Ordinariate Watch: Recent Articles on the Anglican Ordinariate

English bishops stalled earlier outreach to Anglicans, journalist reports

Reflecting on the ordinariates that are being established to welcome Anglicans into the Catholic Church, William Oddie of London’s Catholic Herald reports that a similar accommodation could have been reached in the 1990s, if not for the opposition of many English bishops.

Oddie recalls that with an agreement on the horizon, the English hierarchy resisted accepting Anglicans. The late Pope John Paul II asked, “what are the English bishops afraid of?” Oddie reports, while then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger added his query: “Why are the English bishops so un-apostolic?”

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American Anglicans ready to go when Ordinariate is established

For more than 30 years, groups of American Anglicans have prayed, labored and sacrificed to come home to Rome and live out their Catholicity within the Bark of Peter. A crack in the door was opened when Pope John Paul II created the Pastoral Provision, which allowed for married Episcopal priests to convert to Roman Catholicism. Following more theological training, they could then be ordained Catholic priests and live out their lives and ministries in the Catholic Church.

More than 100 Anglican and Episcopal priests took the Pope up on his unique offer. Within three decades several vibrant Anglican Use Catholic parishes were established and continue to grow in numbers.

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The Ordinariate will help reconnect the English Church to its medieval roots

In the early 1990s, when the former bishop of London and a group of other prominent Anglo-Catholics were in negotiation with a group of Catholic bishops – over the possibility of Anglicans being received into the Church in parish-based groups, rather than as unconnected individuals – the Tablet surmised what Pope Paul could have meant by his aspiration that an Anglican “patrimony” might be “united not absorbed” into the Catholic Church.

The Tablet summarised what the Anglicans concerned were hoping to bring into the Roman Catholic Church: it was, the paper thought, “their widely based evangelistic expertise, their English liturgical style (rather than an “English Rite” which hardly exists in reality), and their tradition of lay involvement”. The Tablet, as might have been expected, got it wrong. The tradition of lay involvement as it had evolved within Anglicanism – bringing in its train endless political activism (often highly divisive) surrounding elections to parochial church councils and diocesan and General Synods, all with their multiple layers of endless bureaucracy – was actually part of what they wanted to leave behind.

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Many Catholic bishops displeased with Anglican ordinariate: Bishop Wright

Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright, a leading biblical scholar, has told the Church of Ireland Gazette that several Catholic bishops in England are unhappy with the ordinariate structure developed by Pope Benedict to serve the pastoral needs of Anglicans who wish to preserve their traditions while entering into full communion with the Holy See.

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