Mgr Keith Newton was reportedly not invited to ecumenical events commemorating the ReformationAs usual, I guess my take on this is going to be contrarian. For starters, I wasn't even aware that ARCIC still existed until I checked last week to discover it's made some sort of statement about Mary. I assume such statement is anodyne, at best unilluminating, and certainly unenforceable for any Anglican. So that suggests that for a small group of former Anglican Catholic clerics, there might be many better uses for their time than ARCIC. Unless, of course, they have free cycles to devote to something like this, which may in fact be the case.The head of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was snubbed from last week’s ecumenical commemorations of the Reformation, a leading Ordinariate priest has said.
In a letter to the Catholic Herald, Fr Ed Tomlinson asks why Mgr Keith Newton, who serves as ordinary of the group for former Anglicans, was not invited to be “part of the numerous ‘reformation celebrations’ taking part in the ecumenical landscape this week”.
Fr Tomlinson also wants to know why Mgr Newton had not been asked “to join the ARCIC [Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission] conversations despite his obvious importance as a former bishop of the Church of England now leading a body, the ordinariate, whose entire purpose is to enable Anglicans to become Catholic while retaining a distinctly English spirituality/patrimony”.
In the six years since the creation of the ordinariate, Fr Tomlinson says, “we have been routinely undermined by those in authority over us. Not a single church has been gifted to the ordinariate despite several closing each month. Why are so many of our clergy used to plug diocesan gaps instead of being enabled to flourish within the vision to which we were called?”
Second, it all depends as well on what the meaning of "ecumenical" is. Mostly I envision some people wearing rainbow stoles and so forth singing kumbaya. It can also mean a tacit agreement among denominations not to poach or proselytize -- one reason attributed to Cardinal Mahony's rejection of the St Mary of the Angels application to become Anglican Use in his archdiocese was it was not an "ecumenical" move, although Mahony had, and expressed, better reasons than that.
Either way, I've got to think that Catholics have better uses for their time than being those sorts of "ecumenical". As we reflect on 500 years of Protestantism, I call on what minimal knowledge I have about 500 years of Arianism and the Church's response, sometimes off the mark, as when it tried to accommodate or compromise with it.
But then, at least in the summary piece quoted here, Fr Tomlinson complains that "Not a single church has been gifted to the ordinariate". But in the US, dioceses haven't "gifted" churches to OCSP parishes. A small number have been sold. Of those, some of the parishes have struggled to make the payments and maintain the properties. How many OOLW communities could afford maintenance and utilities on properties "gifted" to them, much less make payments?
And why change the subject that way? Reminds me of an associate at our parish who said that, as a younger priest, he'd gotten involved in a campaign to have the archdiocese pay priests a "fair" salary, but on reflection, he realized there are many ways to waste one's time. I'm wondering if Fr Tomlinson has yet to arrive at this conclusion.
