The Australian bishop, Peter Elliott, is himself an Anglican convert, and is in charge of the pope's outreach to Anglican opponents of women priests in Australia. Most of these are grouped in a body called the Traditional Anglican Communion, which claims to have half a million members world wide: Burnham warns Bishop Elliott against complete confidence in their leader, Archbishop Hepworth ("clearly a charming man ... but not everything he says ... synchronises fully with what we know from other sources").

But the passage which will cause discomfort in this country is this:

"I am taking the liberty of mentioning, in confidence and with his permission, that we are in touch with Mgr Patrick Burke at the CDF [the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith]. It has all felt a little bit like Elizabethan espionage but, truly, the informal contact with the CDF has been invaluable, and, if ever Mgr Burke got into trouble, I should write to the pope and say how splendidly helpful he has been.

This is not known about fully in England and Wales because we are trying to ensure that the whole Anglicanorum Coetibus project, which will begin in small ways, is not smothered by the management anxieties of a hierarchy, some of whom think that Anglicans are best off doing what they are presently doing and some of whom think the project would impact adversely on the Catholic Church in England. Needless to say Fr Pat's help, and the support of Archbishop DiNoia, need, to a lesser extent, to be protected from disapproval at higher levels of the dicastery [Vatican department]. Hence the cloak and dagger."

Anglicanorum Coetibus is the pope's plan to allow disaffected Anglicans to convert as a group, and to keep their own bishops. As Bishop Burnham says, the Catholic hierarchy in this country is not enthusiastic about the prospect. The plan was sprung on Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, with very little notice and although attention at the time was concentrated on the obvious discomfort of Rowan Williams, the Catholic archbishop had known no more than him.

It's still not clear how much autonomy the Anglican "ordinariates" will have; but Bishop Elliott told an Australian audience they would be comparable to the Eastern churches in communion with Rome; the Maronite Christians of the Lebanon, and the formerly orthodox "Uniate" churches of the Ukraine. "The structure ... is much closer to an Eastern Rite Church in its autonomy than some might imagine."

This kind of autonomy, a church within the church, has long been the dream of the former Anglicans who converted in the early 70s. But it is not what the Catholic hierarchy thinks it is getting in this country. Monsignor Andrew Faley, the assistant secretary to the Bishops' conference here, said "He's wrong - he's not entirely right, would be more ecclesially correct ... Uniate status is concerned with rite; but the Anglican liturgy is so close to ours that it's not possible in this case.

The Pope asked our bishops to 'be generous' and in asking this was recognising their generosity to be genuine. Their hospitality to former Anglicans is 100% assured and the authority of the Church in working this out rests with the bishops' conferences and not with the CDF."

But no groups have yet actually approached the Roman Catholic authorities in this country, according to Mgr Faley.

The other intriguing admission in Bishop Burnham's letter is that "the project ... will start in small ways". This suggests that enthusiasm for the ordinariates is still much greater among the priests and bishops who hope to lead it than among the ordinary Anglicans who are supposed to follow them and fill its churches.

END