This meeting is mentioned in a book review by Fr Allan Hawkins, retired priest of the St Mary the Virgin Anglican Use parish in Arlington, TX:
[A] further, very important initiative was undertaken in 1993. In October of that year, Bishop Clarence Pope, then-Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth, went to Rome with Cardinal Bernard Law, then-Archbishop of Boston and ecclesiastical delegate for the Pastoral Provision, to meet with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They took with them a preparatory document, drawn up by two noted Anglican theologians, Doctor Wayne Hankey and Father Jeffrey Steenson.This document, of course, predates the TAC's Portsmouth Letter by 14 years, and it's significant that one of its authors is the current US Ordinary, Jeffrey Steenson. A Letter to the Editor in the UK Catholic publication The Tablet in 1997 (not available on the web) by the same Wayne Hankey mentioned above gives a further history of this initiative: then-Cardinal Ratzinger approved the proposal and brought it up informally with John Paul II. John Paul supported it, but indicated it would need the approval of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which Cardinal Ratzinger was then Prefect.
The CDF, according to the Hankey letter-to-the-editor, opposed the proposal, even though Ratzinger was in favor. In order to prevent an outright "no" vote, the matter was dropped. However, I believe that this proposal contained effectively the outline of what would become Anglicanorum coetibus, and we may surmise that it basically sat in Ratzinger's desk until, as Pope Benedict XVI, he could issue it in 2009.
It's worth pointing out that an account of the meeting that I've seen notes that Ratzinger asked Bishop Pope, then-Fr Steenson, and the others for an estimate of how many Episcopalians would come over to the proposed body (clearly sketched out in the proposal as a personal ordinariate) if it were established. Bishop Pope, after some hemming and hawing, gave the number as 250,000. The actual number we've seen, in the 18 months since the actual erection of the Ordinariate, has been more like 1,000.
While this is only half the 500,000 estimate that Archbishop Hepworth gave for the members of the Traditional Anglican Communion who would come over, it's nevertheless clearly off by several orders of magnitude, and it's simply the difference between meaningful and insignificant; worthy of a Pope's attention or a waste of his time. It's worth noting, too, that if Bishop Pope and Msgr Steenson gave a number of 250,000 and Pope Benedict added to this number Hepworth's estimate of 500,000, he might have had the impression that worldwide, Anglican ordinariates could number well on their way to a million.
