Putting The Ordinary Into Ordinariate

I am writing here about the Ordinariate in this country. The ones in, especially, India, South Africa and the Torres Strait are very different stories, and I look forward to welcoming their, among so very many other people's, missionaries to these shores.

I wrote yesterday that, at least in its early years, the Ordinariate might well ordain about as many men as all the English and Welsh dioceses put together. But those priests will be ministering to almost no one, the whole thing will be not much more than a clerical society, and the recruitment of the five Bishops of Nowhere pretty much sums up the entire project. Only David Silk has ever been a diocesan bishop, and the much greater homogeneity of Australian dioceses is such that he has been only marginally less a bishop to the Anglo-Papalist ghetto than the other four. Only John Broadhurst has ever been a bishop in any sense within the normal English diocesan structure, and even then only under a highly exceptional provision.

But if there are going to be that many Ordinariate priests knocking about, however small their flocks (and therefore however much time they might have on their hands), then we need to be very, very, very much on our guard. Most people's "problem with Anglo-Catholicism" is the homosexuality and worse, and that should not be underestimated. But there are also the widespread universalism, the kenoticism (with its underlying surrender to Biblical criticism), the brevity of clerical formation, the neglect of Scholasticism, the political extremes of Left and Right, the pathological nostlagia, the contrived eccentricity, and the use of church life as a means of opting out of the wider community.

It is difficult to avoid the sense that the unwillingness to join "normal" Catholic dioceses and parishes is precisely the unwillingness to give up these features, including the universalist and kenotic heresies, of which the latter, at least, touches on Our Lord's permanently normative and determinative question, "Who do you say that I am?" Of course, our own traditionalist subculture is also not without its right-wing extremism, its pathological nostalgia, its contrived eccentricity, its use of church life as a means of opting out of the wider community, and its homosexuality and worse.

Substitute hippy cod-Marxism (Anglo-Catholic Marxists are the real thing) for the first of those, and the Sixties and Seventies for the Fifties or before in the second case, and every parish has people just like that. The Ordinariate will be full of familiar enough Catholics with doctrinal, political, sexual and other deviations of various kinds. But most of them will be ordained, and they will be a very high proportion of those who are. Be warned.

That, moreover, is before we come to that fairly unlikely phenomenon, people who were born and raised in the Ordinariate. What makes anyone think that they would be any more orthodox than other cradle Catholics of the same generation? The Liturgy? Leaving aside what that will or will not be, I ask in all sincerity, and not as a rhetorical question, whether the Eastern Rite Catholics concentrated in certain cities of Western Europe, the Americas and Australia are any more orthodox than their Latin Rite neighbours, workmates and contemporaries? For that matter, is there any such difference between Latins and Melkites in the Holy Land, and Latins and Syro-Malabar or Syro-Malankara Catholics in India, for example? I really do only ask.