The actual constitution was drafted as a result of a meeting between TEC bishop Clarence Pope and Fr Jeffrey Steenson and Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, and the work product resulting from that meeting appears to have formed the eventual text of Anglicanorum coetibus and the Complementary Norms. Nichols's narrative relies largely on hypostatized Trends, a Catholic element, a Protestant element, a Latitudinarian element, Catholic-minded Anglicanism, ecumenism, and so forth. The puzzling thing is how few individuals, specific events, or actual documents are referenced -- there's just Henrician Reformation and other cloud-like entities drifting over the narrative.
The one thing that strikes me is the section on Pope Benedict and His Vision. On one hand, I think it's hard to attribute a vision to Benedict when Anglicanorum coetibus appears to have been drafted primarily by the American Jeffrey Steenson at the instigation of the American Cardinal Law, with the intent of addressing a specifically American set of circumstances, to wit, the 1970s Episcopalian prayer book revisions and ordination of women, which had created a specifically American dissident movement that Law's proposals were meant to address.
It's worth pointing out that Nichols requires the Traditional Anglican Communion. which he characterizes as "a worldwide (if somewhat ramshackle) body of Continuing Anglicans" to justify his postulating a larger intrnational movement, though he doesn't identify John Hepworth as the main actor, he doesn't mention that Hepworth's initiatives were almost immediately repudiated by the TAC bishops, and he seems to be completely unaware of the 1993 meeting between Pope, Steenson, and Ratzinger.
The real puzzle is that Nichols imputes a much larger agenda to Benedict, an evangelization project that would embrace not just Anglicans, but Lutherans, Lefebvrists, and Eastern Orthodox. Well, this was written in 2012 and overtaken by events early the following year. Someone may be able to help me out here, but I'm not aware of any concrete proposal for evangelizing any of these other groups that involved any sort of personal prelature or other special structure to bring them into the Church. And as of 2013, for reasons that aren't at all clear, Benedict seems simply to have dropped the project and abdicated. Whatever his agenda. other things clearly supervened.
I've exchanged e-mails with a friendly ELCA pastor who plans to retire this summer. He describes himself as an "Anglican wannabe" and seems to be a high-church Lutheran who vests in alb and chasuble. I don't think I'll ask him about the prospects he might see in an equivalent evangelization move toward Lutherans from some future pope until he's well and truly retired, because I have a feeling that just about any observation he might make could be problematic otherwise.
My guess is that, if he's aware at all of how Anglicanorum coetibus has fared in the US, tearing parishes apart as it has, attracting only those clergy who had few career prospects as Protestants, with insignificant interest among its target market of disgruntled Episcopalians, he would simply respond that the idea as it's emerged has proven unworkable from a practical standpoint. Maybe if the CDF went back to the drawing board, something better could be developed.
So I find Nichols's essay an odd artifact of an optimism that simply hasn't proved justified.
