In reference to your closing sentence I am tempted to respond "What 'Ordinariate interest in the UK'"? Granted there has been a lot of interest among CofE clergy, but. . . only a minority lead groups. And most of the groups are barely active. . . . There are exceptions, of course, but mostly it has been, as you like to put it, a damp squib.Trying to characterize the UK Ordinariate leads to two problems, the first the difficulty with the law of small numbers and the second the issue of defining "Anglo-Catholicism" or "Anglo-Papalism". The law of small numbers means that variability is more prevalent in small populations. In some thinking about the UK Ordinariate, for instance, I've been tempted to think of Fr John Hunwicke as somehow representative.
From a perspective both transcontinental and transoceanic, I've tended to see him as something like Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, eccentric and basically out of control, and a visitor confirms this impression -- but suggests that his colleagues regard him as an outlier. But given the law of small numbers, everyone in such a small population is an outlier.
In a current series of posts, he insists that some Anglican bishops, including "the Bishop Harry Carpenter who ordained me", irrespective of "the papal condemnation of Anglican Orders in Apostolicae curae", have valid Catholic orders.
Apparently he enjoys pushing the limits. Some US Ordinariate clergy, like Fr Bartus, do the same, though with a different style. It does appear that he is a member of an "English Missal" or "uniate liturgy" faction among UK Anglo-Papalists, something I've already noted here. This is the problem with the second issue, trying to define "Anglo-Catholcism" or "Anglo-Papalism".
Fr Hunwicke, other key figures in the "corporate reunion" movement like Mr Murphy, and Prof Feulner (who, a Bavarian teaching at a Viennese university, wrote the current version of the mass) all clearly feel that "Anglican Patrimony" is primarily liturgical, and the liturgy is what we see in the Ordinariate mass, notwithstanding its earliest drafts date only from 1905. The difficulty is that the laity in the UK Ordinariate have rejected it and have moved to Novus Ordo masses in diocesan parishes.
I've previously noted the remarks of Msgr Lopes of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the UK Ordinariate laity:
He added that it was ironic that many Anglo-Catholics who have joined the Ordinariate did not use Anglican prayer books as Anglicans but the Roman rite.It seems to me that the US Ordinariate, small as it is, has at least the cohesiveness that stems from resistance to the 1976 moves in The Episcopal Church. With no equivalent focus against similar moves in the Church of England, it seems as though Anglicanorum coetibus created a market in the UK for a “product” (a community of clergy and laity) for which a market did not previously exist, and various adventitious elements, such as the “uniate liturgy” enthusiasts and other eccentrics like Fr Hunwicke, have seen an opportunity to fill it.“We have many people in the Ordinariate who are unfamiliar with some of that wider tradition, the depth of tradition, in Prayer Book forms and Anglican Missal forms of worship. In a certain sense it’s an irony because here’s this wonderful liturgical patrimony and we have Ordinariate communities saying ‘wait a minute, that’s actually quite new’,” he said .
Mgr Lopes added that if an Ordinariate community simply uses the Roman Rite it becomes “indistinguishable.”
The problem is that, as a knowledgeable informant tells me, the laity isn’t listening to Msgr Lopes and has continued to stay with Novus Ordo, moving to diocesan parishes and making the UK Ordinariate structure irrelevant. Thus my informant says the UK Ordinariate is primarily a creature of the small numbers of clergy there, who mainly don’t have parishes and are often doing diocesan work, if anything.
