Britain’s Ordinariate is in peril. Here is how to save it
by Damian Thompson, Catholic Herald:
Hostility from the authorities, and apathy from its own clergy, have put the Ordinariate’s future in danger. But there could be a simple solution.
The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham is a canonical structure for ex-Anglican clergy and lay people who have been granted – by a mighty and irrevocable decree of Pope Benedict XVI – their own English Missal based partly on The Book of Common Prayer.
The experiment has not been a runaway success, as members of the Ordinariate readily admit. Ever since the body came into being five and a half years ago, I’ve been listening to Ordinariate clergy predicting that it can’t last.
One priest was still wearing his Mass robes as he declared, à la Private Frazer, that “we’re dooomed!”
If so, there will be few tears shed by the bishops of England and Wales. They are queuing up to preside at its Requiem Mass. (They can do nothing about its sister ordinariate in America, now flourishing under its own 41-year-old bishop, Steven Lopes.)
In the words of one supporter of the Ordinariate, “the English hierarchy seems to have decided that the Catholic prohibition against ‘assisted dying’ doesn’t apply to corporate bodies.”
The bishops’ hostility dates back to 20 October 2009, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith announced – with flamboyant disregard for ecumenical etiquette – that Anglicans coming over to Rome could have an entirely new church structure free from the meddling of local bishops.
(The CDF didn’t put it like that, but you only had to look at the faces of English Catholic prelates as they pretended to “welcome” the Holy Father’s initiative to guess how pleased they were.)
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