and His Holiness Benedict XVI is responding to God’s call for him.