I am very glad that three former Anglican bishops have become Catholics. They could always have done so, of course, and then continued both their ministries and their marriages, although things might have been different for the one who is a former Catholic, even if, unlike a leading would-be Ordinariate figure in Australia, he is not a former Catholic priest. The late Monsignor Graham Leonard was married till the day he died.
I remain entirely baffled by the creation of an Ordinariate in England, a country for which this provision was never designed, and I must again point out that, since the Ordinary has to be a former Anglican, the whole scheme has a built-in obsolescence. It will have next to no lay following here, and will be populated by clergy who have been insisting on the Modern Roman Rite for as long as there has been such a thing. Why are they not simply being appointed to existing Catholic parishes, there to continue the ministry to which they are accustomed? Why do they even want to be in the Ordinariate instead?
Bringing us to the fact that applications for ordination in it are now to be referred to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. I think we know why.
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Yew, we know why ordinations are to be referred to the CDF: To bypass the English Roman Catholic episcopate, which has not been friendly to the concept of having Anglicans come into communion with Rome but keep their Anglican theological and liturgical conservatism.
ReplyDeleteNo, it is because of the very high incidence of homosexuality (and also of various theological eccentricities and political extremities, but mostly it is about the homosexuality) among Anglo-Catholic clergy.
ReplyDeleteBluntly, that looks like the reason to have an Ordinariate in England: to preserve, as the Act of Synod and the absence of women bishops previously did, a subculture defined by theological eccentricity, and by political extremism, but above all by homosexuality.
That was what killed the Roman Option last time. As Cardinal Hume said, "I can cope with married priests or celibate priests, but not those in between". A generation later, here they come again, "those in between".