Bishop Bernard Law invited Frs. Barker and Brown to meet with a canonist in Chicago to explore together the form of an Anglican "common identity" in the Catholic Church. In addition to the above, representatives of SSC and the Evangelical Catholic Mission (ECM) were also invited by Bishop Law. The three groups met with Bishop Law’s Canonist at the Hilton Hotel at O’Hare Airport. The Anglicans present favored the proposal on structure modeled on the Military Ordinariate, but the small number of parochial communities, the death of Cardinal Seper who had taken a personal interest in this cause, together with the reluctance on the part of the American Catholic hierarchy mitigated against such a possibility.It's worth pointing out that the "structure modeled on the Military Ordinariate" was on the table from the start, and this was the option later discussed in the 1993 meeting, facilitated by now-Cardinal Law, of Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope, then-Fr Jeffrey Steenson, and Cardinal Ratzinger that resulted in Anglicanorum coetibus. In this context, it seems reasonable to conclude that Cardinal Law felt a second try at Anglican corporate reunion might be warranted, if the earlier Pastoral Provision had proved a disappointment.
There's another problem:
The conversations in Rome also made it clear that those seeking reunion needed to be clear about their legitimate patrimony; therefore a symposium of Anglican and Roman scholars was held at the University of Dallas in June of the same year. The features of an Anglican patrimony were the subject of that symposium.It would be interesting to see the proceedings of the University of Dallas symposium; if anyone can make a copy available or point me to them on line, I would greatly appreciate it. Exactly what comprises an "Anglican patrimony" is a question I've addressed here, and frankly, the answers I've received are tentative and unsatisfactory. The question mainly comes down to liturgy (except that the actual purpose of the Anglican liturgy was to finesse differences via calculated ambiguity, as well as to allow for broad winks when inconvenient aspects were deliberately ignored!).
Regarding liturgy, Fr Barker says,
The delegates at [an October 1981 Dallas, Texas] conference agreed on the pastoral necessity of maintaining a pastoral provision liturgy which allowed for traditional as well as [modern] English. . . . Eventually the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship authorized the Book of Divine Worship (BDW) for interim usage in 1984, with final approval on 20 February 1987. This document allowed elements of the older Prayer Book of 1928, but the Eucharistic liturgy was taken only from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer with the use of the Roman Eucharistic Canons and the ancient Sarum Canon (with the modern English "Words of Institution" from the Novus Ordo Missae inserted).Clearly the Pastoral Provision liturgy was aimed at a US audience, based on the Episcopal prayer books. It's puzzling that the Ordinariate liturgy has so far rejected the idea of contemporary English and relied primarily on ersatz archaisms in a "uniate" liturgy promoted by elements in the Church of England. However, this liturgy does not appear to be popular in either the UK or the US, and particularly in the UK appears to be a cause of the underperformance of the Ordinariate there.
