Thoughts On The "Anglican Catholic" Blogosphere

The community of blogs that might once have been called Anglo-Catholic has undergone quite a bit of change since Anglicanorum coetibus. I think this reflects some of Patrick Madrid's reservations about "Anglican Catholics". Some of the most popular blogs pre-2011-12, like Mr Smuts's and The Anglo-Catholic, have become inactive. Indeed, as it's been outlined to me, Mr Campbell, a driving force behind that one, came into the OCSP with the small Incarnation Orlando parish but has since devoted more effort to the SSPX, something Mr Madrid seems to have anticipated.

I'm not sure if Fr Seraiah has stopped blogging entirely, but his profile is certainly lower, which probably suits his superiors, and it probably also reflects the fact that real Catholic priests in dioceses have a lot to do and can't afford to spend time on social media, at least in idle chat. The bloggers remaining from the pre-2012 era seem to be those connected with the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society and Mr Chadwick. Why is this?

I think in some measure this is because, whether Pope Benedict intended it or not, Anglicanorum coetibus was a put-up-or-shut-up. Within a year or two, the minimal response from the intended coetus, i.e., existing groups of Anglicans who'd already been petitioning, was a disappointment at best. Whatever the traffic to the blogs, which could never have been more than hundreds per day, the former bloggers must have begun to feel they were addressing, and speaking for, much smaller audiences than they'd envisioned.

I think Anglicanorum coetibus also complicated the question of exactly what does an "Anglican Catholic" believe. This is a question Fr Longenecker had to address late in the story arc of Anglo-Catholicism: late in his youth as an evangelical, he saw the Anglo-Catholic light and went straight to Oxford for his training. He became a Church of England parish priest on the Isle of Wight. But he began to see the contradictions in the "Anglican Catholic" position: "Catholic within Anglicanism" is the thing-which-is-not. Anglican "tradition" goes back 500 years, but if you cross the Channel, Catholicism goes back another 15 centuries. The C of E move to ordain women was a pinprick that popped a much bigger balloon for him.

There's also the bucket of snakes the Catholic Church has brought into the picture in raising a thing called the "Anglican patrimony". Nobody can say quite what this is. Anglican music and hymns -- for that matter, German Protestant music and hymns, and American Evangelical music and hymns -- have been incorporated into Catholic worship long before Anglicanorum coetibus. So it isn't music. Cranmerian prayers sprinkled into a novus ordo mass translated into archaized English rings about as true as an evening at Medieval Times.

And are we trying to resuscitate pre-Reformation English Catholicism in any way? I don't see it; the Divine Worship mass looks back mostly on 1664 while ignoring context like the XXXIX Articles. The "Gilbertines" in Calgary are a small family of opportunists who had their current title suggested to them by Houston.

Is it copes, incense, and birettas? I've got to say that after five years in Catholic diocesan masses, the Anglo-Catholic fuss and feathers, while certainly nostalgic, strikes me as over-the-top. Its appeal is limited and always will be.

So what we're left with is remnants -- the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog and Mr Chadwick's. Mrs Gyapong, as it's been explained to me, is a former Evangelical who came to "Anglican Catholicism" in midlife, but whose actual catechesis has clearly been minimal. Mr Chadwick, by his account, got as far as ordination to the Catholic transitional diaconate (if that's what it was), but for whatever reason, the transition didn't take, and he never had a licit, and quite possibly never a valid, ordination as a priest. The episcopi vagantes with whom he associated himself were, by his account, disreputable and corrupt.

My regular correspondent asks what Abp Hepworth saw in Mr Chadwick that he would "recognize" his ordination. Good question, I can't answer it here. Nevertheless, having apparently failed at his only parish assignment, without a licit, and possibly not a valid, ordination to the priesthood, having left the Catholic Church without formal laicization and subsequently married, and now representing himself as a "priest" (who says "mass" apparently only in his garage), he claims both the prestige of Catholicism and Anglicanism on his blog.

I can't imagine that many serious Catholics take much interest in this "Anglican Catholic" stuff. At basis, I think it's been a major error for the CDF to open the door to it. I think the only way to correct it, at least in North America, will be for Bp Lopes to begin a major program of catechesis.