Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- The Vatican has set up a special structure to integrate disaffected Anglicans and enable the faith’s married priests to become Roman Catholic clerics, the Holy See said.

The new entity will allow Anglicans to become Catholics while retaining many of their liturgical traditions, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the chief Catholic doctrinal office, said in a statement released today.

“We have been trying to meet the requests for full communion that have come to us from Anglicans in different parts of the world,” Cardinal William Joseph Levada, the Vatican’s top doctrinal official, said in the statement. “The church wants to respond to the legitimate aspirations of these Anglican groups for full and visible unity with the Bishop of Rome, successor to St. Peter.”

Traditionalist Anglicans have threatened to quit their church in a disagreement with its ordination of female bishops as well as acceptance of homosexual bishops and same-sex unions. While some traditionalists asked to join the Catholic Church, others have threatened to set up alternative branches of the Anglican Church, which counts 77 million members worldwide.

The Vatican’s new structure for Anglicans, dubbed “personal ordinariates,” enables “the ordination as Catholic priests of married Anglican clergy,” Levada said, adding that historical “and ecumenical reasons preclude the ordination of married men as bishops” in the Catholic Church.

Anglican Comment

The leader of the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, joined the head of the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, in a issuing a joint statement on the Vatican decision.

The initiative “brings to an end a period of uncertainty for such groups who have nurtured hopes of new ways of embracing unity with the Catholic Church,” the clerics said in the statement today. “It will now be up to those have made requests to the Holy See to respond.”

The announcement follows reports in British newspapers last month that Pope Benedict XVI had agreed to travel to the U.K. next year, probably in September, in the first papal visit there since Pope John Paul II’s in 1982. Prime Minister Gordon Brown formally extended an invitation to Benedict when they met in February at the Vatican.

In July, the Vatican moved 19th-century Cardinal John Henry Newman, one of the most famous Anglican converts to Catholicism, a step closer to being declared a saint. Some media reports have suggested that the pope’s possible trip to Britain may include a ceremony in which Newman will officially be declared “beatified” or blessed.

Catholics in England

There are about 5 million Catholics in England, according to the Web site of the church for England and Wales. There are some 25 million Anglicans in England, a Church of England spokesman said.

The Church of England broke from the Catholic Church in 1534, after Pope Clement VII refused King Henry VIII’s request to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn.

“Throughout the more than 450 years of its history, the question of the reunification of Anglicans and Catholics has never been far from mind,” today’s statement said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeffrey Donovan in Rome at jdonovan26@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 20, 2009 08:18 EDT