Three bishops from the Church of England held secret talks last week with Vatican officials allegedly regarding Pope Benedict XVI's open invitation for Anglican clergy to join the Catholic Church, according to the Associated Press.

The Rt. Rev John Broadhurst, the Rt. Rev Andrew Burnham, and the Rt. Rev Keith Newton, the bishops of Fulham, Ebbsfleet and Richborough respectively, held the talks in Rome with officials from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, although the content of the meeting was not disclosed.

Netwon told AP that the trip consisted of "nothing more than exploratory talks" and that no decisions were made. Vatican officials said that they had no information about the meeting.

Last October, the Catholic Church announced that they would be making official provisions to allow Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Church while retaining parts of their liturgical heritage.

The Archbishops of Westminster and Canterbury immediately embraced the announcement, calling it an ecumenical achievement of over 40 years of dialogue.

Other Anglican leaders, however, have seen the invitation, known as the Apostolic Constitution, as a breach of ecumenical protocol that comes at a particularly sensitive time in the Anglican Communion, which has seen sharp divides over issues including homosexuality and women clergy members.

The meeting comes ahead of a historic visit Pope Benedict will make to the UK in September – a move that has been praised by several Anglican leaders but reviled by other Britons, who have expressed distaste over the cost of the visit as well as Benedict's handling of the Catholic Church's recent sex abuse scandal.

Meanwhile, a former religion editor for Newsweek magazine has slammed the New York Times for their coverage of the abuse scandal, saying that the paper created its "own version of the scandal as if they had discovered something new."

Writing in an op-ed in Commonweal magazine this week, Kenneth Woodward blasted the Times for not reporting that Vatican prosecutor Jeff Anderson, who provided documents to the newspaper regarding the scandal, has received over 60 million in previous settlements from the Catholic Church.

Woodward sarcastically added that the Times should have given Anderson a "co-byline" on their stories about former Milwaukee pedophile priest Fr. Lawrence Murphy, who is a major figure in Anderson's current lawsuit aimed directly at the Vatican.

The former Newsweek editor also criticized the Times for elevating the scandal to front page coverage while keeping other similar scandals buried "deep inside" the paper, adding that NY Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who is a self-described "collapsed Catholic," is now "responsible for front-paging journalistically questionable stories that attempt but never quite manage to make the pope personally complicit in the clergy-abuse scandal."

"[Keller] apparently thinks that Jeff Anderson has handed over the ecclesiastical equivalent of the Pentagon Papers," Woodward said.