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Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics: this is the moment of truth
By Damian Thompson
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
October 24th, 2009
Be careful what you ask the Pope for, because he might just give it to you. That's the truth slowly sinking in to attendees at the annual conference of Forward in Faith, held in London today. For ages, many Anglo-Catholics have said they would come over to Rome, but on their own terms (not unreasonable ones, in my opinion). And now the Vatican has said: OK, you can have your own church-within-a-church, only for form's sake we can't call it that.
Uh-oh. Suddenly one or two Anglo-Catholics who used to bleat on about how the only obsctacle to coming over was the ghastly RC bishops' conference are having second thoughts, even though that ghastly conference has been written out of the picture. On the other hand, other Anglicans whom you would never expect to be attracted by a Roman offer are taking it seriously, so dramatic are its contents.
The "flying" Bishop of Ebbsfleet, Andrew Burnham, told the Forward in Faith meeting today: "We are Western Christians, Catholics of the Latin Rite, separated from the Holy See.." Well, now there's a way to demonstrate that. It's already clear that Burnham and most of the big guns in the Anglo-Catholic movement will join the Personal Ordinariate, surmounting practical problems. Most young priests will do likewise, I suspect. Many lay people will be less keen, in some cases because (as one disillusioned Catholic convert put it yesterday) they're as attached to their church buildings as they are to their faith.
We shouldn't expect a definitive response from Anglo-Catholics for some months. But my gut feeling is that the Personal Ordinariate will work, and work well, though its final shape may surprise us. More on this later.
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