The main tenets of "Angelicanism" are (1) disagreement with mainstream Anglican ordination of women priests and bishops; (2) insistence on particular editions of the Book of Common Prayer; and (3) reliance on the prestige of Roman Catholic forms, without actual adherence to the Catholic catechism. These tenets are notable in that they don't actually demand much of "Angelican" laity. It reminds me a little of when I first became really uncomfortable with what sometimes emanated from the Episcopal pulpit: I once heard a homily that contained the exhortation, "Don't be promiscuous." (This was delivered to a Hollywood audience.) It didn't bother to define "promiscuous" (two people a week? a month? a year?), so nobody necessarily needed to trouble his conscience overmuch as a result.
"Angelicanism", especially since it has no adherence to Catholic definitions of sin, can be just as conveniently vague -- in that way, it's clearly descended from liberal Protestantism, and any invective hurled against The Episcopal Church isn't really sincere. The problem is that issues of conscience don't go away. This was, I think, a dilemma in the history of St Mary of the Angels Hollywood from the start: prominent early donors included Mary Pickford, whose divorces and alcoholism finally became too much even for Fr Dodd.
We see this dilemma continuing into recent times, with an extravagant gift of personal property to clergy from a political operator closely associated with pro-abortion and gay marriage interests. Something's being bought here.
I think the essential hypocrisy of "Angelicanism" is reflected in the split within the TAC following the Portsmouth Petition and Anglicanorum coetibus. The record we've seen is that the signers of the petition (who also signed a copy of the Catholic catechism in the same mass) were never sincere. Nevertheless, the ACA/TAC has never wanted to abandon the prestige of being somehow "almost Catholic".
The prestige of Catholicism is an important ingredient here. Naturally, there are large segments of the world that are anti-Catholic (and we should not minimize the fact that the Ku Klux Klan was as much anti-Catholic as it was anti-civil rights), but the Pope has always been a major figure, and a Roman collar normally commands respect. Still, there's the issue of "no sacrifice, no priest". Becoming Catholic means something. The catechism is a serious document. The problem for the ACA/TAC was that, even given the opportunity to become Catholic, its priests and bishops didn't want to make any sacrifice.
Even for the US priests who either went into the US-Canadian Ordinariate, or who've applied but haven't yet been ordained, I still wonder where the sacrifice is in some cases. They get the prestige, but behind the prestige, there's an emptiness. It's all about Steenson and a couple other self-promoters; the faithful are an unimportant supporting cast. I think it was telling when a priest who applied to join but whose process is stalled remarked that he thought the Ordinariate would be "an easy way to become Catholic". I'm not sure if there's ever an easy way to become Catholic -- although there are some Ordinariate clergy who may not yet understand this.
I've come to think from a longer perspective that Anglicanorum coetibus is less an evangelical proclamation than a put-up-or-shut-up refutation of an "Angelican" heresy.
