Why An Anglican Personal Prelature May Have Been A Bad Idea

Those who've been following this story know that Cardinal Bernard Law, who observed the 1970s developments that led to "continuing Anglicanism" with interest, proposed a personal prelature that would include disaffected Episcopalians as early as meetings between his staff and Fr Jack Barker in 1980. The result, however, was Pope St John Paul II's Pastoral Provision, which put former Anglican priests, as well as a limited number of parishes, under diocesan bishops, not a separate personal prelature.

Law tried again in 1993, but Pope St John Paul was again less than enthusiastic. The idea behind the second proposal seems to have been to circumvent diocesan bishops who. like Cardinal Mahony, resisted establishing Anglican Use parishes. In hindsight, though, it's hard to second-guess Mahony's judgment: he was aware that the St Mary's parish was bitterly divided even in the 1980s.

The Pastoral Provision has been successful in bringing former Anglican priests into various kinds of service in the US Catholic Church. The number of remaining Pastoral Provision parishes is only two, with a small number having gone into the OCSP. On balance, experience with former Anglican parishes coming into the Catholic Church as groups, either via the Pastoral Provision or Anglicanorum coetibus, has been disappointing.

I note, via occasional e-mail messages commenting on posts here, that there are Catholics who are former Episcopalians but did not come in either via the Pastoral Provision or Anglicanorum coetibus who think that the idea of a personal prelature was a bad one. I'm a member of that club, of course, but a more recent initiate.

My own view is that leaving the specific question of governance aside, the decision to become Catholic is always individual. The likely need to leave a parish building, a respected priest, or a group of friends behind is the sort of reasonable sacrifice that God might expect under such circumstances. On the other hand, the process of discernment among a whole parish is inevitably going to lead to bitter division, hardly good for anyone's spiritual welfare.

Here are some reasons experience has shown us that a personal prelature is a bad idea:

1. An ordinary can't practically supervise clergy hundreds or thousands of miles distant. I've seen equivalent problems in corporations: those in authority can too easily be misled even if they're interested in what's happening, but they may not be interested anyhow. It appears that the ingredients for a financial scandal are present in Scranton, but the pastor there seems to be minimizing them with glib promises. The resources don't seem to be available to put experienced people on site to determine exactly what's going on.
2. The dotted-line relations between OCSP priests, host parishes, diocesan bishops, schools, religious orders, and other interested parties are an invitation to play them off against the OCSP ordinary. I strongly suspect this is what is happening in Irvine: the pastor appears to be cultivating alliances, for instance, with Extraordinary Form groups when the policy we have from the OCSP is that the OCSP is not to get involved with the Latin mass. Distance also affects this.
3. Bp Lopes has commented that, while Rome admires the Anglican spiritual patrimony, it does not necessarily endorse Anglican structures of governance. Clearly there was confusion in this area under Msgr Steenson. I believe it was Diarmaid MacCulloch who pointed out that the Church of England emerged as a Reformed, congregational denomination that retained bishops and cathedral chapters because they provided opportunities for political patronage. The Fort Worth group eagerly brought careerism into the OCSP, but this is common throughout TEC, the "continuing" denominations, and their successors. It is baked into Anglicanism. One hopes the CDF has learned this lesson.

The idea of bringing in whole Anglican parishes with their priests hasn't turned out well, but on balance, having a diocesan bishop in charge seems like a much better idea. But perhaps an effort to correct some of the abuses to be found in RCIA would provide much better return.