Some Reflections On The Upcoming Tenth Anniversary of Anglicanorum Coetibus

Although commemorations of the ten-year anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus have begun to appear, the remarkable thing is how few there have been so far. A visitor sent me a link to this one at the UK Catholic Herald. Its title reads, "It hasn’t been easy. But ten years on, the ordinariate is a success story". On one hand, it's mostly anecdotal happy talk. But on the other, it clearly refers only to the situation in the UK ordinariate, and it adds,

What of the United States and Australia? The ordinariates there are small. In the US the big achievement took place some years earlier, with the establishment of “Anglican Use” parishes under John Paul II. These, including the Church of Our Lady of Walsingham in Texas, have now teamed up with the ordinariate. But the number of Episcopalians interested in the ordinariate project has been minimal. In Australia, vast distances separate the small ordinariate groups and, as in Britain, no church buildings have been offered by Anglicans.

Anglican Use was, of course, overall a disappointment, with fewer than a dozen parishes in total, many of which folded before the ordinariate in the US was established. The most visible, Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio, has been slowly collapsing following an attempt by its former archdiocese to impose normal discipline on a parish troubled by sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement. A small and inexperienced ordinariate staff in Houston is unlikely to rescue the situation.

But, while all but acknowledging the failure of the US ordinariate, the author doesn't offer any insight into the reasons. If we're going to delve into the history of the movement, it's worthwhile revisiting the St Mary of the Angels parish, which as of late 2011 was, according to the designee who was meant to shepherd it into the ordinariate, intended to be the first parish received, with Cardinal Wuerl and Msgr Steenson clearly aware of its historic significance. Instead, the project failed spectacularly in a third round of the litigation that's dogged the parish for more than 40 years.

What happened? Looking around the web, I found what I believe is the current website for the parish faction that now controls the property. (Another faction maintains a hopeful Facebook page, although this is no longer the group that supported Fr Kelley.) An insight can be gained from this photo on the website:

It shows three men vested as fantasy-Catholic priests and deacons facing ad orientem in front of the Della Robbia altarpiece. The blurbs surrounding the photo say,

We encourage you to visit St. Mary of the Angels and experience the power of prayerful transcendence of the traditional English Mass.

and

Our services are traditional Anglican, much like you might have seen in the Catholic Church or high Episcopal Church prior to the 1960's.

I simply don't know what liturgy they're using now. As of 2012, they used a "uniate mass" dating from about 1905 consisting of Cranmerian prayers perhaps from the 1662 BCP inserted into an English translation of a Catholic Latin mass -- nothing "traditional English" about it. But whatever market this satisfies is very, very small. And that market is an important segment of the somewhat larger (though still small) market for "traditional worship". There's simply a group of people that wants fuss and feathers, no matter the fussbudgets and feather-shakers are fringe figures often unqualified to represent themselves as clergy in any real denomination, be it Anglican or Catholic.

This faction doesn't need to be Catholic, and in fact it doesn't want to be. I think it's a descendant of the "tree and branch" theory of Anglicanism espoused in the 1960s by the UK Anglican scholar S L Greenslade, against whom Bishop B C Butler argued. Fr Jack Barker's mentor Canon Albert DuBois clearly maintained this view, that certain Anglican denominations had a "Catholicity" that inhered, whether they were in unity with Rome or not.

I think a problem with the intellectual history behind Anglican Use and Anglicanorum coetibus is that this faction, DuBois and Barker specifically, was the initial leadership behind the dissidents at the 1976 Episcopal Church General Convention, which in succeeding years founded the "continuing Anglican" movement focused primarily on the ordination of women and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. "Continuers", as things have shaken out, were primarily just disgruntled and had no serious interest in becoming Catholic, especially if they had infrastructure that allowed them to look Catholic without adhering to pesky Catholic moral theology.

Thus the photo above. which I think sums up very concisely the misreading of us Episcopalianism behind the whole Anglican outreach project. No wonder a UK writer simply glosses over the problem.