Last April I cited an address by Bp Lopes at the University of Vienna that amounts to a formal, if couched hypothetically, statement of the problems the CDF perceived needed to be solved in drafting the apostolic constitution.
Bp Lopes outlined two basic issues. The first:
if the Holy See worked with a group of Anglicans to elaborate a proposal, and if that proposal was then entrusted to an Episcopal Conference for implementation, and if that Episcopal Conference then simply killed the proposal in committee, then a new approach might involve consultation with local Episcopal Conferences but reserve the actual oversight and direction of the implementation to the Holy See itself.Clearly the "if" is meant to conceal specific confidential circumstances, though this may refer to a situation that appears to have come up in Canada in late 2011 that resulted in the OCSP being given jurisdiction over both US and Canadian communities. More broadly, the issue comes to opposition to formation of Anglican-based parishes from diocesan bishops, which occurred in the 1980s with St Mary of the Angels. In Bp Lopes's view, Anglicanorum coetibus allows the Holy See to oversee implementation directly and bypass episcopal opposition.
The problem is that as a matter of policy, this may be correct, but as a matter of practice, bishops still have been able to oppose OCSP communities in detail. We saw the Bishop of Rochester, NY refuse to provide residence for an OCSP priest, which forced the Rochester area group to go inactive. More recently, the Bishop of St Petersburg, FL apparently refused to support establishment of a Tampa-area group, possibly by prohibiting use of diocesan parish facilities for a proposed OCSP group.
Assuming an OCSP group in formation had the resources to pay a full time priest and own its facility, this disadvantage could be overridden, but the typical small group of two dozen can't do this and must in fact rely on diocesan jobs to support OCSP clergy and use diocesan chapels. Thus local bishops still have a practical veto and in fact have exercised it. Here's the second issue Anglicanorum coetibus was meant to address, per Bp Lopes:
if a previous proposal for corporate reunion incardinated the converting clergy into local Dioceses, and if those priests were then reassigned or assimilated into the local Diocese so that they could not minister to their former communities and foster the particular identity of those communities, then a new approach might involve creating a juridical structure which would allow the incardination of priests and the canonical membership of laity so that their distinctiveness was not lost to assimilation into the much larger sea of Catholic life.The problem again is that as a matter of practice, most OCSP communities can't support a full time priest, and those priests who can't be paid from the OCSP often need full- or part-time diocesan appointments. The typical demands of a small OCSP group are inevitably much smaller than the demands of a full diocesan parish, or indeed several parishes. Beyond that, Bp Lopes refers to such small groups as "former communities" to which these priests are theoretically ministering, but these groups are almost always assembled de novo, not as Anglicanorum coetibus envisioned, cohesive entities coming over as Anglican parishes. Indeed, calling these tiny groups "make-work projects" isn't far off the mark.
What we see after five years experience with implementation is that the situation Anglicanorum coetibus envisioned, cohesive groups coming over as full Anglican parishes with their clergy and with the resources to support themselves, have been by far the exception. The fewer than a dozen successful OCSP parishes are mostly former Pastoral Provision. The original paradigm simply hasn't worked, and the replacement, small gathered groups of random people only marginally qualified as canonical members, hasn't gathered momentum.
In effect, Bp Lopes's University of Vienna address acknowledged that the Pastoral Provision had failed and outlined the reasons for its failure, which Anglicanorum coetibus was intended to address. I would say that Bp Lopes's analysis doesn't seem to understand the reasons for the failure of Anglican ecumenism, but in any case, the remedies he outlines haven't been effective.
It seems to me that although William James's approach in The Varieties of Religious Experience is quirky, it works as a rough tool. In effect, he's taking the position that objections raised to religion by Hume and Kant are beside the point, because religion is successful and has good practical effects. But if we apply the rough frontier tool offered by James to Anglicanorum coetibus, it fails, because it doesn't solve the problems it defines for itself, it solves no other problems, and it has no good effects over and above those of the Church as a whole.
But as I said above, Anglicanorum coetibus is only a special case of the larger Anglican outreach project.
