[I]t's with some suspicion that I view priests, parishes and individuals who could not seem to "swim the Tiber" without an accommodation such as the Ordinariate to finally push them over. . . . if it takes an Ordinariate to bring you in, may I suggest you might still not have the right idea.There are actually a couple of other related issues here, too. There was already an Anglican Use Pastoral Provision, which is still in effect. But beyond that, the Ordinariates set up under Anglicanorum coetibus have been compared to the national Catholic uses in the US for groups like Germans, Poles, and Lithuanians -- all very good, of course; they're aimed at communities with strong ethnic and linguistic identities who want to continue certain traditions. But in the US, mass for English-speakers is in English at local parishes anyhow (which of course is why mass is in German or Polish or whatever at the other places).
So there are three official Latin-rite flavors of English use, and there may well be others, the Catholic Church being what it is. Having attended the ordinary form English mass for more than a year now, I can say that it's awfully close to Rite II of the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Er, what else are people looking for? Anglo-Catholic supererogatory fuss and feathers, e.g., fiddleback chasubles and subdeacons brandishing patens?
As I've said here before, this is a tough sell. Someone is going to have to convince me that the US and Canadian Ordinariate is going to grow much beyond 25 parishes with optimistically 1,000 members, which puts it roughly in the middle of the various "continuing Anglican" denominations in terms of size -- in other words, something inconsequential. Beyond that, a big part of the market for Anglo-Catholicism is among urban gay Protestant-Episcopalians, who are not going to come over to Rome anytime soon.
So the audience, or market, for the Ordinariate is obviously something other than just Anglophones. Nor in fact is it just ex-Anglicans who want married priests, since there's already the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision, with one major parish electing to stay with that regime rather than go into the US Ordinariate. All I can think is that those who most want the fuss and feathers in the Ordinariate are the snobs. Fr Kelley recounts the story of a lady at an Episcopal parish he served, who'd evaluate newcomers at coffee hour and explain to those who didn't meet her standards that she was sure they wouldn't be happy there; they should find another parish. So is the market snobbo-Catholics, the people like Mrs Bush who feel their church should resemble a chapter of an exclusive club?
I've got to say that I get this same sense from the man behind the curtain who indirectly transmitted this view regarding St Mary of the Angels on Saturday. Not only does St Mary of the Angels deserve to be rejected, it deserves to be rejected anonymously for unspecified reasons (i.e., blackballed), and it deserves to have this done snottily. And I return to the view expressed by Andrew Bartus, a highly favored Ordinarian, that the Ordinariate is for "white people". The only answer I can give for myself is the tried and true one from Groucho Marx: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.” If there's a white people's mass these days out in Orange County, I've got to say that I prefer the mass for everyone else just down the street.
Something's seriously wrong here, Msgr Steenson.
