My Inner Detective Has A Question

I'v been thinking more about the agenda behind repeated proposals, pretty much all with Cardinal Law behind them, for an Anglican personal prelature. The first has been outlined by Fr Jack Barker, covering the 1976-7 discussions in the context of the 1976 Episcopalian general convention. The second was the 1993 meeting between TEC Bishop of Fort Worth Clarence Pope, Jeffrey Steenson, then a rector in that diocese, and Cardinal Ratzinger, which I covered here.. The third, a series of meetings between Pope's successor in Fort Worth, Jack Iker, and other Fort Worth clergy, took place in 2006-9, covered here.

Here's what my inner Philip Marlowe wants to know: why Episcopalians? Here's a YouTube by a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod pastor who outlines why he thinks Lutherans are closer to Catholics than Anglicans. It's at a 101 level, and he misses some key points, but I think he's basically correct:

The first thing he misses, though it doesn't really damage his basic point, is that he relies on the XXXIX Articles as a credal statement. He speaks with specific reference to the ACNA here, but the ACNA uses the 1979 BCP with TEC, and the 1979 BCP places the Articles in a section called Historical Documents of the Church. A liberal TEC priest explained in an adult forum I attended that this meant these were sorta-kinda interesting but no longer strictly binding. This would presumably apply to the ACNA as well as TEC.

The pastor's point in the YouTube, which is echoed in other sources I've seen, is that Article XVIII

The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is Faith.

is in opposition to the doctrine of Real Presence, to which Lutherans ascribe. However, it's also recognized that Anglicanism has not been able to enforce doctrine effectively one way or another for some centuries, if ever, so this question is actually up to individual Anglicans. But the pastor's basic point stands -- we simply don't know exactly what any individual Anglican actually believes with regard to the Lord's Supper or just about anything else.

So, why did Cardinal Law take Episcopalians as his target, when their doctrinal statements, insofar as they can be taken seriously, are farther from Catholicism than Lutherans? One place to speculate would be that high-church Anglo-Catholics fetishize liturgy over doctrine. As long as you're facing the right direction, wear the right vestments, light the correct number of candles, swing the thurible just the right way, who needs a catechism?

The Michael Voris wing of the Church was exercised a few years ago when Pope Francis made friendly gestures toward Lutherans and Bp Barron called Luther a "mystic of grace". But when my ELCA pastor friend calls himself a "high church Lutheran", I think he actually means something more specific than anyone who calls himself a "high church Anglican", which more accurately refers to preference in vestments, liturgical observance, and church architecture than doctrine.

Indeed, this is what the New Model ordinariate startups have been stressing: "reverent" liturgy over the Church as unity. Sell a fantasy of building a gothic monument in the piney woods one day over the need to support an existing messy parish with all the human issues it entails.

But this goes to why Cardinal Law seems to have had such interest in rubbing the sores of Anglican dissent over three decades, and it also gives some insight into why the 1993 and 2006-8 proposals were so half baked. If the 1993 proposal had been at all serious, Pope and Steenson would have gone in, not with just a draft of Anglicanorum coetibus, but with pledges of at least $100 million for purchasing real estate, establishing a pension fund and other benefits, and litigation. ($100 million would probably have been inadequate by at least one order of magnitude, but it would at least be an initial indication of how serious the move would be.)

What eventually emerged in 2009 generated a certain amount of hype but little else, and only the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society and several dozen highly marginal Protestant clergy ever took it seriously. I think this is because the 1970s and 1993 proposals were made primarily to advance Law's personal agenda. Had John Paul II passed away in the mid 1990s, it's possible that Law, with good contacts in Opus Dei, support from the Spanish speaking Church, backing from the Bernardin wing of AmChurch, and the achievement of publishing the Catechism, could have had good prospects in a conclave. If he'd brought over 250,000 Episcopalians as well, it could well have sealed the deal.

But the Anglican proposals were never realistic. A more productive evangelical direction could well be with Lutherans. The more I see of Francis, the more I think there's substance there.