Rather than having to fully swim the Tiber, as the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman had to, I read the following article:Catholic News Agency
The Vatican this morning announced that the Holy Father has approved the erection of 'Personal Ordinariates' within the Anglican community who wish to be brought into full communion with Rome. There are already Anglican Use parishes in America, and the creation of these will apparently "allow Anglicans to enter into full communion whilst maintaining some aspects of the distinctive Anglican spiritual patrimony".
Rather than rejoice at this development, notice how the prelates of the two sides, Catholic and Anglican, scrabble around trying to pick up the pieces of 'ecumenical dialogue'. I can only assume ecumenism must mean agree that we're all equally wrong. They say this is a furthering of the last 40 years in acknowledging what we have in common. Rowan Williams desperately pleads to his bishops that he's sorry not to have "alerted" them earlier, as if this is some sort of new strain of Swine Flu. No, it's Rome openly extending an open hand of compassion asking her seperated children to return. Not a product of "joint working" or "mutual enrichment".
So, please Anglo-Catholics, avail unto Rome, the successor of St Peter the prince of the Apostles, and escape communion with a fractured body of liberals, protestants, sodomites and feminists. "One more thing and I'm out of here" or so the joke goes, with traditionalist Anglicans who keep seeing their church disintegrate. Now there is a positive reason for them to come to Rome.
But what will it mean to maintain distinctive aspects of Anglican spiritual patrimony? Perhaps the same thing as maintaining a distinctive 'spirit of Vatican II' patrimony: one which, at its heart, seems to have sought to destroy the Catholic faith and its practice and beliefs from their very core: Liturgy. The Protestant 1662 book of Common Prayer and its creation by Cranmer has been strikingly compared with the Catholic 1960s post-conciliar reform. How can these be used as authentic bastions of true Catholic patrimony? Perhaps now that we are about to get a semi-decent English translation of the liturgy we are moving in the right step, towards Cranmer. What a sorry state of affairs.
Only time will tell what these structures will consist of; will the priestly orders which have been previously proclaimed as "totally null and void" need to now be con-validated by Catholic bishops? Will the faithful need to be "received" into the Catholic Church? Will the Anglican Baptisms be examined for possible invalidity (especially if conducted in free and easy evangelical wings of the Anglican communion) and therefore offered conditional Baptism? Somehow I doubt it.
In any case, once the whole mess is sorted out perhaps the Anglo-Catholics will explore a unique and authentic English Catholic spiritual patrimony: The Sarum use of the Roman Rite, or the various other ancient missals used in medieval England. Vatican II, in its constitution Sacrosanctum Conciliam (paragraph 4), indeed recommends such preservation, as does the post-Trent reforms in the Bull Quo Primum (paragraph 4) when it promulgated the Tridentine Missal. Being Catholic does not necessarily mean being Roman, as the Anglicans may be pleased to realise when they look in horror at the way we have destroyed and ransacked our temples in the last 40 years.
Rather than rejoice at this development, notice how the prelates of the two sides, Catholic and Anglican, scrabble around trying to pick up the pieces of 'ecumenical dialogue'. I can only assume ecumenism must mean agree that we're all equally wrong. They say this is a furthering of the last 40 years in acknowledging what we have in common. Rowan Williams desperately pleads to his bishops that he's sorry not to have "alerted" them earlier, as if this is some sort of new strain of Swine Flu. No, it's Rome openly extending an open hand of compassion asking her seperated children to return. Not a product of "joint working" or "mutual enrichment".
So, please Anglo-Catholics, avail unto Rome, the successor of St Peter the prince of the Apostles, and escape communion with a fractured body of liberals, protestants, sodomites and feminists. "One more thing and I'm out of here" or so the joke goes, with traditionalist Anglicans who keep seeing their church disintegrate. Now there is a positive reason for them to come to Rome.
But what will it mean to maintain distinctive aspects of Anglican spiritual patrimony? Perhaps the same thing as maintaining a distinctive 'spirit of Vatican II' patrimony: one which, at its heart, seems to have sought to destroy the Catholic faith and its practice and beliefs from their very core: Liturgy. The Protestant 1662 book of Common Prayer and its creation by Cranmer has been strikingly compared with the Catholic 1960s post-conciliar reform. How can these be used as authentic bastions of true Catholic patrimony? Perhaps now that we are about to get a semi-decent English translation of the liturgy we are moving in the right step, towards Cranmer. What a sorry state of affairs.
Only time will tell what these structures will consist of; will the priestly orders which have been previously proclaimed as "totally null and void" need to now be con-validated by Catholic bishops? Will the faithful need to be "received" into the Catholic Church? Will the Anglican Baptisms be examined for possible invalidity (especially if conducted in free and easy evangelical wings of the Anglican communion) and therefore offered conditional Baptism? Somehow I doubt it.
In any case, once the whole mess is sorted out perhaps the Anglo-Catholics will explore a unique and authentic English Catholic spiritual patrimony: The Sarum use of the Roman Rite, or the various other ancient missals used in medieval England. Vatican II, in its constitution Sacrosanctum Conciliam (paragraph 4), indeed recommends such preservation, as does the post-Trent reforms in the Bull Quo Primum (paragraph 4) when it promulgated the Tridentine Missal. Being Catholic does not necessarily mean being Roman, as the Anglicans may be pleased to realise when they look in horror at the way we have destroyed and ransacked our temples in the last 40 years.
Thanks for an insightful summary. When the Anglo-Catholic liturgical movement got under way in the 1860s many of its exponents revived Sarum ceremonial to distingusih themselves from what they called "The Italian Mission" (i.e. the newly re-established true hierarchy)and some of that ceremonial may still be practised in churches which haven't gone exclusively for the Novus Ordo, for all I know. It would be interesting if the Sarum Use were made a sort of "Extraordinary Form" for the ex-Anglican Ordinariate.
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