Reasons For The Disappointment of Anglicanorum Coetibus

Here's what I think I've learned over the nearly three years I've done this blog:

• Anglicanism is a Protestant denomination, although as the knowledgeable ex-insider Frederick Kinsman said, it's less a set of beliefs than a policy (of wide toleration). Anglican toleration has resulted in three strains, High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church. The differences are wide enough that it's nearly meaningless to give "Anglicanism" a concrete definition. Although there have been limited defections from the dominant Broad Church strain along the existing fracture lines since the 1970s, these haven't changed the nature of the mainstream denomination. In addition, it has been a miscalculation to believe that any of the groups that defected would wish to become Catholic in any significant numbers. Whatever Anglicans are, and however dissatisfied smaller breakaway factions may have been with the Church of England or The Episcopal Church, they have mostly remained Protestant. Even self-identified Anglo-Catholics or Anglo-Papalists, tolerated within the Anglican scheme, have tended not to become Catholic via any path.
• At the same time, as I've begun to look more closely at the Ordinariates, I've come to realize that, small as they are, they are individual entities. Thus it's incorrect to say, as Mr Murphy recently did, that "The Ordinariate responds to now-bishop Philip North". He quotes the comments of two priests in the UK Ordinariate, neither of whom claims, as far as I can tell, to be speaking on behalf of Msgr Newton. This sort of linguistic imprecision is typical and reflects the tendency to reify an "Ordinariate", which is actually a collection of three jurisdictions that are widely scattered, small in membership, and disparate in their makeup.
• It can't help that people like Mr Murphy (who has taken on the role of de facto public relations flak for the Ordinariates, much in the way that Stephen Smuts used to be for the TAC) seem to regard membership in the Ordinariates as a sort of exclusive club. Today he asks plaintively, "Is there really no way for a “regular” Cradle Catholic to join the Ordinariate?" He goes on,

  It is not evident whether and under which conditions a person who has taken part in the activities of the Ordinariate for a longer period can apply for a transfer. So it would seem almost always to be the case that “once a cradle Catholic, always a diocesan Catholic”. This may seem unfair, even ludicrous to you, but that is the legal canonical position, as far as I can make out.

  It's not fair! I'm not sure what the not fair part of this is. Our current political leadership insists it's not fair that some are wealthy and some are not -- that's understandable; we can imagine that many wish to be wealthy who are not. But how many wish to be members of the Ordinariate if they aren't eligible under the complementary norms? There's an implication that membership is something to be desired like, say, rushing Phi Sig. This may be the case in the minds of Mr Murphy and a small number of other initiates. I don't see it otherwise. It reminds me of Frederick Kinsman's characterization of High-Church Anglicanism as "a chronic fastidiousness which spent its energy in pointing out how everyone else was more or less wrong -- the superciliousness of schism -- and in a willfulness to follow individual whims."

Eligible for membership in an Ordinariate group or not, as a good Marxist, I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.