A Different Approach To Anglican Outreach

Neither the Pastoral Provision nor Anglicanorum coetibus has matched expectations, at least in terms of attracting significant groups of Anglican laity to Catholicism. (If the Pastoral Provision had been successful, there would have been no need for Anglicanorum coetibus.) On reflection, I think a big reason for this has been the idea that disaffected Anglicans would come in as quasi-parish groups, or indeed as full parishes.

I've never felt that it was a particular error for Cardinals Manning and Mahony to reject the St Mary of the Angels application to come in as Anglican Use in the mid 1980s. Every indication is that it would have been a headache and indeed a continuing source of bad press -- why borrow trouble? Nevertheless, St Mary's parishioners and clergy did in fact become Catholic during that period. Why lay so much stress on coming in as a parish?

In fact, the experience not just of St Mary's but of other groups has been that the process of parish discernment is unnecessarily divisive and often wastefully expensive. In addition to seriously damaging St Mary's parish, it's done some measure of harm to the Los Feliz community.

Nevertheless, there are common areas of belief and practice between Anglicanism and Catholicism that shouldn't be ignored. But RCIA, since it's mostly aimed at unbaptized catechumens coming from widely varying backgrounds, isn't the best route for Anglicans seeking to come into the Church. Beyond that, even the pastor at our former diocesan parish acknowledged that RCIA is too dumbed-down for many people.

I'm not sure how cost-effective a specialized approach to Anglicans would be in any diocese, but it does seem to me that if you apply the broad definition of Anglican used in the complementary norms (including those married to Anglicans broadly defined, or members of a family in which there was one such member), the numbers affected could be significant.

So how about a streamlined but enriched RCIA program? This might go along with a campaign of education that stressed that Catholic parishes vary in liturgical observance, and perhaps a bishop could extend a particular invitation to Anglicans to visit a variety of diocesan parishes to see if they might find certain ones appealing. Then announce the enhanced RCIA in particular parishes -- if there were just one or two catechists who might be best suited to this, fine -- offer the class at different times in different places.

I think a big miscalculation in Anglican outreach has been to gloss over the fact that it's always a personal decision to become Catholic. So far, the personal decision is unnecessarily tied up with parish factionalism, while the best alternative, RCIA, isn't well-suited to educated people who are already fairly well catechized.

A different approach might be worth some thought.