In The Past Few Days,

while looking for the actual current size of the Ordinariate, I found a puzzling discrepancy: the current Ordinariate Communities web page lists 25 entities (I'm not sure what else to call them) in the US and Canada. However, while poking around the web, I've found two others that claim to be in the Ordinariate, but aren't listed on the web page. St Mary the Virgin of Arlington, TX, formerly Anglican Use (and thus under the jurisdiction of the local Catholic bishop), now says on its website that it's part of the Ordinariate.

However, the Communities page at the Ordinariate site still doesn't list St Mary the Virgin, but lists St Peter the Rock Catholic Community in Arlington, which was meeting somewhere other than at St Mary the Virgin. As of today, St Peter the Rock's site is down (a cached copy is here); when I checked it a few days ago, it said that it was undergoing a transition into St Mary the Virgin. Apparently this is in process, but the Ordinariate web site hasn't been updated -- this is your public face, folks, not a good sign.

Another parish not listed on the Ordinariate Communities page is St Timothy's Church, Catonsville, MD. However, on the web site of Mount Calvary Church, also in Catonsville and part of the Ordinariate, there's a news release from February 2013, indicating St Timothy's vote to leave The Episcopal Church and enter the Ordinariate, though leaving their property behind. There's no equivalent announcement on the Ordinarite web site.

The news release about St Timothy's contains the following statement about the Ordinariate's size:

The Ordinariate (www.usordinariate.org) includes 36 communities, 30 priests and more than 1,600 people in the United States and Canada.

So why does the Communities page on the Ordinariate web site list only 25 communities? I sent the following inquiry to the e-mail address listed for the Ordinariate headquarters in Houston yesterday:

The news release covering St Timothy’s Episcopal Church Catonsville, MD’s entry to the US Ordinariate at http://www.mountcalvary.com/news.php says the Ordinariate has 36 communities. However, only 25 are listed on the website for the Ordinariate itself. Is the number 36 correct? If so, which 11 communities are not listed on the Ordinariate’s web site?

Thanks for any help you may be able to provide.

As yet, I've had no reply. We're back to the same amateur show we've seen in "continuing Anglicanism". I had an e-mail suggesting I may be mistaken in questioning Msgr Steenson's motives, when the problems lie farther down in the organization. A partial answer would be that he clearly tolerates slipshod work -- you wouldn't have this sort of conflict in public statements if he were paying the least attention. If there were problems lower down in the organization, if he had integrity himself, he wouldn't surround himself with people who allow what we're seeing here, though I don't think this is anything like the whole picture.

Who Is Jeffrey Steenson? -- V

While there seems to be unanimity (including the strong implication of Steenson's own statements) that he abrogated his vows in leaving his post as a bishop in The Episcopal Church, I think the extensive timeline connected with the establishment of the US Ordinariate also calls into question the sincerity of his statements on why he left that denomination.

Steenson had apparently been in contact with Bernard Law, the US delegate for John Paul II's Pastoral Provision allowing married Episcopal priests to become Catholic priests, since at least the late 1980s. Cardinal Law has been a consistent figure throughout this story, in fact: he arranged the 1993 meeting of Bishop Pope, then-Fr Steenson, and Cardinal Ratzinger, and he appears to have been involved, with his close associate Msgr William Stetson, in all phases of the story through his reception of Steenson into the Catholic Church at the Basilica of St Mary Major, where Law served as archpriest, in Rome in 2007.

Like a good juror is expected to do, I have to bring my own experiences to bear in evaluating evidence. In the corporate world, nothing happens by accident at the senior vice president level. The subjects of meetings are agreed in advance. The outcomes of the meetings are foreordained as well; they are based on detailed proposals that have been carefully drafted by staff and thoroughly reviewed at lower levels before they're presented on mahogany row. If anything, I've got to assume that an institution like the Catholic Church operates like this even more than an American corporation.

Nobody just walks in on the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- I know things work that way, in the same way that the centurion with the paralyzed servant understood, based on his own experience in a different field, that if Our Lord gave an order, the order took. The 1993 meeting was set up by Cardinal Law, and we must assume that flights from Texas to Italy, hotel rooms, and the like, weren't booked just so everyone could shake hands. Cardinal Law had been talking to the Fort Worth crowd for years; he thought there was finally something they could say to Cardinal Ratzinger that wouldn't waste his time.

So I think it was deliberately misleading for Steenson to characterize the 1993 meeting to the 2008 Anglican Use Conference as simply exploratory. Formal sitdowns with senior vice presidents aren't exploratory, sorry. Steenson needed to mislead the Anglican Use Conference attendees, because the pattern of his conduct throughout his Episcopal Church career was, we can reasonably conclude, duplicitous.

I think this goes as well to the chronology of his final (and we may assume long-delayed) decision to leave the denomination. A House of Bishops meeting in March, 2007 was the last straw, in Steenson's account, although Steenson had presumably been ordained using a rite from the 1979 BCP into a denomination that already ordained women; he'd tolerated the ordination of Barbara Harris as a bishop in 1989; he'd been through the Jack Spong controversies in the 1990s, and he'd specifically said the ordination of Eugene Robinson as a partnered gay in 2003 wasn't a reason for leaving The Episcopal Church. But some minor thing in 2007 was positively the last straw!

By September 2007, the date of his letter to the Rio Grande clergy, he'd worked it all out with Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori. In the same 2008 address, Steenson says, "My counselors, Monsignor William Stetson and Archbishop Michael Sheehan, urged me to bring my ministry in the Episcopal Church to a close as honorably as possible." Well, all I can say is that if I had a true last-straw moment, I'd be out the door in a huff, as I occasionally was in my secular career. Yet it seems to me that Steenson spent the time between March and September being careful -- in particular, I would guess, being extremely careful that he didn't invoke Episcopal disciplinary procedures, which would almost certainly destroy his chances of becoming US Ordinary. This would have been the real intent of Stetson's counsel in particular -- Stetson, Bernard Law's right arm, is a canon lawyer, after all.

The written record indicates that Bernard Law, after years of no contact with Bishop Clarence Pope, contacted him again in 2003, somewhat to Pope's surprise. However, Law appears to have dropped the contact immediately after that. My surmise would be that the 1993-4 proposal for a US Anglican personal prelature was coming back to life, for whatever reason, and Law was trying to determine Pope's level of health and overall interest if the project should move forward. In 2003, Pope would have been the only candidate for Ordinary, since he was the only former Episcopal bishop.

Steenson, however, by 2003 was Canon to the Ordinary at the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, a post that could easily lead to being named bishop, at Rio Grande or elsewhere. By 2004, he'd become Bishop Coadjutor of the Rio Grande, in line to become diocesan at his predecessor's retirement. In other words, he'd had his bishop ticket punched, while Pope, aged, in poor health, and unstable, was no longer a credible candidate.

My own view is that the Vatican had Steenson clearly lined up as the potential Ordinary at the time of his election as a bishop in 2004, and Steenson was aware of this. The likelihood of a US Ordinariate was assured when Ratzinger become Benedict XVI in 2005. The only small issue, when the time came to move, would be to find a pretext -- a last-straw moment -- for Steenson to leave, and then to wait a decent interval before erecting the Ordinariate and naming him Ordinary. As far as I can see, this is the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from events -- I don't see nearly 25 years of coincidence here.

What does this say of this man's character? Careerist is probably a generous interpretation.

Who Is Jeffrey Steenson? -- IV

Steenson's repeated expressions of gratitude (for instance, here) to Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori for her "pastoral support. . . during this time" are remarkable, because Her Grace has not been noted for her pastoral support of other departing bishops like Iker, Schofield, Duncan, or Lawrence. On one hand, this may simply be a reflection of the fact that, unlike the others, Steenson wasn't taking a diocese or its property with him.

On the other hand, there's something about Steenson that in fact makes him the very model of a modern Episcopal bishop: abrogating his vows and resigning in this way become a form of in-your-face autarchic apostasy worthy of a James Pike. In contrast, Schofield, Duncan, Iker, and Lawrence, shepherds arguably ushering their flocks to safer pastures, are only namby-pamby. Perhaps this excited Jefferts Schori's admiration, rather than her contempt -- there's something essentially narcissistic about Steenson's move, since in the end, it's all about him.

Let's look at that peculiarly sheepish letter to the clergy at the Diocese of the Rio Grande, which I linked just above. You would only have to change a few words here and there to turn it into an announcement that Steenson is leaving his wife to marry his longtime gay partner!

This is a very difficult letter to write as your bishop and colleague in the ordained ministry, and I hope that you will receive it in the prayerful spirit in which it is offered.

Let's just insert a sentence that reads something like, "Some of you are aware of the ongoing, caring, mutually rewarding, and loving relationship I've had with my longtime gay partner, Herb Throckmorton, who is a devout Wiccan. I have decided to divorce my wife and marry Herb in the Wiccan faith." Then we can continue with the rest of the letter, pretty much word for word as written:

An effective leader cannot be so conflicted about the guiding principles of the Church he serves. It concerns me that this has affected my ability to lead this diocese with a clear and hopeful vision for its mission. I also have sensed how important it is for those of us in this position to model a gracious way to leave the Episcopal Church in a manner respectful of its laws.

We might add a sentence after the praise and gratitude toward the Presiding Bishop that would read something like, "My wife and three grown children have also been most supportive of Herb and me in this difficult transition time," and so forth. But otherwise, I hate to say it, the two letters from my point of view would be precisely the same -- the total focus on Steenson and his wishes to the exclusion of the flock for which he was responsible, the sheepish tone, the touchy-feely pseudo-sensitivity. Indeed, there's the typical salve to a guilty conscience: he's not betraying anyone; he's doing them all a big favor by modeling a gracious way to leave the Episcopal Church!

Steenson is unwittingly betraying a very contemporary sensibility, cloaked not very convincingly in Catholic piety. He's out for number one, period.

Who Is Jeffrey Steenson? -- III

Discussions of Steenson's departure from The Episcopal Church trace his dissatisfaction at least as far back as the late 1980s. A comment at the Commonweal blog says,

According to William Oddie's book "The Roman Option" - if my memory serves me correctly - Steenson and Law had a pre-existing relationship. Both men were part of a group of Catholic and Episcopal clergy who were part of discussions in which a large group of Episcopal clergy were considering going to Rome as a group in the late 80s when Barbara Harris was made an Episcopal bishop.

Steenson gave the standard reasons for wanting to become Catholic in the 1993 meeting with Ratzinger, the ordination of women and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. This would, of course, imply that Steenson had had reservations about The Episcopal Church since his ordination as a deacon there in 1979, a priest in 1980. His defenders tend to give the half-hearted response that maybe he thought things would change, or something like that.

What did he think might happen, that TEC would suddenly decide to lay all those women priests off? Steenson knew perfectly well what the denomination's direction was at the time of his ordinations. He also must have understood that the toothpaste couldn't be put back in the tube. Yet he was happy to continue in a highly prestigious career for 28 years, playing footsie with Rome as it suited him. It's worth raising the point that, had the Diocese of the Rio Grande known of his meeting with Ratzinger in 1993, Steenson's election as bishop might not have been assured.

Not only that, but as his successor as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande pointed out,

Steenson “seemed to have no trouble working with women priests” during his three years as bishop, Vono said. “He was celebrating with women at the altars.”

In other words, whatever sense of unease he may have had about women clergy didn't interfere with keeping his prestigious job as an Episcopal bishop. Vono continued,

Vono said this month that Steenson’s decision to step down just three years after taking his vows as bishop left Episcopalians “saddened” and “disillusioned.”

“He took vows, as we all do, in front of the whole church,” Vono said of Steenson’s choice to become a bishop. “It isn’t as though Jeffrey didn’t know what he was doing when he made those vows.”

The vows to which Vono refers, in the 1979 Service for the Ordination of a Bishop, include

Will you guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church?

To which Steenson presumably should have answered, "I will, until this other deal I've been working on comes through." But while Episcopalians understandably came away with a sense of bad faith and betrayal on Steenson's part, the puzzlement and even skepticism of Catholic observers is also significant. Mainstream Catholics do not trust Anglo-Catholics who come over, I've found, and there was little triumphalism in Catholic ranks over Steenson's move. The Commonweal blog observed at the time of Steenson's resignation, for instance,

Steenson is the third Episcopal bishop to swim the Tiber this year; the other two were retired.

Of course, all are welcome. But I find these conversions interesting because 1) they are all from self-styled "orthodox" Christians and 2) they all seem rooted in disaffection and disagreement with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. . . .[I]f these neo-converts think they're joining a church with no disputations, well, they should check in on this blog.

I of course can't judge anyone's conscience. But going by the public comments of these bishops, I have to ask if these are "conversions of convenience"?

The voluminous comment thread for that post includes well-reasoned remarks from Catholics that the public reasons Steenson gave for his resignation were vague -- even "vacuous" -- and self-contradictory. I would summarize them this way:

• The main reason for a Protestant to become Catholic is a revised understanding of the sacraments.
• However, Steenson had always had a Catholic understanding of the sacraments.
• The Episcopal Church already gave him the latitude to have this understanding, which he had publicly professed, and his career had prospered.
• Church polity alone is not a good reason to make such a switch.
• Steenson himself had said the ordination of Eugene Robinson as a bishop was not a reason to leave TEC.
• So why, exactly, did he move?

But the commenters were working without the context of the 1993 Pope-Steenson-Ratzinger meeting, with its strong implication that any journey to Rome by either Pope or Steenson would be a package deal that included more than a simple affirmation of faith -- when part of the package fell through in 1994, after all, Pope backed out of the whole thing; he didn't even stay Catholic! Turning Catholic, even with his Episcopal bishop's pension assured, wasn't going to happen unless Pope got some other sweetener. Given the example of Pope, it almost certainly wasn't just a matter of faith for Steenson; it wasn't just a matter of ecclesiology, either -- it was a career move.

Who Is Jeffrey Steenson? -- II

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. The blog cited above quotes the New York Times:

“he publicly took communion from the hand of an Episcopal priest, saying in an interview that he had left the Catholic Church and abandoned plans to enter its priesthood.” The article quoted him as saying “he had succumbed to a ‘growing unease’ about his original decision. His unease, Bishop Pope said, lay in his feeling that he could not give up his status as a bishop, which he would have to do to be re-ordained as a Catholic priest.["]

A conservative Catholic blog gives a different view, noting as well Pope's eventual return to Catholicism in 2007:

As Episcopal bishop, Clarence Pope had tried to negotiate with Rome for a personal prelature for Anglo-Catholic converts in the US: although his meeting with John Paul II went well, the plan was stonewalled by officials and nothing came of it: only Cardinal Ratzinger supported such a plan, and it did not fall within the competence of Ratzinger's Congregation, obviously. [This version appears not to be borne out by the written record; apparently the meeting with John Paul II was part of a public audience, and nothing substantial was apparently discussed there. John Paul instructed Pope subsequently to go through Ratzinger and by implication the CDF.] When Clarence Pope then converted individually, his new Catholic bishop announced that he would be willing to ordain Clarence Pope as a Catholic priest--if his diocesan Priests' Council approved (?!?). The Priests' Council rejected ordaining Clarence Pope, as they deemed him far too "traditional."

My own view is that Ratzinger may well have made some type of promise to Pope connected with the establishment of a personal prelature. It may well have been twofold, that Pope would be in charge, and quite possibly that his episcopal orders would be recognized, since the record appears to indicate that Pope spent considerable effort documenting his line of succession at the Vatican's request.

Whatever the specifics of the alleged promise may have been, it seems to me that Pope envisioned a specific path to being named ordinary that would involve his resignation from the Episcopal House of Bishops, his reception into the Catholic Church, and then his ordination as a Catholic priest and possibly a bishop as well. Some part of this process went awry, to Pope's enormous disappointment and bitterness.

Bishop Clarence Pope's somewhat erratic journey provides what I think may be a context for Jeffrey Steenson's own resignation as an Episcopal bishop, his ordination as a Catholic priest, and his designation as US Ordinary. Steenson, remember, was clearly the number two behind Pope in the 1993 meeting with Ratzinger and apparently did much of the work in preparing the proposals in the written record.

He addressed the 2008 Anglican Use Conference in July of that year on "The Causes For My Becoming Catholic"; the text is on line. He describes what he presumably hopes his audience will believe was his last-straw issue as follows:

It is not necessary to rehearse all that was going on in the Episcopal Church at that time, except to say that the tumult reached a crescendo at the House of Bishops meeting on March 20, 2007. That was the day the bishops overwhelmingly rejected the valiant work that had been done to propose more effective instruments for the Anglican Communion, and they insisted that the polity of the Episcopal Church is independent, democratic, and connected to the rest of Anglicanism by voluntary association. By sunset I knew that I could not remain in the Episcopal Church under these circumstances.

He made no mention in that address of his impending ordination as a Catholic deacon in December 2008, nor his ordination as a Catholic priest in February 2009, nor what I strongly suspect was his already-foregone designation as US Ordinary in December 2011. Nor does he honestly characterize the close call he and Pope had with going over 15 years earlier -- if he'd been so pro-Catholic then, over the usual matters of women's ordination and the 1928 BCP, why did he need to wait for a much smaller decision by the House of Bishops to make the final push? The only mention he makes of the October 1993 meeting with Ratzinger is less than fully descriptive:

In October of 1993, I had the great privilege of meeting the Holy Father at the general audience, when a group of us were in Rome to explore how Catholic unity might be realized corporately by smaller Anglican communities.

It seems entirely reasonable to surmise that, had the course that Bishop Pope intended to follow in 1993 played out as planned, Steenson would almost certainly have gone over with Pope, perhaps as his vicar general and eventual successor. When the whole business was put on indefinite hold after 1994, Steenson stayed with The Episcopal Church, continuing to advance: in 2000, he became Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of the Rio Grande; in 2004, he was elected Bishop Coadjutor there, succeeding as Diocesan in 2005. At that point, he'd at minimum had his ticket punched as an Episcopal bishop, should the possibility of a Catholic personal prelature in the US re-emerge.

Opinions differ on what the problem was in 1994, and as a new Catholic, I must acknowledge my inexperience at reading Vatican tea-leaves. But it's almost impossible for me to avoid assuming that sometime after Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope in 2005, any impediments to an Anglican personal prelature in the US disappeared. Some time after 2005, but I would have to think well before any public announcement of his departure in 2007, someone, possibly Cardinal Law, who'd set up the 1993 meeting and also received Steenson as a Catholic in 2007, called him up and said something like, "Remember that thing we were talking about in 1993? Well, it's on again."

Who Is Jeffrey Steenson? -- I

As a newcomer to the dissident-Anglican movement in 2011, I certainly didn't see Jeffrey Steenson as a leader. Most attention was focused on David Moyer, whose quarrels with The Episcopal Church were much more visible, and in fact whose connection with the upcoming US Ordinariate was also plainer: John Hepworth had made him bishop for the TAC Patrimony of the Primate, the vehicle by which TAC parishes would go in. The TAC, via the Portsmouth Letter, was seen as the prime mover behind Anglicanorum coetibus, and the handicappers were putting both Hepworth and Moyer in major positions once national ordinariates were erected. The handicappers, of course, were influential bloggers at The Anglo-Catholic and elsewhere, and events proved them wrong in nearly every prediction.

When it became known in late 2011 that Steenson would become US Ordinary, it struck me as nothing I hadn't seen in the corporate world: a colorless unknown rises to the top, to the surprise of just about everyone except those in the loop. Steenson, who had been Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande, resigned that position in 2007 and was received into the Catholic Church the same year. Married, he was ordained an Anglican Use priest in 2009 and took up a position teaching in a Catholic seminary in Houston. Other than regular appearances at Anglican Use conferences, he maintained a very low profile, with most discussion in the blogosphere, insofar as it took place, centering on whether he'd betrayed Episcopalians in one or another way by becoming Catholic.

It wasn't until I learned of the 1993 approach by Steenson and his bishop, Clarence Pope, to Cardinal Ratzinger requesting a path to corporate union with the Catholic Church, that the reasons for Steenson's selection began to fall into place. Following the 1993 meeting, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith returned to Bishop Pope with a set of questions, to which Pope responded in 1994 with a detailed proposal that clearly formed the eventual basis for Anglicanorum coetibus: there would be ordinariates, similar to those for the military, on a national basis. Anglican Use style parishes with specifically Anglican liturgy would exist under the ordinariates. Married Anglican priests in these parishes would have dispensations from the normal requirement of celibacy. Parishioners would be catechized and received in a manner parallel to RCIA. It's worth pointing out that the TAC's 2007 Portsmouth Letter simply requested communion with the Catholic Church under whatever terms the Vatican chose to grant. The terms the Vatican granted were, with only a few differences, the terms of Pope's 1994 proposal, which we must assume was drafted in large part by Steenson.

In other words, I figured when Steenson was designated US Ordinary that he'd had some sort of inside track. I didn't realize that not only did he have the inside track, but he'd designed the whole race course! The 1994 proposal specified that, oh by the way, whoever was eventually designated US Ordinary would need to have been an Episcopal bishop. At the time, this probably meant Clarence Pope. However, Pope was diagnosed with cancer soon afterward, while the CDF fell into a decade-long silence over the proposal, which would not be revived until Ratzinger became Pontiff. At that point, the only credible candidate for US Ordinary, if the requirement remained that he be an Episcopal bishop, was Steenson himself -- Clarence Pope was still alive, but in very poor health (he passed away in 2012).

A Different Take

on the origin of Anglicanorum coetibus: there are several versions on the web concerning how Pope Benedict XVI's Anglican apostolic constitution came about. The most complete so far appears to be that of Prof Tighe, posted by Fr Phillips on The Anglo-Catholic blog. Someone has, however, pointed me in a different direction, to a meeting between then-Cardinal Ratzinger on one hand and a group of US Episcopal bishops and priests on the other, facilitated by Cardinal Law, in Rome in October 1993.

This meeting is mentioned in a book review by Fr Allan Hawkins, retired priest of the St Mary the Virgin Anglican Use parish in Arlington, TX:

[A] further, very important initiative was undertaken in 1993. In October of that year, Bishop Clarence Pope, then-Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth, went to Rome with Cardinal Bernard Law, then-Archbishop of Boston and ecclesiastical delegate for the Pastoral Provision, to meet with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They took with them a preparatory document, drawn up by two noted Anglican theologians, Doctor Wayne Hankey and Father Jeffrey Steenson.

This document, of course, predates the TAC's Portsmouth Letter by 14 years, and it's significant that one of its authors is the current US Ordinary, Jeffrey Steenson. A Letter to the Editor in the UK Catholic publication The Tablet in 1997 (not available on the web) by the same Wayne Hankey mentioned above gives a further history of this initiative: then-Cardinal Ratzinger approved the proposal and brought it up informally with John Paul II. John Paul supported it, but indicated it would need the approval of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which Cardinal Ratzinger was then Prefect.

The CDF, according to the Hankey letter-to-the-editor, opposed the proposal, even though Ratzinger was in favor. In order to prevent an outright "no" vote, the matter was dropped. However, I believe that this proposal contained effectively the outline of what would become Anglicanorum coetibus, and we may surmise that it basically sat in Ratzinger's desk until, as Pope Benedict XVI, he could issue it in 2009.

It's worth pointing out that an account of the meeting that I've seen notes that Ratzinger asked Bishop Pope, then-Fr Steenson, and the others for an estimate of how many Episcopalians would come over to the proposed body (clearly sketched out in the proposal as a personal ordinariate) if it were established. Bishop Pope, after some hemming and hawing, gave the number as 250,000. The actual number we've seen, in the 18 months since the actual erection of the Ordinariate, has been more like 1,000.

While this is only half the 500,000 estimate that Archbishop Hepworth gave for the members of the Traditional Anglican Communion who would come over, it's nevertheless clearly off by several orders of magnitude, and it's simply the difference between meaningful and insignificant; worthy of a Pope's attention or a waste of his time. It's worth noting, too, that if Bishop Pope and Msgr Steenson gave a number of 250,000 and Pope Benedict added to this number Hepworth's estimate of 500,000, he might have had the impression that worldwide, Anglican ordinariates could number well on their way to a million.