One more time: Anglicans are a type of Protestant. A scrub jay is a type of bluejay. Scrub jays on the edge of their range may look a little like other kinds of bluejays, but they are definitely not sparrows. The reason Catholics take the elements of the eucharist so seriously is that they believe in the transubstantiation that Anglicans and other Protestants specifically abjure, as we see above. If the bread becomes the body of Christ in some real way, according to Catholicism, it's important that it be bread and not something else; the same applies to wine. And this is a specific litmus test as to Catholic belief, though certainly not the only one.Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.
The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is Faith.
To a Protestant, it's not the same thing, and faith is key, so it's OK to use grape juice, and if pumpkin bread is all you've got, have at it. For Abp Hepworth to claim that departure from the elements of the mass, and departure from the maleness of the celebrant, wanders into heresy, doesn't match his Protestantism, which he acknowledges, since he has styled himself a Primate of a Protestant denomination that ascribes to Article XXVIII. The statement of belief to which he ascribes, the Articles, makes him a Protestant. The Catholic Church, which he left, considers him a Protestant. In wishing to re-enter the Catholic Church, he acknowledges that he is a Protestant.
Certainly at the highest Anglo-Catholic parishes a subdeacon brandishes a gold paten as the host is distributed, such that if the host should fall from a communicant's hands, it won't reach the floor. However, since it's nevertheless a Protestant service, to which Article XXVIII definitely applies, this is only a formality, since the host has not become the Body of Christ in a real way. If you dress as an Elizabethan during a Shakespeare festival, it doesn't make you an Elizabethan. (And patens, with subdeacons, are rare indeed at actual Catholic masses.)
So then we inevitably come to the TAC bishops who signed the Catholic Catechism during a Protestant mass in 2007 as part of the Portsmouth Letter process. To the extent that the Protestant TAC bishops did this, I now have to agree with the ACA Chancellors: this was in fact abandonment of communion (which applies to clergy, not laity). If the Thirty-Nine Articles are the TAC's statement of belief, which they are, then at best it was an indicator of fundamental confusion for the bishops and other clergy at Portsmouth to sign the Catechism, and I would have to agree with Presiding Bishop Marsh that it's hard to know exactly what anyone had in mind in signing it.
In fact, I'd go a little farther: Marsh implies that the bishops intended to teach the Catechism, but not necessarily to become Catholic. But if they teach the Catechism, they're contradicting the Thirty-Nine Articles in numerous ways, whether they're Catholic or not, and not just over transubstantiation: the Articles also abjure Purgatory, icons, and the saints. They're actually quite Protestant. The bishops, from Hepworth on down, should have resigned their Anglican orders before signing the Catechism. That would have been the act of sincerity that they claim to have made. Instead, Hepworth fostered only ambiguity and confusion, and he's responsible for the result.
