More Thoughts On Coetus

I more or less sat up in the middle of the night with a new idea of what was in Cardinal Ratzinger's mind when he supervised the drafting of Anglicanorum coetibus in the decade or so before he became pope. Let's go back to the inception of the idea, at a 1993 meeting he had with TEC Bishop of Fort Worth Clarence Pope and Jeffrey Steenson, then a priest of that diocese. I've discussed this meeting at various times, especially here. A later post here gives more details on what may or may not have been discussed:

Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth Clarence Pope was the lead participant from the Anglican side at the October 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger. While there are formal minutes of this meeting in existence, apparently matters were discussed that did not make it into the minutes, and exactly what other items may have been discussed or promised by Ratzinger, and what Bishop Pope's response may have been, is not fully clear.

What we know is that a year after the meeting and on his retirement as an Episcopal bishop in 1994, Pope converted to Catholicism with the expectation of then being ordained as an Anglican Use Catholic priest. A liberal Episcopal blog gives one interpretation of these and subsequent events:

He had denied he was leaving The Episcopal Church right up until the day he left. When he made the announcement, he said he planned to seek ordination as a Roman priest. He told us he had known for the previous two years that he would go to Rome. This led some here to question whether or not he’d earned his quite substantial salary as bishop by fraud for those two years.

There is no question that the substance of the October 1993 meeting was kept highly confidential, and one part of the written record indicates that Pope requested communications from the Vatican be sent to his home, not his office. Wayne Hankey, a participant in that meeting who drafted the semi-official minutes, in his 1997 letter to the editor of The Tablet strongly implied that Cardinal Ratzinger had made some type of promise to Pope, which he was subsequently unable to keep.

Whatever the basis, Pope became extremely bitter and returned to The Episcopal Church in 1995.

With several years' reflection on this account, I'm more and more convinced that Big Things were mooted there that were not in the minutes but remained on various agendas even when St John Paul was hesitant to endorse them. We know that Pope was bitter about the eventual outcome. We also know he was anxious to keep the whole matter highly confidential. Nobody in that meeting was wearing a feckless rainbow stole and singing kumbaya, or it would have been public.

Fast forward to 2006 and the peculiar game of footsie Cardinal Law played with Clarence Pope's successor as TEC Bishop of Fort Worth, Jack Iker. I cover it here.

• April 2006: Six priests of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, along with Bishop Iker, meet in Rome with Cardinal Law to discuss causes of Catholic-leaning Episcopal dissatisfaction. Law requests that the group make some type of proposal. The sketchy account of this meeting does not mention any specific discussion of the 1993 proposal, except that Law is quoted as saying,"What was not possible twenty years ago may be possible today."
• * * *
• June 16, 2008: Four priests of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth meet with Roman Catholic Bishop of Fort Worth Kevin Vann, with the knowledge and approval of Bishop Iker, to present a proposal for Catholic unity, which they say is the result of two years of discernment, presumably the outcome of Cardinal Law's 2006 request.

  The document states that the overwhelming majority of Episcopal clergy in the Fort Worth diocese favor pursuing an “active plan” to bring the diocese into full communion with the Catholic Church.

• August 12, 2008: Bishop Iker backs off the meeting, saying "in their written and verbal reports, [the four] have spoken only on their own behalf and out of their own concerns and perspective. They have not claimed to act or speak, nor have they been authorized to do so, either on behalf of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth or on my own behalf as their Bishop." He adds that the meeting with Vann will not affect the business of the upcoming diocesan convention.

These events took place in the context of the upcoming 2009 formation of the ACNA, in which several TEC bishops, including Iker, took significant parts of their dioceses into the ACNA. It's hard for me to avoid thinking now, as the question of what constitutes a coetus comes up, that Ratzinger, with Law at his ear, had been encouraged to think that one or more TEC dioceses would petition to become Catholic as a body. It seems credible that both Bp Pope and Bp Iker may have had something like this in mind, although Iker seems to have had second thoughts fairly quickly.

i would say that Iker recognized clearly what Law and Ratzinger didn't, that Anglicanism had a substantial low church faction that would never accept even a whole diocese going to Rome. I'm currently leaning toward a view that Ratzinger, later as Benedict, was governed by wishful thinking in this area. But not only were the numbers of US Anglicans who went into the OCSP a disappointment, still greater was the fact that no diocese had anything remotely like that intention. Certainly the timing of Anglicanorum coetibus, promulgated in 2009, suggests it was hoped that the option would be attractive to full dioceses dissatisfied with TEC.

I would guess that Bp Lopes must recognize that his assignment is to do whatever he can to retrieve what must be perceived in the Vatican as a disaster. He's a junior guy, and if he screws up, it won't be a big blow to the CDF.

UPDATE: After posting this, it also occurred to me that St John Paul's unenthusiastic response to Ratzinger, when he first proposed the idea in 1993, may have been connected to the idea that this would mean bringing in one or more full TEC dioceses, or substantial parts of them. I can't imagine that John Paul would have thought an idea that meant bringing in a dozen ex-Episcopalians at a time into basement chapels would be worth anyone's time. The other could well have been construed as poaching big time, though -- some basement chapel evening prayers, not so much.