The Ordinariates Have Different Roots And Different Preoccupations -- I

Reading Fr Barker's Early History of the Anglican Use has helped me to clarify some of the puzzles I've had over the Ordinariates. It's plain from his first-hand account that the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision arose from the moves in the Episcopal Church's 1976 General Convention to ordain women and revise the Book of Common Prayer. The history of Anglican Use paralleled that of "continuing Anglicanism", including predictions of widespread acceptance followed by disappointing execution.

But there was never a parallel move in the Church of England to defect over the ordination of women. The Church of England's General Synod in 1987 voted to ordain women priests. However,

The Church of England took a decisive step towards women's ordination yesterday when the General Synod voted by 317 to 145 to prepare legislation for the reform.

The Bishop of London, Dr Graham Leonard, who had variously threatened to divide and to leave the Church if the synod voted for the measure, said later that he would, after all, do neither.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, who won a major tactical victory over the diehard traditionalists, had said in the debate that there had been 'premature panic' over the prospect of a schism.

'It is too early to be taking the tarpaulins off the lifeboats, and even signalling to other shipping,' he said.

That referred to Dr Leonard's declared intention to negotiate a 'special relationship' for dissident groups with Rome and other churches.

Dr Leonard smiled sadly at the archbishop's joke. Minutes after the vote Dr Leonard said he had no plans for negotiations with Rome or any other church . 'We shall now have to give thought to what to do. It will be a slow, exploratory process. I'll be talking with other Anglicans first,' he said.

Whatever the process may have been, if in fact there ever was one, there was never an equivalent set of defections to "continuing Anglicanism" at even the US rate from the Church of England. There were eventually only a minimal number of Traditional Anglican Communion parishes in the UK. Women were finally ordained as priests in the Church of England in 1994; the first woman bishop was not consecrated until 2015. There have never been equivalent moves of any size to form "continuing" denominations or other breakaways like the ACNA.

As we've seen here, Anglicanorum coetibus was drafted in 1993-94, apparently at the instigation of Cardinal Bernard Law, who had also been behind the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision. It appears to have been intended primarily as a way to bypass the unwillingness of US bishops like Cardinals Timothy Manning and Roger Mahony to accept Pastoral Provision parishes in their dioceses, and it appears to have been based on ideas mooted as early as 1980 to establish such a personal prelature.

The idea was clearly a holdover from post-1976 US dissidence from Episcopal Church actions, and in their 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger, Bishop Pope and then-Fr Steenson gave as reasons for proposing a personal prelature for dissident Episcopalians the ordination of women and the revision of the prayer book, neither of which had become equivalent issues in the Church of England.

So there was never an equivalent "continuing Anglican" or "corporate reunion" movement in the UK to serve as an equivalent recruiting ground for a personal prelature. The Guardian piece suggests that any idea of reconciliation with Rome from Dr Leonard was nothing but a bluff, which Dr Runcie successfully outmaneuvered. So whence arise the roots of Ordinariate interest in the UK?