So Let's Recapitulate:

I probably wouldn't be thinking this way if I weren't going through the third confirmation class of my life, but confirmation classes talk about the Church of which you will become a full member. Sacraments come only through the Church, and they come mostly via priests. So it's entirely appropriate that I should be seriously revisiting the related questions of what is the Church, and what is a priest. As it happens, I have my recent brush with the "worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion" as a way to organize my thinking.

The "worldwide TAC" is a good many things that the Church is not, and this, to my way of thinking, is important.

• The TAC is punctilious about exactly two things: the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women.
• It is not otherwise punctilious about the "priests" it ordains, or whose orders it recognizes. Which would you rather have, a woman priest who's been through formation in a mainstream Protestant denomination, or a male priest who hasn't even been to seminary, or a male priest who's left his mainstream denomination due to a scandal?
• By the same token, dissatisfaction has been expressed in some quarters that the Catholic Anglican Use Book of Divine Worship owes more to the hated 1979 Book of Common Prayer than the fetishized one of 1928. Sorry.
• The "worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion" has numbers in all Western countries that do not total more than four digits by any responsible estimate, but are probably at the low end of that range. The consensus also seems to be that numbers in third-world countries are impossible to estimate reliably, but TAC Bishop of Southern Africa Michael Gill has complained that his Catholic counterpart questions whether even baptisms by the TAC are valid. I go with the Catholic guy -- whatever the numbers may be, if even TAC baptisms aren't done properly, how can any TAC numbers be comparable with those of other denominations?
• By comparison, there can be no dispute that the real Anglican Communion has numbers in the millions, while the Catholic Church numbers well over a billion. Even Stephen Smuts seems to think that numbers say something, at least when he talks about his own blog.
• The most prominent TAC blogger, Stephen Smuts, clearly identifies himself as a TAC priest in his profile, and he ostentatiously displays the cross and the chi-rho symbol on his blog and in his avatar. However, as far as I can determine, he has not been to seminary and would not be ordained in any mainstream denomination, nor have his TAC orders recognized.
• As the de facto public-relations voice of the TAC, who frequently posts announcements from TAC bishops, Smuts also makes kissy-kissy references to Ordinariates and Ordinariate priests. However, he himself is completely unqualified to become an Ordinariate priest, his bishop has publicly denounced Ordinariates and Anglicanorum coetibus, and his denomination has purged the former Primate who is often regarded as the prime mover behind Anglicanorum coetibus.
• The founder of the denomination, "Archbishop" Louis Falk, has told several outright falsehoods, documented on this site. He has reversed his own position on the Portsmouth Petition and remained with his 25-member parish in the ACA-TAC.

Frankly, the TAC and those connected with it make me nauseous.