The Vatican announced yesterday that Anglicans who don’t like their church’s acceptance  of female priests and gay bishops will be able to join the Catholic Church much easier than in the past.

Anglicans can now retain many of their own traditions  and “enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony,” Cardinal William J. Levada, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The new policy seems to be a move by the Catholic Church to capitalize on the divisions in the Anglican Church, which largely center on the issue of  openly-gay bishops.

Apparently, 20 to 30 bishops and hundreds of other people had petitioned the Vatican on the matter in recent years, the New York Times reported.

Read the full New York Times article here.

— Theresa Bruskin