Whether To Laugh Or Cry

Diarmaid MacCulloch can dream on. There are problems with the Personal Ordinariate proposal, such as exactly what Anglican liturgy it is that Anglo-Papalists use in the first place, or exactly what these clergy will be doing all day, since they will bring almost no laypeople with them.

But the liberal Catholic tendency to which Professor MacCulloch refers is made up of people the Pope's age (he was never of their number, but he was a sort of fellow-traveller at one time) or only one generation younger, which makes them pretty old these days. Their position is not that of the Magisterium, so it is irrelevant, since that is how Catholicism works: unless the Pope, as such, says something, then who cares? The huge numbers of young men being ordained in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe are the embodied quintessence of orthodoxy. We should bring some of them over here as missionaries. Professor MacCulloch's hackneyed reading of the Second Vatican Council is simply bunk. And he is quite wrong that the Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical arguments against the ordination of women are anything less than complementary; indeed, they are mutually dependent, and find their full unity in the Teaching of the Catholic Church.

All in all, Professor MacCulloch might consider reading anything published in the last twenty or twenty-five years. Beginning with the Catholic feminists who now specifically cite the Anglican experience as the basis of their new opposition to women's ordination, and who do not know whether to laugh or cry at the sight of these Anglican women in their black suits and white collars, looking like drag versions of Catholic priests from the 1950s or the 2020s.