Ordinariate Watch: Sheep Without a True Shepherd

By Robin G. Jordan

The Celtic monks in the seventh century used to offer this piece of advice to those planning a pilgrimage to Rome. “If you don’t take Christ with you, you won’t find him in Rome.” Their advice is as true today as it was back then.

Whichever way the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Roman Catholic media try to spin it, Anglicanorum Coetibus is a fancy Latin name for sheep stealing. The Church of England priests who are leading their flocks to Rome are accomplices in the crime, as are three former bishops whom the Roman Catholic Church will be rewarding with Roman Catholic holy orders on January 15, 2011. They are like hirelings whom a greedy unscrupulous landowner has paid to drive their masters’ flocks off the land of their rightful owners onto his own land, there to be marked as a part of his own flock. His own land is white with sheep, yet he covets the flocks of his neighbors.

The story of the stolen lamb that the prophet Nathan told King David who, coveting the wife of Uriah the Hittite sent him into the thick of the battle where he would be killed, comes to mind. David had many wives and concubines but he gratifies his lust with the wife of a loyal servant and then arranges the death of the servant so he can claim the servant’s wife for himself.

To make things worse, the Church of England’s chief bishop, the Archbishop of Canterbury, does nothing as the Pope’s minions prepare to drive flock after flock out of the Church of England into the waiting fold of the Church of Rome. He dithered when decisive leadership was required to deal with the crisis that the Episcopal Church provoked with its unilateral consecration of a bishop who is an openly practicing homosexual. He withdrew to his office in the Lambeth Palace while Massachusetts Bishop Tom Shaw married two leading lesbians in the Episcopal Church and blessed their union. What will he be doing as the sheep trot past his window, baaing loudly as they are driven into the stinking waters of the Tiber? Writing another undecipherable treatise? Preparing a paper for the next interfaith conference?

Sheep, after all, are sheep. They require shepherds for a reason. They are not known for their intelligence. They will overgraze a hillside if they are not moved to fresh pasturage. They are prone to go astray if they are not watched closely. A shepherd and his dogs live with the sheep. If he is not there to keep an eye on them, they will wander into bogs. They will become tangled in briars. They will fall into gravel pits and old mine shafts. Marauding dogs will chase them and savage them. Thieves will steal them. However, if the shepherd is not a true shepherd but a hireling, then he himself is also a danger to the flock.

If the chief shepherd prefers the comforts of a warm hearth to the cold hillside, what good is he? He is dozing before a fire when he should be walking the hills, making sure his fellow shepherds are tending the flock.

In the case of the present Archbishop of Canterbury he has shown himself incapable of protecting the flock from wolves. Indeed he is like the foolish shepherd who entrusted the care of his flock to a wolf. Now the Bishop of Rome and his henchmen poach the sheep at their leisure.

In this second decade of the twenty-first century in which English town councils ban Christmas, the Muslim call to prayer is heard from the minarets of English mosques where once Christian church bells rang; and English Christians are dismissed for wearing a cross, the present Archbishop of Canterbury may be a symptom of the times—an ineffectual chief shepherd who mistakes wolves for shepherds and cannot protect his own church from a historic rival that has sought to undermine the Church of England since the sixteenth century. They are evil times; worse things than wolves prowl the hills and slink in the darkness. While one is tempted to call for his resignation, his sudden departure might add to the problems of the Anglican Church rather than ameliorate them.

The sheep milling on the banks of the Tiber think that they will find greener pastures and safety in the Church of Rome. This is what the hirelings have been telling them. But the grass is just as dry, sparse, and tough on the other side as it is on this side; they will be sharing grazing with other sheep that have already closely cropped what little grass that grows on that side of Tiber’s fetid stream. They will face perils there as they face them here. As it is, they are already in great danger. They are in the care of hirelings!