So one of the takeaways I had from that homily was that a Catholic priest could tell me a great deal about my baptism that, while it was true and valid, I was never seriously taught as a Protestant, even though in the eyes of the Church, this baptism had the same effect no matter a Protestant denomination performed it. I thought I knew everything, huh? All of a sudden the Church is teaching me new things about stuff I took for granted. Not long before I heard that homily, I belatedly added my late godparents to my prayers, possibly because I was already moving toward that new understanding.
The homily also brought me back to the reading I'd done by the convert from Anglicanism, theologian, and bishop B C Butler, who spends a lot of time in The Idea of the Church with the debate among the Church Fathers on the validity of schismatic sacraments. He concludes, with St Augustine, that the Church recognizes schismatic baptisms as a way to bring those outside the Church into the Church, but it does not imply that the schismatic groups are in any way equivalent to the Church.
If you can get to the sacraments, especially to baptism, you must of course do so. But if, through no fault of your own, you cannot receive grace sacramentally, then God has his own ways of dealing with your predicament. (p 148)But once I listen to the Church and have these issues clarified for me, I have an obligation to take the Church seriously and continue to develop as a Catholic in a spirit of humility. The thrust of Butler's arguments throughout much of his career was that Anglicanism is not a denomination somehow separate but equal from Rome. Theologically it is schismatic and in a position no different from Arianism or Donatism. The Church recognizes Protestant baptisms for its reasons, though it doesn't see anything special about Anglican baptisms over and above Church of the Nazarene baptisms.
Thus I feel profoundly uncomfortable with remarks, most recently by Fr Bergman, that Anglicans have some special status that entitles them to fix the Catholic Church. As he put it in the essay I linked yesterday, "The refuge we sought was populated in many quarters not by shepherds in the mold of St. John Paul but by scoundrels and wolves who could be aptly described as Judas priests. . . . Our unique background means we don’t have time for the confusion . . . . We do not question the Faith but wonder only how better to communicate and share it with those who desperately need it."
The strong implication here is that Fr Bergman, his fellow ordinariate priests, and presumably right-thinking members of their exclusive little flocks, haven't left the faith at all and don't question it. There was nothing they needed to come into. They're going to fix their newly acquired co-religionists, though. All one billion of them. I've heard this line from Fr Hunwicke as well; I won't cite lay spokespeople, simply because it's the responsibility of their priests and their bishop to teach them correctly, something it would appear men like Fr Bergman haven't yet been fully formed to do.
This idea that there's something special about Anglicans that makes them experts on being Catholic -- indeed, it would seem more Catholic than the Pope, and these people really mean it, they're gonna fix the Church now -- is simply bizarre.
What puzzles me is that when I realized that Anglicanorum coetibus wasn't going to work out for the St Mary of the Angels parish, and my wife and I would need to start over with RCIA, I began to understand for the first time that the Catholic tradition was something I would need to spend the rest of my life learning and understanding. It wasn't something I would get after a few months of Evangelium and a quickie confirmation. I wouldn't be entitled to go out and show the Church how it's done.
Why, by the way, do none of the self-important spokespeople for any of the ordinariates ever mention the Catholic intellectual tradition that's at the basis of Western culture? It reminds me a little of a member of our Bible class who asked me if I'd ever read Chesterton. I asked him in reply if he'd ever read Summa Contra Gentiles. He came back the next week and told me maybe he needed to start reading Aquinas after all.
So far, I can't imagine having that exchange with anyone in any of the ordinariates.
