It was the Angelicans, of course, who signed the Portsmouth Letter in a body, except for a couple who'd wandered in and didn't know what was really going on. The mistake was compounded when Pope Benedict inadvertently misspelled Anglicanorum coetibus, when if he'd spelled it correctly to refer to the little groups of Angelicans, everything would have worked out as it should.
I think my insight into the nature of Angelicans goes farther. Angelicans want to hitchhike on the prestige of seeming Catholic, they wear Roman clericals, and they're certainly insistent on being addressed as "Father" (vid Smuts and Chadwick), but when you scratch the surface, they're in fact violently anti-Catholic.
This was an issue that I worried was never adequately addressed when I was going through catechism at St Mary of the Angels. Among the parish stalwarts at the time was a highly influential political consultant and operator who was one of the people largely responsible for turning California into a blue state, using issues like abortion and same-sex marriage to get his clients elected. Another was a creative writing teacher who wasted much time in parish meetings insisting that the language in resolutions be gender-neutral -- I assume she seethed every time she heard "our Father" instead of "our Parent".
Yet these people and others insisted they are as Catholic as anyone. I keep thinking "Angelican" is a much better term. This has got me wondering more seriously if the Holy Spirit was in fact operating via the 2007 Portsmouth conference, because it brought out the issue of who was sincerely claiming to be Catholic and who was not. Clearly a faction -- probably a sizeable majority -- of those at Portsmouth were expecting that the Holy Father would, if he responded at all, simply issue some sort of blanket admission of the Angelicans into the Catholic communion.
They could operate as before, picking their doctrines as they chose, ignoring whatever they didn't like. They could have hitchhiked all the more easily on prestige that wasn't theirs. The good thing about the aftermath of Anglicanorum coetibus is it showed the Angelicans up for who they are.
At the beginning of this Lent, a visitor e-mailed me saying that, for Lent, she'd decided to stop enabling some of these people. I think this would be a good resolution for many who do so by visiting Angelican blogs.
