A Vatican plan to receive disaffected Anglicans into the Catholic Church while keeping much of their liturgy and a married priesthood, shows the changing fault lines within global Christianity. But it will likely have little impact in Pittsburgh.

The plan announced yesterday would allow groups of Anglicans to join new non-geographic dioceses, called "personal ordinariates," usually headed by former Anglicans.

It got a tepid response from the Episcopal Church and a welcome from the Anglican Church in North America, the group formed in June by 100,000 conservative former Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans.

In Charleroi, Bishop William Ilgenfritz of the Missionary Diocese of All Saints for Anglo-Catholics in the new Anglican Church in North America, said there may be some interest in his 13 parishes, "but I don't think it's going to be a complete hemorrhage."

The personal ordinariates will have only celibate bishops. That tradition is shared with Orthodoxy, and is crucial to Vatican efforts toward unity with those churches.

But "even if I were single it wouldn't look attractive to me. If I believed everything that the Roman Catholic Church teaches as dogma, I would be one and I would have been one years ago," Bishop Ilgenfritz said.

The 80 million-member global Anglican Communion is an alliance of churches rooted in the Church of England, including the Episcopal Church. Its conservative side has three major wings. One resembles evangelical Presbyterianism, one resembles Pentecostalism and one closely resembles the Catholic Church, from which the Church of England broke in the 16th century.

The three are often in tension, particularly over women's ordination, which most Anglo-Catholics don't accept. In June, 100,000 conservative former Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans from all three wings united into the Anglican Church in North America, which hopes to be recognized by the Anglican Communion. It allows diocesan option on female priests, but doesn't permit female bishops.

The head of that body is Archbishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, who welcomed the Vatican plan. "We rejoice that the Holy See has opened this doorway, which represents another step in the growing cooperation and relationship between our churches," he said.

"While we believe that this provision will not be utilized by the great majority of the Anglican Church in North America's bishops, priests, dioceses and congregations, we will surely bless those who are drawn to participate in this momentous offer."

Most local Episcopalians who might be interested are thought to have already left the Episcopal Church with Archbishop Duncan. Bishop Kenneth Price, Jr. of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh took a benign view of the plan, saying that it continues a quiet pattern of many years.

"This is another example of how people may come together. In this world there are people hungering for all different directions in their journey of faith. If someone wants to go there, that's their choice," he said.

Official reaction from the ecumenical office of The Episcopal Church was muted, saying "we have received the Vatican's statement" and were in dialogue with the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury in England.

The Vatican also released a joint statement from Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the global Anglican Communion and Archbishop Vincent Nichols of the Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster, England, saying the effort shouldn't harm the relationship between the two Christian churches.

"Without the dialogues of the past 40 years, this recognition would not have been possible," they said.

In 1982 Pope John Paul II permitted married Anglican priests to become Catholic priests. There have been parishes or other groups who have become Catholic, with permission to use many Anglican traditions. Since 1994, four Episcopal bishops in the United States have become Roman Catholics, according to conservative Anglican blogger David Virtue. By the count of Episcopal News Sevice, that's double the number over the prior 200 years.

At least one large Anglo-Catholic body, the Australia-based Traditional Anglican Communion, is known to have asked the Vatican for permission to become Catholic but maintain its traditions. About 5,000 of its 400,000 members are from the United States.

Vatican officials said yesterday that they were "responding to many requests" from Anglican clergy and laity "in different parts of the world."

The new church bodies are to be modeled after military ordinariates, non-geographical dioceses that exist in many nations to care for members of the military.

Its "ordinaries" -- church jargon for a bishop with full authority -- will "usually be appointed from among former Anglican clergy" and may be either an unmarried bishop or a married priest. Candidates for ordination will study at Catholic seminaries, but may live at separate houses of spiritual formation where they can learn their own traditions.

Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, a past chairman of both the doctrine committee and the liturgy committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said much remained unclear.

"There are concerns that will need to be resolved," he said.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops would be involved in setting up any ordinariates here, he said, and Anglican priests must still be re-ordained to become Catholic priests. But yesterday's announcement wasn't clear whether the married priesthood is only for a first generation of converts.

"It's not specified whether the expectation is for future priests to be married or unmarried," he said. Now, if an Episcopal priest becomes a Catholic priest and his wife dies, he must be celibate.

He doubts that former Catholic priests who have become Anglican priests will be accepted back.

"I think Rome would be resistant -- and I'm sure they've thought through that," he said.

The situation parallels Eastern Catholic Churches, based mostly in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, that are under papal authority but follow Orthodox practices. In their native lands they have married priests. But in 1929, at the request of Latin bishops in the United States, the Vatican banned the married priesthood for Eastern Churches in the western hemisphere. At the time many Eastern Catholics here defected to Orthodoxy, and in recent years the Eastern Churches have sought a return to a global married priesthood.

Because of Anglican converts, "there are more married Roman Catholic priests in this country than there are married Eastern Catholic priests," said Bishop John Kudrick of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Parma, Ohio, who sees the Anglican development as a positive.

"This confirms our understanding of the benefits of a married clergy," he said.

Monsignor Russell Duker, vicar general of the Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy of Pittsburgh, Rome now approves the ordination of married men here case-by-case.

"It's being done," he said. "So I don't see any problem that they would have incorporating this [Anglican body] into the church."

Historically the Episcopal Church has received more converts from Catholicism than vice versa, including clergy.

The Rev. Daniel Crawford of St. Thomas-in-the Field, Richland, is a former Catholic monk who became an Episcopal priest and is now in the Anglican diocese.

"It's a stunning development" because the Vatican made a global response to isolated requests, he said. But he wasn't shocked because "this pope has been very, very interested and concerned about developments in the Anglican world."

In 2003, two years before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent greetings to a national gathering of conservative Episcopalians in Texas that later evolved into the Anglican Church in North America. He assured them of his "heartfelt prayers."

In his 2008 visit to the United States, Pope Benedict spoke to ecumenical representatives in New York, offering a critique that paralleled the concerns of conservatives in the Episcopal Church and other Protestant bodies.

"Fundamental Christian beliefs and practices are sometimes changed within communities by so-called prophetic actions" that go against biblical teaching and tradition, he said.

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