As Long As We're Speaking Of The Holy Father,

we may as well deal with the informal remarks he made to Anglican Communion Archbishop of the Southern Cone Gregory Venables, a good friend:

In Bishop Venables' words as published by the Anglican Communion News Service, "he called me to have breakfast with him one morning and told me very clearly that the Ordinariate was quite unnecessary and that the Church needs us as Anglicans."

Bishop Venables told the BBC News website that the quotation of him was accurate, but had not been meant for publication and had appeared on the Anglican Communion website without his consent.

He said he had merely made some remarks to some friends which he had not circulated widely, and added that he did not believe the remarks would reflect the future position of the Catholic Church.

On the other hand, I'm not quite sure what to make of the reactions from either the UK or the US Ordinaries, which are similar. Msgr Steenson posted this on the Ordinariate website on March 15, though it's not linked from the News page:

We have received a number of inquiries from those who are concerned about what our new Pope’s attitude may be toward the Ordinariates, occasioned by an anecdotal report from an Anglican bishop in Argentina. It is important to remember that our Ordinariates were created by an apostolic constitution, thereby giving them real permanence and stability.

In other words, he's saying something to the effect of don't worry, he can't touch us! I'm not sure if this is the message I'd want to be sending here.

And it's definitely worth pointing out that the Ordinariates were a special project of Pope Benedict XVI, as was mentioned once again in the BBC article cited above. We've seen that the idea was shepherded by Cardinal Law, leading up to a meeting with Benedict as Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993; its implementation, however, was delayed until Ratzinger became Pope. Cardinal Law is, of course, a highly controversial figure, and I'm not sure if it's the best thing for the Ordinariates to have been so closely associated with him.

The record indicates, as I discussed the other week, that the estimate that Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope, with Steenson in the room, gave Cardinal Ratzinger for the number anticipated to come into the US Ordinariate was 250,000. It seems to me that if the most optimistic actual number of those coming in as of 2013, 1600, is only about one half of one percent of the estimate, the Vatican may have eventual reason to reassess its position.

In addition, if we look at the Anglican Ordinariates as a Vatican response to the perceived split in the Anglican Communion represented by "continuing Anglicanism", it seems to me that it may have fallen victim to the wild miscalculation and overestimate of how many disaffected Anglicans are actually out there that we've seen throughout the history of the "Continuum". The only people who benefit from this are the bishops and prebendaries who are able to make careers for themselves in the ecclesial entities they're able to create.

Isn't this precisely the sort of thing that Pope Francis has been speaking against? Time will tell. If I were attached to the Ordinariates in some inordinate way, though, I'd be nervous, too.