Anglicanorum Coetibus Has Fizzled

The three ordinaries of the Anglican ordinariates established under Anglicanorum coetibus meet each year and pose for pictures. The crack team of dilettantes at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog is on the case. However, no report of the interview cited was issued on the blog, and aside from the photo, no link to any published interview was given. My regular correspondent had to wait until the November issue of Portal magazine, the UK ordinariate's monthly, to learn anything about the meeting in London last month. The issue can be found here.

My correspondent's take:

As you can see on pages 12 and 13, there was clearly nothing to report. These men have nothing to say to each other. The UK Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham struggles to achieve any meaningful liturgical identity. The US Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter sees home schooling as a means of attracting membership, and hopes that the Gilbertines will be a "useful model" for religious communities in the future. Who knows what the Australian Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, a few hundred strong, is up to?

Bp Lopes also noted during a talk at Walsingham that the majority of OCSP clergy do not have "other roles" such as chaplaincies and diocesan parish responsibilities. This is misleading, as most of these men are financially supported by TEC or other pensions. When that generation of clergy retires again, Bp Lopes will have to find diocesan jobs for their replacements or fold their mission parishes. If this model is not working well for the OOLW he should be worried. In any event, the Annual Conference seems to have been singularly devoid of meaningful content. A year from now there is supposed to be a symposium in Rome celebrating the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus. I do not foresee a much more substantive outcome than this non-event.

I haven't addressed the ordinariates for a while, in large part because I think there's less and less to say about them, while there's more and more to say about everything else. It's worth noting that among the three ordinaries, I don't think their total flock worldwide amounts to five figures, the size of a single average US parish. And it isn't growing -- yet again, it seems as though Houston, after years of supposed effort, is unable to produce a census of its membership.

My wife and I met with our pastor this past week to discuss supporting parish projects, and among the issues we covered, he never quite seemed to get around to asking if we felt the liturgy there was Anglican enough. Instead, he was concerned about parishioners leaving the Church due to the real crises in Washington, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rome, and nearly everywhere else.

On the other hand, I was watching a Patrick Coffin YouTube presentation on Medjugorje, where he said the cult represented a form of "fantasy catholicism", where people could wrap themselves in comfortable bromides that seemed sorta-kinda catholic, but weren't -- and I would add, are potentially dangerous, in that they're misleading about the true teachings of the Church. Having recently learned about "centering prayer", I'd say this is another form of "fantasy catholicism".

Dare I suggest that Anglicanorum coetibus has turned out to be yet another? What puzzles me is that, even after five former Episcopalian parishes made their suicide leap and left that denomination in 1977, they had to wait several years for a conference to decide just what the "Anglican patrimony" actually was. I'm not sure if that conference ever issued a report. But that doesn't matter; there was another such conference at Oxford a couple of years ago; I'm not sure if it ever decided anything more definite.

Yet the dilettantes and amateurs at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society confidently issue pronouncements on the precious spiritual treasures of the Anglican patrimony all the time. They have their tiny groups that one day will maybe look like All Saints Margaret Street, if they can get a few hundred like-minded congregants to supplement the couple of dozen they have and maybe even start a building fund and get some good vestments and an organ and hire a choir and stuff. Meantime, they can dream. No need to go looking for a reverent OF mass, they'll have something much better one day.

And certainly, no need to seek out good diocesan priests, an active and reverent diocesan parish with a real program and school, and actively support it with sacrificial giving.

My regular correspondent added,

Unfortunately most of the visible OCSP spokespeople have fallen into the trap of seizing on the Crisis as a stick to beat perceived "liberals" with, or at least a reminder that by moving into a small gated community they have avoided the problems of the larger metropolis. Both of these approaches must be severely off-putting to those contemplating coming to the Church from another denomination, or from unbelief, who should after all be the focus of evangelism, not disaffected Catholics.