Here's A Question

So for its next trick, The Episcopal Church is looking at a gender-neutral revision of the Book of Common Prayer:

The Episcopal Church formed a committee Wednesday to “provide a pathway” toward revising the Book of Common Prayer to include gender-neutral language.

Church leaders called for immediate revisions to correct the “overwhelming use of masculine language” throughout the book, arguing that the language is now a hindrance to spiritual inclusion, according to the Episcopal Church website.

How many people do you think are going to say, "That's the last straw! I'm going over to the ACA/ACNA/REC/ACC/whatever!"? How about the OCSP? Well, if the stars are in alignment, if there's a respectable ACNA parish nearby, if friendships aren't broken, the ACNA may pick up a few. The others, including the OCSP, maybe a dozen at best among them.

In that context, my regular correspondent commented a few days ago,

"Continuing" Anglicanism is chained to its evil twin, real Anglicanism, insofar as almost no one who was never a member of TEC etc is ever going to join a "continuing" denomination. If mainstream Anglicanism were smitten by a punitive plague its continuing cousins would likewise disappear in due course. The depressing math of this situation was an unspoken drag on the TAC which joining the Catholic church was supposed to rectify. "Our Little Parish Will Grow Like a Mustard Seed" was the title of one of Mrs Gyapong's long-ago posts on The Anglo-Catholic.

I don't think the question of why this would be the case was ever thought through; maybe the expectation was that every single Anglican who had ever become Catholic would start attending an Ordinariate parish. Perhaps it was just a sense that one would be part of a major enterprise; as if your little bnb had been taken over by the Hilton chain. How could business fail to improve? In any event, Annunciation, Ottawa did NOT grow like a mustard seed; in fact it lost about a third of its membership in the process of joining the OCSP and has never completely rebounded.

So where is OCSP growth to come from? Tying its fortunes to mainstream Anglicanism seems no more fruitful now than it did in TAC days. So now the target market seems to be not disaffected Anglicans, but disaffected Catholics. They are not in short supply, that's for sure, but their existence paradoxically undermines the appeal to Anglicans.

Wasn't the idea to get away from the infighting and factionalism of Anglicanism, the sense that one was at best able to hole up in a bunker of orthodoxy at some particular parish? Now it seems that OCSP communities are marketing themselves as exactly that parish. Sad.

It's entirely possible that someone of Mr Coulombe's caliber will look at the latest TEC developments and post on the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog, "Now's our chance! At least 250,000 Episcopalians will now become Catholic! We just have to let them know about us!"

At least since the original 1978 talks between Bp Law and Fr Barker, there's been this fantasy that a last-straw event will drop significant numbers of (fill in the blank) onto the Catholic Church without the Church having to do anything special (such as set up a real prelature instead of a dungeons-and-dragons role play fantasy like the OCSP) to bring them in.