As far as I can see, the legal idea of a personal prelature is of fairly long standing, but up to the 1980s, almost never implemented. The earliest example I can find is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, which according to Wikipedia
is a personal jurisdiction, meaning that it has no defined territory and that its jurisdiction extends to those whom it serves throughout the world. It has jurisdiction wherever American men and women in uniform serve. The jurisdiction of the Archdiocese extends to all United States government property in the United States and abroad, including U.S. military installations, embassies, consulates and other diplomatic missions.Established in 1917, it was eventually expanded to its present form by John Paul II, who reconstituted the military vicariate as the present Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, naming Archbishop Joseph T. Ryan its first archbishop.
Although discussions of the Anglican ordinariates often compare them to the military archdiocese, this jurisdiction oversees military chaplains, who nevertheless attend seminary and are formed and ordained as priests in their home dioceses and remain incardinated there. In fact, priests intending to become chaplains serve in diocesan parishes for three years after ordination before they leave for military assignments. On military retirement, they are still quite young by canonical standards, and they return to their home dioceses to continue parish work until canonical retirement.
As a result, the Anglican ordinariates aren't a very close parallel to the military archdiocese. Catholic chaplains conform fully to the Catholic brand, and the local bishops have a major stake in their formation and intend eventually to get them back for diocesan work. Ordinariate priests are not formed according to the same standards; no MDiv is required; there is no real definition of "Anglican" that qualifies them for the program; and as a practical matter, there is little vetting -- candidates who for whatever reason were turned down for ordination in TEC after completing seminary are accepted, when a Catholic seminarian turned down by a Catholic bishop would not become a diocesan priest.
Leaving the military archdiocese aside, the jurisdiction often cited (including in Vatican documents) as the "first" personal prelature is Opus Dei, established by John Paul II in the apostolic constitution Ut Sit in 1982. (There may be some small difference between a "personal jurisdiction" and a "personal prelature".) Opus Dei has been the source of much controversy even outside Dan Brown's misrepresentations, but this is largely beyond the scope of this blog.
The problem a visitor has referred to me, however, is that Opus Dei as a personal prelature allows a sort of parallel -- maybe an alternate-universe version -- of Catholicism to exist outside normal diocesan discipline. Opus Dei appears, for instance, to recruit lay people for institutions that would normally be religious orders, but the recruiting methods appear to differ significantly from those of recognized orders and have sometimes been criticized as cult-like.
By the same token, Ordinariate priests wear Catholic clericals and call themselves Catholic priests, ministering to groups that call themselves Catholic churches, but even beyond the fact that many are married, the criteria for ordination are much more lax, their formation as "Anglicans", however sketchy, is taken for granted, and their supervision is minimal. Episcopal visits to their "Catholic churches" are unusual at best; many have never been visited at all.
As I've become more experienced as a Catholic, I've come to recognize that despite a tendency in places like Church Militant to call diocesan bishops good guys or bad guys, the work of dioceses and diocesan parishes proceeds from day to day without much reference to what Archbishop X says about this, that, or the other controversial issue. Our own parish has thrived for more than 100 years, producing vocations with regularity no matter who happens to be Archbishop of Los Angeles.
In fact, the archdiocese seems to have had consistently competent people at the less visible lower levels of its bureaucracy. As a result, my inclination in general is to trust the working of the Almighty in dioceses established and working from centuries of experience since the original vision of people like St Charles Borromeo. What happens to Opus Dei is above my paygrade, but I see a real problem so far in the fruits that aren't emerging from Anglicanorum coetibus.
