Being Realistic

I started this blog when the specific events surrounding the attempt by the St Mary of the Angels parish to enter the newly erected Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter threw me and others into spiritual crisis. It then became an effort to get to the bottom of things, and it's taken me on a journey through "continuing Anglicanism", the position of church institutions in civil law, "Anglo-Catholicism" and its relation to "Anglicanism", the history of The Episcopal Church, what it means to become Catholic, RCIA vs reception via the Ordinariates, Catholic thought based on figures like St Thomas Aquinas, the nature of Catholic sacraments, and many other things. In fact, it's taken me through an education I wish I could have had at the age I should have had it. The journey isn't finished.

Here's a quote from John Henry Neman's The Idea of a University:

Right Reason, that is, Reason rightly exercised, leads the mind to the Catholic Faith, and plants it there, and teaches it in all its religious speculations to act under its guidance. But Reason, considered as a real agent in the world, and as an operative principle in man's nature, with an historical course and with definite results, is far from taking so straight and satisfactory a direction. It considers itself from first to last independent and supreme; it requires no external authority; it makes a religion for itself. Even though it accepts Catholicism, it does not go to sleep. . .

I don't have much patience for sentimental appeals to Anglicanism in whatever form as reasons to become Catholic via Anglicanorum coetibus. I think it's important to look realistically at what the Ordinariates' resources are, what their potential is, and what difficulties they face. At the same time, I also think back to my years studying English literature and the remarks of a professor I had as an undergraduate: he said that people sometimes want to idealize an England of the past, Canterbury Tales or The Faerie Queene or Shakespeare's Henry IV or Addison's Spectator or Dickens or Trollope and don't recognize that the English in that period were actually murderously efficient. The sentimental appeals to reified "Anglicanism" we see in whatever form, today, for instance at Ordinariate News, strike me as unrealistic, unsustainable for real spiritual growth, and unhealthy.

On the other hand, it seems that Ordinariate News has put its one consistently reasonable commenter on notice:

Oh EPMS. forgive my frustration, but if you have nothing to comment but your fears that the Ordinariate project will die within two generations, I would really prefer you wrote nothing at all.

For those of us who are doing our utmost to achieve exactly the opposite (and we too are aware of the risks!), your cries of woe are not helpful at all.

David Murphy

Regarding Ordinariate News, my wife commented, well, I guess you always have to have a cheerleading blog that says everything's fine and dandy.