IN EARLY JUNE 1999 I was deposed as a priest in the Episcopal Church. By the month’s end my family and I were received into the Roman Catholic Church. And four years later, I was ordained a priest under what is called the Pastoral Provision.

At that time I made the resolve neither to write about my conversion nor to engage in religious skirmishes on the op-ed page. Knowing that “informed public discourse” is an oxymoron, I had no desire to give offense to a church whose spirituality I loved (and still love) and whose people I had been privileged to serve.

Nor did I have any desire to travel the circuit of professional convert and recite my “story” as something of an over-rehearsed party-piece. Moreover, I have become increasingly allergic to a certain sub-culture that would turn the Roman Catholic Church into an neo-conservative ideology impervious to nuance and devoid of humility. (I confess that I did consent to one newspaper interview and a cable-TV program. But I did so with great reluctance and have lived to regret both.)

But the recent announcement by Rome of an apostolic constitution by which Anglicans — parishes, pastors and people — will be incorporated into the Catholic Church and still retain their ecclesial identity demands comment. Or I should say that the reporting of this news demands comment. For the foundational issue that has roiled the Anglican Communion (especially the Episcopal Church) for three decades continues to be obscured by the simplistic spin to which journalists, theological naifs, are inclined.

The basic issue has never been women priests nor even the ordination of practicing homosexuals. These two issues, as serious and divisive as they may be, are simply the more newsworthy symptoms of a pathology that has gone in and out of remission for some 400 years, and that was fated to return with a fatal virulence upon the demise of British culture.

The basic issue that has eroded the Anglican Communion is what has been eating away at its foundations for 400 years: how ecclesiastical authority is to be understood. Since the 16th Century, two very different understandings of authority have engaged in a tug-of-war within the Church of England and the larger Anglican Communion.

One understanding is that the church is determined and shaped by Catholic tradition. Anglicans committed to this understanding of authority have sought to be faithful to that which has been believed by Christians everywhere and at all times. And while these Anglicans would admit that a correct discernment of Catholic tradition is often difficult, they have always considered their church bound by this tradition.

The second understanding of authority, while often respectful of Catholic tradition, proceeds from the Protestant principle of private judgment. This understanding may (and often does) appeal to Scripture and the Holy Spirit. And as long as it was rooted in a coherent culture, this understanding seemed to possess a theological coherence of sorts. But when it is torn from the soil of a coherent culture, as has occurred over the last century, the roots of this understanding are seen to be what they always were: the occasional opinions of whatever happened to be the prevailing majority.

The first understanding of church authority is that Christian revelation presents us with an objective truth to be pursued. The second understanding believes that if there ever was a Christian revelation, it presents us only with an approximation of whatever God may (or may not) be. That such a house divided has managed to stand for 400 years is an odd testament, I suppose, to the power of British culture. But an ethos can hide incoherence for only so long.

And it is this incoherence that Pope Benedict XVI now seeks to address. Benedict is acknowledging nothing less than the integrity of those Anglicans who have always understood themselves rooted in the Catholic tradition. And, at the same time, he seeks to provide them with a structure by which they may be incorporated into the universal church, without having to jettison a rich devotional patrimony.

To reduce the Vatican’s proposal to ecclesiastical sheep-stealing is of course stupid. And to explain it away as providing a fire escape for those who have “difficulty” with women priests and gay bishops would be condescending if it wasn’t so simple-minded. But given that objective truth has long since ceased to be a concern for many (Anglicans and others), it isn’t surprising that Benedict’s proposal would be viewed simply in terms of one ecclesial corporation engaging in a hostile take-over of another.

Will there be a mass exodus from the Church of England? Probably not. The few Englishmen who continue to attend their local parish church do so more as a way of staving off the cultural chaos that now ravages English society than out of any confessional commitment. If anything, the pope’s proposal may inadvertently accelerate Anglicanism’s drift to becoming a global equivalent of the Metropolitan Church.

What of the impact on America? I suspect that its impact will be minimal. Within a mere two centuries Americans have become genetically predisposed to the Protestant principle of private judgment — including many “conservative” Episcopalians and, paradoxically enough, a large number of Roman Catholics. Besides, with each passing generation, ethnic Catholic parishes, marginal to begin with, have been absorbed by the larger church or closed. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine the Anglican Book of Common Prayer stemming the flood of liturgical mediocrity any time soon.

But the impact of Pope Benedict’s proposal is really beside the point. Truth has never been about numbers, and victories are always pyrrhic. It is enough for many of us that those Anglicans who have labored long after the Catholic tradition have at last been recognized by the church that most completely instantiates this tradition.

The Rev. David Lewis Stokes, a Catholic priest and formerly an Episcopal one, is an associate professor of theology at Providence College.