Join the Conversation
Send your thoughts to Letters to the Editor. Learn more
"When the idea of an Anglican Ordinariate was announced in September 2009 in the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, the Times of London ran the headline 'Vatican Parks Tanks on [Archbishop of Canterbury] Rowan [Williams]'s Lawn'. It seemed an apt image at the time," writes Andrew McGowan on the Australian Jesuit website, Eureka Street.
"Three years later it is more as though the Pope had, uninvited, sent over a Fiat Cinquecento or two to pick up some stranded friends and their bags. ... the stated aim of the Ordinariates, to accommodate whole groups of Anglicans who might come together as existing communities or structures with Anglican patrimony in tow, and thus to promote unity, is a failure.
"In just a few cases — ostensibly including one in Melbourne — congregations have moved en bloc; generally the new parishes of the Ordinariates will be precisely that, new bodies made up of disaffected individual Anglicans from various communities, gathered afresh around re-ordained clergy."
