Someone brought to the attention of the Anglican Ordinariate Forum Fscebook group (the public forum, not the informal one) that the Our Lady of the Atonement bulletin last week mentioned that Quinceañeras were held at the church [This is a Latin celebration, both a religious and a social event, of a girl's fifteenth birthday.]I covered Cahenlyism most fully in this post s year ago. It was a proposal in the 1890s by Peter Cahensly, a prominent German Catholic layman, to have separate hierarchies in the American Church for each group of ethnic immigrants in the US. This was apparently intended mainly to avoid situations where German immigrant Catholics would have Irish priests and bishops in charge of their parishes.This has led to a blizzard of comments—-96 to date—-some of them making the point that San Antonio is 60% Hispanic, and that there are significant numbers of Hispanic Episcopalians, or just “what’s it to you?”, but many others saying that an Ordinariate parish should be culturally “English” and that Mexicans with their celebrations derived from Aztec fertility rites have no place there.
At one point there was a Spanish language OCSP community of former Episcopalians in Pinecrest FL, which has since folded, but I believe that their former administrator, Fr Pedro Toledo, travels periodically to Incarnation, Orlando to offer Confession in Spanish. Cahenslyite deviation indeed.
It does underline that the Ordinariate is not even a unified concept among its own adherents.
As best I understand the history, this never rose to the level of a formal proposal, and it never resulted in a formal rejection by Leo XIII, but a consensus arose both in Rome and the US that things weren't going to be done that way. However, I don't believe this ever reached the point that it was formalized in canon law -- I hope more knowledgeable visitors can chime in here.
But that a Latin tradition should cause controversy if it's celebrated in an ordinariate parish shows that there is some notion that the Anglicanorum in the coetibus refers to people of English or Episcopalian cultural roots, or more broadly, as Fr Bartus explained to an adult forum that I attended, "white people". (I know Fr Bartus well enough to know that neither irony nor humor is part of the man's makeup.)
So we're left with the question: is Quinceañera or Día de Muertos appropriate in an ordinariate parish? My answer would be derived from Wittgenstein, in which the solution to the problem emerges from the disappearance of the problem. In a novus ordo parish, this would be up to, say, the worship committee, the Fil-Am council, or whichever other parish body was involved, in consultation with the pastor.
In a novus ordo parish, the result would probably be processions, flowers, and lots of food. In an ordinariate parish, apparently a certain level of snobbery and bitter debate, no flowers, no processions, no food.
But this gets to the Cahenslyite conundrum as well. In effect, Cahensly's proposal, never quite folly defined or elaborated, would still amount to a personal prelature for certain interest groups. And this leads to the question, well above my paygrade, of why the idea of a personal prelature emerged in the late 20th century, when Leo XIII implicitly rejected it about 1900.
The first personal prelature was Opus Dei. It appears that Bernard Law was involved in some way with it, since he had been involved with, and maintained contacts with, Opus Dei since his time as a Harvard student in the early days of the American movement. At roughly the same time that John Paul was reviewing this possibility for Opus Dei, Bernard Law was advocating a personal prelature for disgruntled Episcopalians.
Law, an extremely ambitious man whom I've heard intended to succeed John Paul II as pontiff had it not been that John Paul outlived Law's expectations, was an opportunist and may have hoped that an Anglican personal prelature could in some way leverage his rise in the Church.
We're left now, with a personal prelature for Anglicans belatedly established under Benedict, trying to address the question of what problem it's meant to solve. Is it meant to cater to a particular ethnicity ("white people", perhaps?) in a way that novus ordo doesn't? I would say that Leo XIII was correct in saying this idea isn't worthy of a formal answer.
Is a personal prelature needed to cater to a particular liturgy? Why would that be necessary? Latin masses have prospered far more than Divine Worship within novus ordo dioceses. So we're left with the puzzle of why this strange personal prelature is needed, beyond that it seemed like a good idea to Bernard Law.
If any of the ordinariates had a strong leader, or perhaps even a strong advocate in Rome, who could articulate reasons for its existence, it might make a difference. In North America, Jeffrey Steenson comes off as an opportunist and an incompetent administrator. Bp Lopes -- I wonder why Bp Barron has never, to my knowledge, mentioned Anglicanorum coetibus or the North American ordinariate as any sort of bright spot in the suffering Church.
I would guess Bp Lopes is known to his brother bishops, if at all, as the guy who broke his leg falling off a ladder in his residence. Says a lot about a personal prelature.
I would guess that Cardinal Law, although he may have thought the establishment of an Anglican personal prelature could in some way further his career, he wouldn't have wanted the job, and he wouldn't have done any better in it than the others.
So if there's a reason for it, we've yet so see an effective leader who can show us what it is.
