Many-Branches-One-Tree vs Heresy

A regular visitor and I frequently work through friendly disagreements. Sometimes he brings me around to his views, and other times he forces me to clarify my own thinking. Here's his reply to my last two posts:

With respect to today’s post, there’s a LOT that happens “behind the scenes” when clergy of other denominations seek ordination in the Catholic Church, including the very vetting that you described in today’s post. In the case of the initial wave of clergy who came into the Catholic Church to form the ordinariate, it occurred even before the ordinariate was erected. Cardinal Wuerl, in his capacity as papal delegate for the erection of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, spoke of it in a briefing to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), when he spoke of the dossiers submitted by the applicants being divided into three groups — (1) those who had completed a full program of Anglican seminary formation, who could be ordained after a relatively brief, but uniform, program of formation, (2) those had little or no formal formation for ministry, who thus would require a full program of Catholic seminary formation, and (3) who would require individual programs of formation tailored to their specific situations. The ordinariate continues to do this for those now seeking ordination. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reviewed all of these decisions in considerable detail before approving the ordination of the candidates.

I think there may be something akin to reification or hypostatization going on here, but not exactly those. (If anyone can explain it better, I'd like to hear it.) In this case, it seems to me that my visitor is assuming a consistency in a very large, nearly abstract, entity, the Catholic Church, that probably doesn't exist in practice. He uses "Cardinal Wuerl" in this case, I believe, as something close to an abstraction. In reality, as best we can determine this, "Cardinal Wuerl" was actually Fr Scott Hurd, who appears to have done the day-to-day work in 2011-12 implementing Anglicanorum coetibus in North America.

Fr Hurd, an Anglican Use priest, Nashotah House alumnus, and former Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth priest, is by all accounts very closely linked to the original Fort Worth clique that started the OCSP. The testimony we have in blogs and elsewhere is repeatedly that Fr Hurd favored Nashotah House alumni and friends from the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth in all personnel decisions, and indeed, based on occasional remarks by him in blogs, he was quite open about it.

The testimony we have is that applicants for OCSP ordination who were not in the favored clique actually had their paperwork "lost" in the process or were simply blackballed. Cardinal Wuerl, presumably busy on a wide variety of missions, was not going to be in a position to review or second-guess Fr Hurd's decisions. But perhaps more to the point, by late 2015, it had become plain that most of the Fort Worth group, along with Msgr Steenson himself (a Ratzinger candidate presumably, not Wuerl's call) were not going to work out and were removed. Vetting? Whatever took place was ineffective, notwithstanding whether more careful reviews are done in the CDF itself.

Next, my visitor says

And with respect to yesterday’s post, there clearly has been a major break in Anglicanism over the past forty years, with liberal provinces abandoning the rule of scripture, which is central to authentic Anglican tradition and patrimony, to follow the “political correctness” of the current day.

Anglicans who remain faithful to the rule of scripture, and thus to the core of Christian doctrine expressed in the Nicene Creed and in the baptismal vows, continue to celebrate at least the sacraments of baptism and marriage validly. Thus, we must regard them as authentically Christian even though they do not profess the fullness of Christian faith and the fullness of Christian life in the rest of the sacraments, as articulated infallibly in No. 15 of the dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium promulgated by the Second Vatican Council.

Many of those who have abandoned the rule of scripture seem to have radically abandoned Christian faith and thus fallen into apostasy. Some may have gone over to syncretism (the heretical belief that all religions are the same), but it is not clear that even the majority have done so.

Those who are coming into the full communion of the Catholic church are clearly part of the former group. Thus, I’m not persuaded of the relevance of the concerns that you expressed in yesterday’s post.

My visitor's assertion here is clearly that the defects in Anglicanism date only from the 1970s. However, Anglicanism has been heretical since the 16th century, and we've got to take that seriously. Exactly what beliefs constitute Anglicanism has never been completely clear, notwithstanding the very Protestant XXXIX Articles. But to be thorough, we've definitely got to exclude any who ascribe to the Articles from automatic eligibility to be waived in as Catholics.

Some Anglicans, presumably like Msgr Steenson, believe in doctrines like the Real Presence, but until very late in his career, he did not accept the authority of the Pope, since he allowed himself to be consecrated a bishop in a heretical church. Although he did not ordain women personally, he concelebrated masses with them and certainly accepted them in his diocese. So we have the head honcho of the OCSP, ordained an Episcopalian priest in 1980, who made a very good career for himself on the basis of post-1970s Anglicanism -- as indeed did most in his inner circle.

A better example of an Anglican bishop who became Catholic would be Frederick Kinsman, although he saw the problems inherent in Anglicanism between about 1912 and 1919, when he resigned, and he did it without an assured Catholic position to go to. Interestingly, he did this at roughly the peak of Anglo-Catholicism, and he was high church himself. He saw the defects in Anglicanism as basically a problem that "there's no there there", and a bishop who in fact sought to enforce, say, the rule of scripture would not be supported, as several in fact were not at that time. In the early 20th century he clearly saw the potential for Bps Pike and Spong.

My visitor says that faithful Anglicans celebrate baptism and marriage validly -- but the Catholic Church recognizes nearly all Protestant baptisms, and indeed it recognizes first civil marriages. This is no great leap. The problem is that Protestants of whatever stripe remain Protestants, and minimizing the important differences continues to be indifferentism or syncretism.