Apparently two members have left Annunciation, Ottawa recently over "Anglican patrimony issues," although it is not clear whether they left for another parish or returned to the Anglican Church. In any event, the lead article here addresses this subject in a thoughtful way. Reading between the lines one can see the "continuing" mentality still exists in the parish: "Nobody can tell us what to do!" Part of the problem, IMHO, is that in a marginal community it may be difficult to perceive that you are getting more than you are losing.I had a few extra minutes, so I looked the link over. Just for starters, calling the bulletin of a Church of the Annunciation The Annunciator is one of the clumsiest plays on words I've ever seen -- I can imagine it appearing in something by Evelyn Waugh, which makes me wonder what he'd have done with Anglicanorum coetibus. But we'll pass this by.
Fr Hayman doesn't mention the specific circumstances that led him to address "Anglican patrimony issues", but I assume it was some epiphany that led someone to say, "When they said 'Catholic', I didn't think they meant that." Fr Hayman sort of circles around this question:
Many of us continue to struggle with questions of Anglican Patrimony in the Catholic Church, particularly regarding what we have or have not been able to bring with us into full Communion, and what might yet be part of our life and ministry in the future. Of course when, in our profession of faith, we declared, “I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.” we acknowledged our willingness to trust the Church to judge what of our Anglican heritage may be gathered in to express full and fruitful Catholic Faith.The simple answer, it seems to me, is that nobody was sufficiently clear about Catholicism when the parish was catechized before its reception into the Church. When my wife and I took RCIA, we were given copies of the Catechism and the New American Bible. When we took the catechism class for the OCSP-in-formation a year earlier, we were given neither, just a superficial program called Evangelium, which, while it had the apparent tacit approval of Msgr-to-be Steenson and other authorities, didn't say much.
Bp Lopes has been clear at various times that "Anglican patrimony" refers primarily to certain supererogatory paragraphs which have been inserted into the Divine Worship mass and some thees and thous elsewhere -- and that's about it. On the other hand, at the University of Vienna, he gave as a reason for Anglicanorum coetibus the need for "creating a juridical structure which would allow the incardination of priests and the canonical membership of laity so that their distinctiveness was not lost". But if Anglican patrimony is a few paragraphs of liturgy couched in faux early modern English, why the fuss over "distinctiveness"?
There's a certain confusion here, a subtext that the Church is modifying something like doctrine so Anglicans will be more willing to come in, which, of course, no priest or other Church representative would consciously endorse -- but clearly people are getting this impression. Indeed, it sounds as if some people in Ottawa apparently felt they'd been misled. Fr Hayman's answer is remarkably namby-pamby.
This is in some measure their own fault, of course. In 2011, with the option of going into the Church before me, I took a careful look at the Catechism, which is on line and searchable. I didn't consciously say, "Gee, this Evangelium isn't telling me much, maybe I'd better be more careful here," but clearly an instinct along that line was at work. Thus I avoided some of the surprises others have had when they discovered being Catholic meant that, whatever that was. When St Aidan's Des Moines had to be told about that at a very late stage, whose fault was it?
Whose fault was it that some years after Annunciation of the BVM was received, some people got a big surprise over that? One thing that interests me over secular developments in recent months is the decline in credibility among formerly respected media sources and the rise in prestige of fringe outlets that nobody took seriously until they predicted things like the outcome of the 2016 election. By the same token, I listen to Catholic commentators like Michael Voris and recognize that he's right, the Church of Nice fails when it's not clear in its teaching.
Apparently this is all a big surprise to Fr Hayman. But why did it take his parishioners so long to get clear on being Catholic? This isn't Fr Hayman's fault. Someone, though, thought it was a good idea to make him a priest.
