Last September, Bp Lopes invited Bishop Daniel Martins, the 11th Bishop of the Diocese of Springfield in the Episcopal Church, to serve as the guest preacher at an ecumenical choral Evensong at OLW during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity on Sunday, January 23 of this year. We must assume that Bp Martins received an honorarium consistent with his station and expenses to allow him and his wife to travel in comfort. This in turn suggests that Bp Lopes had expectations of some sort for this visit.
Bp Martins's report of the visit, though, must be a disappointment to Bp Lopes on several grounds. The chief impression I get from Martins's account is how uncomfortable he felt.
To be sure, in the midst of this familiarity, there is a baseline level of anxiety, since I know I am not welcome to receive Holy Communion when the time comes. I do not fully agree with the reasons behind this lack of eucharistic hospitality, but I understand and respect it. My anxiety is ameliorated because the mainstream Roman rite as it is practiced in the United States, especially in the 2011 translation, is different enough from my regular liturgical experience that it doesn’t feel like I’m being denied a meal in my home. It feels like I’m a guest.But oddly, the DW missal, borrowing so heavily from the BCP, makes things worse, not better:
Apart from knowing precisely where I was, there was nothing to distinguish what I heard and saw from what I have experienced in a number of Anglo-Catholic parishes, both in the United States and in England. In that context, then, having to step out from my pew to allow others to go to the Communion rail, but not walk forward myself, was profoundly unsettling. It felt like it might if I were to travel in time to my boyhood home and see my parents and siblings and all the same bric-a-brac on shelves and paintings on walls, only to find my room had been let out and I couldn’t spend the night there.Then he almost makes a very peculiar observation, when he doesn't quite follow up to these remarks:
The Evensong was almost an anti-climax, but gorgeous. I told a friend that it sounded like Westminster Abbey and looked like All Saints Margaret Street (an Anglo-Catholic shrine church in London). The Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis were from the Anglican Charles V. Stanford’s scrumptious setting in the key of C. The organ and choir were magnificent. The whole thing felt utterly and familiarly Anglican.Isn't he basically asking why go to all this trouble, to go through RCIA or Evangelium, and for priests, to submit dossiers and have the old boys put in the right words for you, when you've already got what you need at Westminster Abbey and All Saints Margaret Street? What he's saying, in fact, is that the OCSP is doing a great job at trying to be Anglo-Catholic! He pats them on the back and goes home, er, not quite comfortable, since he couldn't go up for the sacrament!
This turns things upside down. He's come to Houston to check on how well the never-Anglican Bp Lopes is doing at trying to look Anglican! Do I hear syncretism? He continues a few paragraphs down almost as if he'd made the point I've often made:
Moreover, do the ordinariates really manifest the genuine Anglican patrimony? Or are they just a hothouse version of one style of the Anglo-Catholic fringe, a convenient way for clergy and laity who already feel fundamentally compromised as Anglicans to just continue doing what they’re doing, only with a different structure of accountability (no more vestries and standing committees and synods, but a clear hierarchical authority)? Do the ordinariates in fact undermine unity by bleeding off the motivation for the hard ecumenical conversations that are necessary? These are significant questions around which there is not yet abundant clarity.This is a variation on what I've been saying -- in fact, Bp Lopes has farmed out the job of determining what "genuine Anglican patrimony" really is to a semi-official group of poseurs whose actual experience in Anglican denominations has been brief or none. Indeed, Bp Lopes is presenting the OLW version of high-church to Bp Martins, who presumably having survived the Jefferts Schori era still wearing a mitre, must have a much more concrete idea of what "genuine Anglican patrimony" consists of. He's being polite, but he's shaking his head as he walks away.
Is there a future for the ordinariates? Sooner or later they will run out of disaffected Anglicans. Will they be able to do first-level evangelization? Are there very many Catholics who will find that liturgical ambience compelling? There are already more Anglican clergy who wish to row that particular boat across the Tiber than there are congregations that they can lead. In North America, there are 53 parishes in the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. Some, like Our Lady of Walsingham, are booming. Others are marginal. All live in relative isolation, spread across the vast expanse of the United States and Canada.
