Ordinariate Watch: The Party Is Over

By Robin G. Jordan

Three bishops and three nuns bid farewell to the Church of England on New Year’s Day and were received into the Church of Rome. Their reception received much hoopla in the English media. They have become Catholics, wrote Damian Thompson in The Telegraph. The inference is that the members of the Church of Rome are the only true Catholics. Any other group whose members call themselves “Catholics,” including Anglo-Catholics, are imposters or poor deluded fools.

This development should not surprise Anglicans. It is a part of the realignment through which the Anglican Church is going. Since the nineteenth century and the Oxford Tractarian movement the Church of England and her daughter churches have had congregations and clergy that sought to be the Church of Rome in all but name in the Anglican Church. Whole parishes and in some cases entire dioceses were turned into little Romes. Masses, missals, and monstrances abounded. Now these congregations and clergy can be the Church of Rome in the Church of Rome. They can convert en masse to Roman Catholicism.

Where then does this leave the rest of us? We find ourselves in a church that has for the past one hundred and seventy-five odd years been sidetracked by a movement that sought to make its agenda the agenda of the Anglican Church. Its agenda was to make the Church of England and her daughter churches so much like the Church of Rome that the Pope would welcome the Anglican Church back into the Roman fold.

With the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus Pope Benedict XVI has signaled that is not going to happen. Those who have trying to make the Anglican Church more like the Church of Rome—or perhaps more accurately more like the Church of Rome in the nineteenth century—can stop. They are spinning their wheels. It aint gonna happen!

For some congregations and clergy Romanizing the Anglican Church has never been on their agenda. They have been led to believe that what they have been doing is what being Anglican is all about. These folks will have to decide whether they want to be Anglican or Roman. If they want to be Roman, the place to be Roman is the Church of Rome, not the Anglican Church.

Anglicanorum Coetibus also pours cold water on the notion of the Anglican Church as a bridge between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism unless, of course, you accept the idea that the role of the Anglican Church is to pre-evangelize and pre-catechize Protestants for conversion to Roman Catholicism. Some Anglicans may wish to embrace this role for the Anglican Church. Most Anglicans will in all likelihood not warm to such a notion.

Notions of the Anglican Church as a branch of Christianity in which disparate traditions such as Protestantism and Roman Catholicism converge appear in the light of Anglicanorum Coetibus to be as equally foolish. The willingness of some Anglicans even to entertain such notions is symptomatic of the identity confusion that Oxford Tractarian movement created in efforts to change not only what it meant to be High Church but also Anglican. Before the Oxford Tractarian movement even High Churchmen agreed that the Church of England and her daughter churches were Protestant. Catholicism was not confused with Romanism. This identity confusion is the real legacy of the Oxford Tractarian movement—the patrimony that its Anglo-Catholic successors will not be taking with them into the Church of Rome.

The creation of Personal Ordinariates for Anglicans in the Church of Rome and the migration of a number of Anglican congregations and clergy to such Ordinariates are not going to end this confusion. A number of Anglican congregations and clergy that hold to the teaching of the unreformed Church of Rome (as opposed to the teaching of the reformed Church of England) have no desire to make a new home for themselves in the Church of Rome. They will continue to invoke the saints, to recognize more than two sacraments, and to offer the sacrifice of the Mass in the Anglican Church. We are faced with the incongruity of a Province like the Anglican Church of Rwanda that gives the appearance of affirming the Thirty-Nine Articles in its constitution but in its canons adopts the doctrines, language, norms and principles of the Roman Catholic Church, affirming the dogmas of the Council of Trent. Closer to home the Anglican Mission, which is a missionary outreach of the Anglican Church of Rwanda, has adopted a service book that is a repudiation of its Solemn Declaration of Principles, which uphold the doctrine of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as the standard for any alternative rites or services adopted by the Anglican Mission and the Thirty-Nine Articles with the 1662 Prayer Book as the standard of faith and worship for the Anglican Mission. The canonical charter of the organization, like the Rwandan canons, incorporates Roman Catholic language, norms, and principles. The Rwandan canons, An Anglican Prayer Book (2008), and the Anglican Mission’s canonical charter stand in sharp contrast to Anglican Mission’s popular image as an evangelical and Low-Church organization.

The Church of Nigeria, the Church of the Province of Uganda, the Anglican Church of the Province of the Southern Cone of America, and the Anglican Diocese of Sydney are unequivocal in their affirmation of the historic Anglican formularies. While affirming the 1662 Book of Common Prayer the Anglican Church of Kenya makes no pretense of affirming the Thirty-Nine Articles. The Anglican Church in North America pretends to affirm the historic Anglican formularies but its affirmation of these formularies is not as clear-cut as that of Nigeria, Uganda, Southern Cone, and Sydney, and is highly problematical. It seeks to appear to affirm the formularies without really affirming them. Its canons, like the Rwandan canons, adopt Roman Catholic doctrine, language, norms, and principles. The most widely used service book in the ACNA is The Episcopal Church’s 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which has been criticized for its Pelagian catechism. The GAFCON Jerusalem Declaration and the GAFCON Theological Resource Group commend the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer. The 1979 Prayer Book, however, falls short of this standard particularly in its doctrine.

This is only a small part of the mess that those fleeing the Anglican Church are leaving behind them. I am not suggesting that they are entirely to blame for the mess. However, it is a mess that their spiritual forebears helped to create and to which they themselves have in their own way contributed. It is the mess that those who remain must clean up.