Anglican Catholics and the experience of the Ordinariate

More than two years ago, Pope Benedict XVI published the apostolic exhortation Anglicanorum Coetibus, that allows groups of Anglicans to collectively convert to the Catholic Church while still keeping their Anglican identity.

It envisaged the creation of structures called 'Ordinariates' for returning Anglicans.

The first such Ordinariate was established last January in the United Kingdom.

One year after its creation, about a hundred of its members have come to Rome for a week, to celebrate the anniversary.

To date, fifty seven priests and three deacons have joined the Ordinariate, together with over one thousand lay people.

Two hundred more faithful will be received this year.

Twenty of the Ordinariate's priests are still being trained.

Mgr. Keith Newton, a married Anglican priests and father of three takes stock of this unprecedented experience in the relationship between Christian Churches in the West...

Read the rest of this interview with Msgr. Newton, originally published last week, on the web site Clerical Whispers.

Hat tip to Fr. Chadwick's "English Catholic" blog.

Hundreds more Church of England defections expected

At least 20 clergy and several hundred of their parishioners are already lined up to join the Ordinariate, the new structure set up by the Pope a year ago that allows them to remain some of their Anglican heritage while entering into full communion with the Holy See.
But many more members of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England are likely to defect following a critical meeting of its governing body, the General Synod, if traditionalists who cannot accept the ordination of women are denied special provision.
The head of the Ordinariate, Mgr Keith Newton, told The Daily Telegraph: “There are in the region of 15 to 20 people who I think will be coming over this year. These are ordained Anglicans who wish to petition the Holy See for ordination.”
He said they are likely to bring a “couple of hundred” worshippers with them in a second wave of defections, following the 60 clergy and about 1,000 lay people who crossed the Tiber last year...

Read the rest at The Telegraph.

The Receptions: Ruth Gledhill Radio Interview

January 1, 2011

Transcript from the PM programme on BBC Radio 4, 1 January 2011

Interview with Ruth Gledhill

At midday today a special Mass was held at Westminster Cathedral: the moment marked the conversion to Catholicism of three former Church of England bishops, two of their wives and three Anglican nuns. They became the first to take part in a scheme set up by Pope Benedict, allowing Anglican opponents of women bishops to defect to the Catholic Church. Some predict that these first conversions could be followed by many others, from up to twenty Church of England parishes, in the months to come. Ruth Gledhill, the Religion correspondent for the Times is with me.

Ruth, you’ve spoken to one of those who took part. What are their reasons?

They are responding to an offer made by the Pope which they believe is very generous. But their reason is that they believe that the Church of England, despite claiming to be part of the one holy, apostolic and catholic church in the Creed, has in fact departed from apostolic teaching, particularly over the issue of women’s ordination.

Will they be followed by many others?

Well there were many priests in the congregation at Westminster Cathedral today who are likely to join the Ordinariate. I think it will be a small stream at first; the question that nobody knows the answer to, is whether that will turn into a river or a flood...

Read the rest at Ordinariate Portal.

Hat tip to Mary Ann Mueller

Apostolicae curae today

Fr. Hunwicke, in a post that is redolent of his wonted incisive wit and learned analysis, has examined the position of Apostolicae curae today in the context of both ARCIC and Anglicanorum Coetibus.

The previous posts on this subject (this is the end of the series) have deliberately avoided going over the old questions in all the old polemical books and pamphlets. I have tried to edge into greater prominence both forgotten details ("idem caput disciplinae") and bigger questions of context, as well as historic developments since Leo XIII. I hope to have written enough to give some background to what Fr Aidan Nichols said in a paper which, most appropriately, he read at Littlemore (in 1993):

" ... the state of the question has shifted from an outright determination of the invalidity of Anglican Orders, in the bull Apostolicae curae, to the tacit admission, in the open letter from Cardinal Willebrands to the Co-Chairmen of ARCIC II in 1985, of a doubt about the invalidity where more recent ordinations are concerned. Unlike a doubt about validity, which has the (positive) presumption of validity as its background, a doubt about invalidity has the contrary negative presumption behind it, and so it does not license conditional, as distinct from absolute, ordination. However, those Anglican clergymen who feel morally certain of the sacramental reality of their Orders can draw consolation from the fact that, whereas the practice authorised by Apostolicae curae still continues (since the teaching of that bull remains the thesis in possession), the applicability of its teaching to their own Orders today is not unconditionally proposed by the contemporary Roman church." [Italics of the author.]

I would also contend that the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus points in the same direction. As you know, it provides that the Ordinary, even if only in priest's orders, may ask the Holy See for the right to wear pontificals ... well, actually, it doesn't say anything of the sort. If the Ordinary was merely a presbyter in his Anglican days, there is not the hint of a suggestion that he can ask for the jus pontificalium. It is Ordinariate clergy who were Anglican bishops who can make this application, whether they are Ordinaries or not. In other words, the right to seek a grant of jus pontificalium is totally unrelated to the status of a man within the Catholic Church; the right arises solely from the fact of his Consecration as a bishop in the Church of England...

If our Holy Father really does now continue to expect Ordinariate Anglicans to subscribe heart and soul to the complete applicability in current circumstances of the findings of Apostolicae curae, that Anglican Orders are completely null and utterly void, he has devised a most extraordinarily bizarre and counter-indicative way of manifesting this expectation. Come off it. Anglicanorum coetibus constitutes a deliberate and considered refusal to rub our noses in Apostolicae curae. If such an attitude is good enough for the most learned Sovereign Pontiff since Benedict XIV, why isn't it good enough for some Roman Catholics...

Read the post in full (along with soon to be posted and no doubt equally learned comments) at Fr. H's Liturgical Notes.

When compromise trumps apostolic tradition

George Weigel has a post on the upcoming trip of Pope Benedict XVI to England, and the difficult relationship between the Catholic Church and the Church of England. A highlight from his essay:

The Telegraph's sense of what has "preserved the church for more than 400 years" is misplaced, I fear. Elements of sanctity, intelligence, and beauty have been nurtured in the Anglican Communion for more than four centuries by the work of the Holy Spirit, who distributes gifts freely, and not only within the confines of the Catholic Church. Thus there have been great Anglican theologians and noble Anglican martyrs in the Anglican Communion, which has also given the world a splendid patrimony of liturgical music and a powerful example of the majesty of the English language as a vehicle of worship. None of this has had much, if anything, to with a "tradition of compromise."

Read all of Mr. Weigel's column in The Boston Pilot.

Traditionalist Anglicans split over response to ordaining women bishops

Posted: 8/6/2010
By Simon Caldwell

LONDON (CNS) -- A group of traditionalist Anglican bishops has admitted that Anglo-Catholic clergy are sharply divided over how to respond to the ordination of women as bishops.

Fifteen bishops belonging to Forward in Faith, the largest Anglo-Catholic group in the Church of England, admitted that the Anglo-Catholic faction of the church could not decide collectively what course of action to take...

Read the rest of the article at The Boston Pilot.

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet's September Pastoral Letter

August 5, 2010
by Christian Campbell
Electing a New General Synod

In my August Pastoral Letter, I said that I should continue to reflect on current issues in the September letter. Normally one looks for a different, and unrelated topic, but these are not normal times. We have seen the dissolution of the 2005–2010 General Synod and with it the dispersion of its ‘Catholic Group in General Synod’, one of the informal groupings in the Synod. New elections will take place shortly and the 2010–2015 General Synod will be inaugurated by the Queen in November. As happens every five years, there will be an inaugural meeting of the new ‘Catholic Group’ and people will be counting up how many are in the Group, bishops, clergy and laity, and what kind of line they will be taking. That much is predictable and the pattern for it long-established. The officers of the ‘Catholic Group’ will already be in place (provided they have managed themselves to be elected to the Synod) and the Chairman will already have a sense of the direction in which he will want to lead the Group...

Read the rest of His Grace's pastoral, posted in advance of normal publication times, on the blog The Anglo-Catholic

Synod vote pushes Anglo-Catholics towards Ordinariate

Wednesday, 14 July 2010
By Simon Caldwell & Anna Arco

The largest Anglo-Catholic group in the Church of England is expecting an exodus of thousands of Anglicans to Catholicism after a decision to ordain women as bishops without sufficient concessions to traditionalists.

Stephen Parkinson, director of Forward in Faith – a group that has about 10,000 members, including more than 1,000 clergy – said that a large number of Anglo-Catholics are considering conversion to the Catholic faith...

Read the rest at The Catholic Herald.

The Bishop of Ebbfleet's August Pastoral Letter

July 13, 2010
by Bishop Andrew Burnham

The General Synod at York

It is now 40 years since the Church of England General Synod came into being. It was an exciting new development, replacing an even more cumbersome system of dual control by Convocations of Clergy and the Church Assembly. The laity at last had a full and effective voice in the government of the Church of England. There were some safeguards in place. Certain matters had to be passed by two thirds' majority and there could be a call for a vote by Houses, even when one was not strictly required. That meant that there needed to be majorities in each of the three Houses, Bishops, Clergy, and Laity.

It was this last safeguard which torpedoed the attempt of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to introduce an amendment to safeguard the ministry of traditionalist bishops...

Read the rest of His Grace's monthly pastoral letter at The Anglo-Catholic blog.

Is this the End? (Of Catholics in the C of E)

Fr. Hunwicke writes:

Like those nice old London Routemasters, all of a sudden juicy bits of news arrive in convoys. That pert Ms Gledhill (did the naughty girl disregard an embargo?) prematurely blew the gaff on the refusal of the Manchester Group to envisage an honourable place in the Church of England for Catholics. In the world of secular politics, that obnoxious Blair redivivus David Cameron is advising the ABC to reform the C of E along the lines of his own 'transformation' of the Conservative Party: what a hoot! And how clear now is his New Liberal agenda to bully Political Correctness through with just as much determined brutality as any old-style Lefty. You won't catch me rooting for that tacky little crook-on-the-make. Under Cameron, the old idea that at least there were a few shreds of Toryism left in the 'Conservative' party has finally expired.

And poor Sentamu is getting a battering for his claim that Ordinariate members would not be 'real Catholics'. I think people should lay off him. The plain and obvious fact is that he is not very bright...

Read the rest of Fr. H's musings at his Liturgical Notes blog.

Ecclesiology: The True Stumbling Block for non-Catholics

Fr. Hunwicke has a great post that very succinctly deals with ordination and ecclesiology in such a way as to make clear that the tradition of male priests is a necessary reflection of the Trinity.

One Father
Rowan Williams asks whether, "when so much agreement has been firmly established in first order matters about the identity and mission of the Church, it is really justifiable to treat other issues as equally vital for its health and integity". And: "In what way does the prohibition against ordaining women so enhance the life of communion, reinforcing the essential character of filial and communal holiness as set out in Scripture and tradition and ecumenical agreement, that its breach would compromise the purposes of the Church as so defined?" Behind this surely lurks a question which, if we are honest, many of us sometimes have worried about: " How do we present to the world a gloomy prohibition against Women Clergy as being positive Good News?"

The answer is in Rowan's own summary of the new consensual ecclesiology: "God is eternally a life of three-fold communion; and if human persons are to be reconciled to God and restored to the capacity for which they were made, they must be included in that life of communion. The incarnation of God the Son recreates in human persons the possibility of filial relation with the Father ... etc". The Church images and embodies that divine life of communion in which the Father stands as as the principal of unity because he is the pege theotetos or its arche, the Source of Godhead...

Read the rest at Fr. Hunwicke's blog Liturgical Notes.

Spats

From Fr. Longenecker's blog:

Some of the criticism of the new Apostolic Constitution has been bitter. Liberal critics have attacked Pope Benedict for undermining ecumenical discussions. They say he has pulled the plug and insulted the Anglicans.

Why doesn't anyone point out that the Anglicans have been sabotaging the ecumenical effort since the mid 1970s. When the Episcopal Church of the USA was voting for women priests the Catholic Church said diplomatically, "Please don't do this as it will present a new obstacle on the path to Christian Unity." They went ahead. The list goes on. Virtually every five years since then there has been another scandal, another crisis vote, another issue and Holy Mother church has endured another slap in the face from the Anglicans...

Read the rest at Standing on My Head

On the validity of the sacraments and charges of "unecumenical" behavior

One of the things that has irked people who have written negatively about the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus which Pope Benedict XVI recently published is that it insists that Anglican bishops and priests be ordained. This does not have anything to do with the value of their previous ministry, of course; if their ministry was not considered to have value, then these Anglican clergy would not be given any special consideration as ordinands in the Catholic Church; there would be no dispensations from the canon on clerical celibacy. But the leaders of the Church must ensure for the peace of all the faithful that there is no doubt about the validity of the sacraments offered by these ministers within the Church.

But of course, despite this, there will still be the complaint of a devaluing of Anglican or Episcopal ministry.

All I can say to respond to this is that some Anglicans have hardly been "ecumenical" in their statements about Catholics. Lord Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury, infamously said in 1991, "The idea that only a male can represent Christ at the altar is a most serious heresy," thereby condemning both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches as heretical.

Now, we hear from Episcopal bishop of Washington John Chane, speaking about homosexual "marriage" that, "people who deny others the blessings they claim for themselves should not assume they speak for the Almighty." And so Bishop Chane dismisses from any true ministry not only the Catholic and Orthodox priesthood, but even Evangelical ministers who uphold traditional Christian teaching on marriage, and traditional marriage as it has exisited for all human history.

While I realize that validity of orders does not depend on a clergyman's ability to think clearly, it also needs to be kept in mind that this "defrocking" that some people claim the Catholic Church is practicing toward Anglicans clergy who enter the communion of the Church is far less insidious, far less public, than the one high ranking Anglican clergy have been visiting upon Catholic clergy for decades.

SEC

Notes
quote from Archbishop Carey from The New York Times
quote from Bishop Chane from Virtue Online

Fr. Hunwicke on "Facing Facts"

It is very important that we consider the exact wording of the Apostolic Constitution carefully. After all, God has made us rational beings. But it is even more important that we Anglican Catholics face up to the fact that we are at a historical turning point.

For most of my lifetime, the Ecumenical Movement seemed (I put it like that because it is arguable that it was already flawed and leaky below the waterline) to be going places. However messy things might be, there seemed to be gradual convergence. ARCIC did say some remarkable things; and, at the ground level, there was indisputable liturgical convergence.

The plain fact is that things are now wholely different. The Anglican elite has set out, knowingly, on a path of divergence...

Read the rest of Fr. Hunwicke's analysis of the current state of ecumenical affairs and of Pope Benedict XVI's initiative on his blog Liturgical Notes.

Attacks on traditional Anglicans prove pope's point

Thursday, Oct. 29 2009
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

The possibility that the Catholic Church's commitment to defending traditional
marriage and the tradition of an all-male priesthood stems from anything other
than bias, and that those Anglicans attracted by that commitment could be
anything other than narrow-minded, cold-hearted simpletons, never seems to have
occurred to many who pronounced publicly on this development. As in so many
other public debates over these hot-button issues, those making the most noise
about "tolerance" and "openness" proved themselves more eager to personally
attack their opponents as sexists and homophobes than to engage in substantive
debate.

There is nothing new about this dynamic, of course. In today's dictatorship of
relativism, such ad hominem attacks increasingly take the place of reasoned
argument. And the blowback can be vicious for anyone targeted by the
self-appointed tolerance police, whether it's a beauty queen who answers
honestly about her definition of marriage, a scientist who publicly objects to
experiments on human embryos or an Anglican attracted to the very Catholic
teachings on sex and marriage that our chattering classes so abhor...

Read the whole article in The St. Louis Dispatch.

Forward in Faith? Forward to Rome.

Fr. Phillips of Our Lady of the Atonement writes on his blog Atonement Online

The National Assembly of Forward in Faith is meeting in London. This group is comprised mostly of those who would consider themselves Anglo-catholic, and it's a presence in several provinces in the Anglican Communion. The galvanizing issue for them is the ordination of women. Obviously, they're against it. Of course, there are other issues that concern them, and they tend to be fairly traditional on things like the liturgy, their understanding of sacraments and ecclesiology. It was formed in 1992 and is really an amalgamation of several different catholic-minded groups within Anglicanism. Many, of not most of the members would have reunion with Rome fairly high on their agenda. Knowing that about them, I thought it would be really interesting to listen to the speakers, and they have the audio presentations available. You can listen to them at their website.
Frankly, I was disappointed. Yes, they called the news from Rome "historic." They acknowledged that some people might be interested in the Personal Ordinariates. But most of their talk was about derailing the push towards having women bishops in the Church of England, and protecting their place as Anglo-catholics...

To read the rest of Fr. Phillips analysis, visit his blog Atonement Online

Anglican/Episcopal Rift Prompts Restructuring Talk

by Stephen Clark
August 5, 2006

Tensions continue to simmer between the worldwide Anglican Communion and its American wing, the Episcopal Church, over the church's embrace of gay clergy and other policies that critics view as overly liberal.
The tensions, already brewing in recent years, began to rise again in June when the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori became the first woman elected to preside over the entire Episcopal Church, offending some conservatives who do not approve of women as priests or bishops.
from the Los Angeles Times. Read in full at the Anglican Use Society web site.