Living Still

Some variation on the Book of Common Prayer, previously pursued (if at all) within the Church of England, is "the English Catholic tradition"? Some concoction in the Sarum vein is "the Anglican Patrimony"? No wonder that, from the doubts raised by Stuart Reid on his Catholic Herald blog, to the outright hostility of Gerald Warner on his Telegraph one, the voice of Recusancy has not been silent. Nor will it be.

And for what? Almost every one of these clergy is accustomed to the Modern Roman Rite. Most of the rest, such as there are, could easily become so. Anyone still left over could celebrate the Extraordinary Form, as a few of them have already been doing. Every new priest for the FinF-based English Ordinariate, never what the Apostolic Constitution had in mind, is one existing parish without the priest that it could have had. And the number of parishioners thus deprived is most unlikely to be somewhere between 10 and 50.