Ordinarily Speaking

The Archbishop of York's remark that people in England who joined the Personal Ordinariate would not be "proper" Catholics articulates what most of this country's Anglicans and Catholics alike think, if they think about this at all.

Theologically, they will be as Catholic as the Pope and full members of the Patriarchate of the West, the Latin Church, whose Patriarch also happens to be the Pope. Pastorally, they will be no such thing, but rather just another category of oddball to be avoided, or ignored, or never heard of, by normal Catholics, including bishops.

But this should never have been a big story in Britain, if it should even have been a small one. This is about India, South Africa and the Torres Strait, and to a lesser extent about America, Canada and Australia. The Church of England needs to get over itself: not everything is always about you. The prime mover in this has been the Traditional Anglican Communion, which even by its own standards barely exists here.

While it is possible, I submit that it is unlikely that this country will experience any great influx of Indians whose forebears rejected the committee-based, pan-Protestant ecumania of the middle twentieth century. Or of South Africans, including Thabo Mbeki, whose Methodist missionary heritage led them to a high ecclesiology and sacramental theology which in turn led them to accept Anglican Orders, but always with a separate structure, before they finally broke away as much as an expression of Xhosa nationalism as anything else. Or of Torres Strait Islanders, from the only place on earth where the TAC is the "usual" church. No doubt people in each of these categories already exist in London, but will they ever be sufficiently numerous to warrant even the one parish now maintained there by each of several Eastern Catholic Churches? In any event, they are strikingly different from each other.

And none of them bears much or any resemblance to the "Modern Rite, Traditional Ceremonies" liturgical life of Anglo-Catholics on this island for the last forty years. If those wanted to become Catholics, then they have been perfectly able to do so for nearly twenty years without any bar to their ordination if they were married clergy. They would have done it by now. But they would have brought, and would bring, few or no laypeople with them. Anglo-Catholicism is most established in centres of what is or was the industrial working class, with its tribal fissures that make submission to Rome practically impossible. Although they have their own issues in India, black South Africa or the Torres Strait, they do not have these issues in particular. However, they might very well have them in America, Canada or Australia.

There is also the very high incidence of homosexuality among Anglo-Catholic clergy in the West, and its normative cultural status among them and sections of the laity.

On the South African point, Britain is in fact experiencing very high immigration from white South Africa, such that both the ultraconservative Evangelicals of the Church of England in South Africa, and the diehard racial segregationists of the Afrikaner Protestant Church, now have congregations in London. The former would seem a much more natural ally than the Catholic Church for at least one TAC member, the Church of Ireland (Traditional Rite), a Prayer Book denomination based mostly in Northern Ireland, whose submission to Rome seems unlikely in the extreme.