The Other Direction

Congratulations to the three former Anglican bishops who have been named Monsignor. Meanwhile, there is talk of an Ordinariate for former Catholic priests in South America. The best that I can say about such a scheme is that "Spirit of Vatican II" types would not like the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, nor would it like them. It is of staunchly Evangelical provenance, has lately been profoundly influenced by Neo-Pentecostalism, and has extended its care to disaffected conservatives in North America. Unless I am very much mistaken, it does not ordain women. It certainly has no truck with genitally active homosexuality. Still, I suppose that, in that case, it makes more sense to create an Ordinariate alongside it than it does to create one here for people who have used nothing but the Modern Roman Rite for as long as there has been such a thing.

But the history of this sort of project is not a happy one. Few have flocked to the liberalised Evangelicalism of the Lusitanian Church or of the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church, the latter with its record of support for the Soviet-controlled Spanish Republic, although it is notable, as a curiosity, that there are people celebrating a vernacular, if Protestantised, version of the Mozarabic Rite, and that at least one such celebrant is a woman; so far as I know, the Lusitanian Church has never sought to adopt or adapt the Rite of Braga. But, as I say, extremely few people have ever shown the slightest interest in either. In the Philippines, American Episcopalian intervention has created an equally lacklustre ecclesial expression of frankly Masonic liberal-nationalism, with Unitarian leanings accordingly.

And now this, if it ever goes ahead. No doubt one of the last gasps of that strange thing, Liberation Theology: purely academic, largely imported from the universities of Europe and North America, fatally dependent on Marxism, never taken seriously either by proper Marxists or by the poor, and with little or no sign of surviving into a third generation.