So, What Are The Ordinariates Good For?

My regular correspondent sent me screen shots from a thread on the Anglican Ordinariate Informal Conversation forum. A dialogue between John Beeler and Peter Smith began with references to "hate" on this blog but moved on into the question of what Anglicanorum coetibus is good for, and what people might be expected to get out of it. The lack of any real focus in the opinions, and in fact the drift toward indifferentism, are somewhat troubling. Here's the first one (click on the image for a larger copy):

Peter Smith, who writes for the Register and should really know better, says the question is neither liturgy nor language, since Hispanics in Texas have grown fond of worshiping in Arabic at mosques, and we should admire their zeal. Well, shall we say, up to a point, huh? Smith says it's the "poor witness" of Catholic churches (and I'm just not sure what he means about that) that's driving people elsewhere in search of the Gospel. Well, you're not gonna find the Gospel in a mosque, Mr Smith.

So let's back up and ask him to explain what the "poor witness" in the Catholic Church consists of. I want to see concrete examples. How is the witness of, say, Bp Barron, Word on Fire, Ascension Presents, or Revevant Radio, just as a few examples, failing? Mr Smith himself writes for the Register. Is that poor witness? Where is poor witness specifically to be found? Just general references to holding hands around the altar or dancing in the aisles won't cut it. My e-mail is on the right.

Mr Smith suggests i have a "flawed interpretive framework with weak knowledge base". Hmm. My interpretive framework probably moves from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience to Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles to C S Lewis's Surprised by Joy to B C Butler's The Idea of the Church to Frederick Kinsman's Salve Mater to Douglas Bess' Divided We Stand, mediated by four years hard time in a graduate English department studying linguistics, the history of the English language, rhetoric, and English cultural history. I spent 30 years as an Episcopalian in parishes high, low, and broad, and another two as a "continuer". You? My e-mail is at right.

Here's a second screen shot: (Again, click on the image for a larger view):

What's puzzling is that Mr Smith here clearly thinks ordinariate parishes should be aiming at "a working class family with a high school education". But wait a moment. His interlocutor, Mr Beeler, insists he was "formed by and love the same kind of high church that the ordinariate does". There seems to be a basic misunderstanding of target audience here. Consider that many Novus Ordo parishes are in fact in working-class districts, and many continue to feature a working-class ethnic appeal even if they're in now-gentrified areas.

Is Mr Smith suggesting that ordinariate parishes somehow supplant the mission of Novus Ordo parishes outside the original, clearly expressed audience (in Anglicanorum coetibus itself and the Complementary Norms) of former Episcopalians? It seems to me that Mr Beeler is probably more correct in identifying himself as part of the ordinariates' target audience, and Mr Smith is making suggestions that aren't very clear.

Here's the third screen shot:

Mr Smith is still deeply confused here, I think. He keeps referring to the "working class" although if he writes for a living, he's sociologically speaking an intellectual, and not a member of the working class. (I would note that commentary that I think is incisive on the recent UK election suggests that Labour lost its vision when urban intellectuals felt entitled to speak for the working class, which inexplicably went Tory. I wonder if something like that is happening here.)

I would actual;y suggest that Mr Smith, who if anything is imprecise in this exchange, is expressing not so much a wish to appeal to a reified "working class" (he is probably not familiar with any actual working class people) as a more generalized wish for personal authenticity, which has been characteristic of middle-class younger people poorly educated in contemporary colleges. He seems to be longing for a situation in which people "eat, breathe, and drink Catholic" in some authentic way.

But how will affecting archaic and academicized English in liturgy bring authenticity? If you discover you like Trollope or TV films of Jane Austen novels, fine. But if you grew up in suburban Ohio, for instance, this won't be an authentic part of who you are. Trying to graft it onto idealized "working class" people won't work, either. And again, Mr Smith is not very precise in this exchange, and I'm not sure what he's aiming at.

Does he think the Divine Worship missal will bring the "working class" as he imagines it back to the Church where Novus Ordo has failed? I'm wondering who has the flawed interpretive framework here, to tell the truth.