Msgr Newton On Anglicanorum Coetibus

My regular correspondent has referred me to this interview at the Register with Msgr Newton equivalent to the one I cited with Bp Lopes. On one hand, it's very similar; Msgr Newton talks of "tarting a new structure, which is what this Ordinariate is, with very little resources", essentially the same line Bp Lopes took. On the other, i'm not entirely comfortable when he refers to "the joyful ‘Englishness’ of Catholicism". Msgr Newton is English, so I suppose this is OK for English people, but of course, reading this in the US doesn't have the same association. But I suppose this is the sort of thing the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society laps up.

My regular correspondent was particularly interested in Msgr Newton's remarks on the status of the daily offices:

We use something called the Customary at the moment, which was put together in the early days, but we’re trying to revamp an office book. We were hoping to have something which would be between America and England and Australia: just one official office book, but that isn’t going to be possible, because those in the Chair of St. Peter wants some different things, which come from a different sort of strand of Anglicanism. So the translations are a bit different. I think we’re very keen here that if we’re going to make an office book, it should be based fairly squarely upon the Book of Common Prayer. So we’re in the process of negotiations for having our own office book printed, which will be for England and Wales, and also for Australia, who would like to come in, because they come from the same source Anglican tradition as it were. But they will be very similar.

So we're talking about three different national prelatures, none of which numbers above the mid four figures, that can't agree on a single edition of the daily offices. This appears to be the reason for the delay. The only word I can think of to characterize such a situation is "boondoggle".

Msgr Newton concludes,

What we'd really like in 10 years’ time is 20 really strong communities around the country that would be on their own, where you know that the Ordinariate liturgy is celebrated regularly, where there’s the Holy Week liturgy, where there is a sense of this Anglican patrimony within the Church and so forth.

That’s happening, but it’s a gradual thing. I keep telling people: 10 years is not a lot in the history of the Catholic Church.

Nor, of course, does North America have 20 full parishes, and a ten year estimate doesn't seem unreasonable for growth here, either -- if it ever reaches that. We're talking, as a visitor put it to me not long ago, about a worldwide ordinariate membership still probably in the high four figures, just a single medium size diocesan parish. But it has over 100 priests and three ordinaries. And even in the UK, it's a boutique operation.