Those in attendance filled the choir room, with its capacity of a dozen or so, but I recognized only one new face -- all the others were from the original core pro-ordinariate members as of 2010-11. The archbishop's history helped me to clarify my own views on "corporate reunion".
He mentioned several names, including Pierre Duprey, whom Paul VI named under-secretary (third in command) of the recently created Secretariat for Christian Unity, later becoming Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. However, Abp Hepworth pointed out that the council's mission was more abstract, and the actual task of implementing reunion went to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Another figure was Msgr Peter Wilkinson, an Anglican priest ordained in the OCSP in 2012. According to Hepworth, he corresponded with Cardinal Ratzinger on liturgical issues for 20 years. It's worth noting, though, that these figures represent two themes in the presentation, general ecumenism and liturgy, that didn't actually seem to have borne much fruit until Cardinal Law began to work toward the Pastoral Provision. Hepworth didn't mention Law at all, and he mentioned the Pastoral Provision only in passing.
Just a few days ago, I heard from another visitor who brought up another name among earlier figures in the "corporate reunion" movement, not mentioned by Hepworth:
I read Mark Vickers' Reunion Revisited: 1930s Ecumenism Exposed last week and, having awakened with insomnia about an hour ago, have begun to write my review of for Shared Treasure. The book is well worth reading, and the story it tells is fascinating. It is interesting how Fr. Vickers subtlely, in a between-the-lines sort of way, depicts the French Catholic ecumenical enthusiast, Fr. Paul Couturier, as having had, unintentionally, an unfortunate effect, in the longer run, on these conversations, as the substitution of his "Week of Prayer for Church Unity" for the Anglo-Papalist "Church Unity Octave" allowed, from the 1960s onward, the "warm feelings" of "an ageing and diminishing constituency sitting in church halls sipping tea and coffee, telling one another that they are 'all the same really'" (Vickers, p. 258) to supersede aspirations for the concrete and specific goal of "corporate reunion" based on complete doctrinal agreement - and how he portrays the Ordinariates as a reversion to, and realization of, that earlier goal.But let's look at "corporate reunion" in a larger context. By the 1920s, we had a remarkable series of Anglicans converting individually to Catholicism, without the need for any corporate prompting. These include Frederick Kinsman, Ronald Knox, G K Chesterton, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Leaving aside C S Lewis, who as an Anglican ranks well above the others, the only comparable figure who remained an observant Anglican is Dorothy Sayers. (Agatha Christie was raised an occultist; T S Eliot, an American expatriate Anglophile, belongs more in the category of Henry James and Ezra Pound.) These converts had far more influence on culture and contemporary opinion than anyone working at the margins on "corporate reunion".
Abp Hepworth sees Anglicanorum coetibus as a result of this "corporate reunion" movement, although my impression is that, as he was felt to do in the runup to the Portsmouth Petition, he tends to exaggerate the numbers, strength, and prospects for it. By his own admission, he couldn't hold the TAC bishops to their promises.
I think there are actually two threads to "corporate reunion", a US thread and a UK-Canadian thread. The UK-Canadian thread, Anglican Papalist, a late outgrowth of the Oxford Movement, seems largely to have been driven by "warm feelings" and nostalgia, and as far as any actual reunion was concerned, had no practical result. The US thread, coming more than a generation later, was driven by Cardinal Law as he observed the "continuing Anglican" movement leading up to the 1977 Congress of St Louis. This, however, was marked by false starts and only modest success in scattered instances, mostly in Texas.
Abp Hepworth did mention resistance by diocesan bishops to the Anglicanorum coetibus project. He cited the conflicts between Fr Phillips and Abp Garcia-Siller as his best example, but my view here continues to be that Abp Garcia-Siller was enforcing reasonable diocese-wide policies on matters like finance, school management, and protection of children, and Fr Phillips's retirement, simultaneous with the parish's entry to the OCSP, was a face-saving gesture.
Liturgy is just one aspect of Catholicism. If ordinariates stress liturgy as a main justification for their existence, they won't serve the full set of purposes for which the Church exists. As I continue to say here, only a handful of OCSP parishes offer anything like the range of fellowship, education, and devotional activities available at many diocesan parishes. In addition, it can only help Catholics to encounter the different cultural perspectives they can find at diocesan parishes where Asian. Latin, African, central and southern European, and Middle Eastern people can easily be found.
I still keep asking myself what problem the "corporate reunion" movement is trying to solve. Certainly, considering the overall lack of progress over what is now a century, it can't have been important.
