Ordinariate: floundering on the rocks?
Posted by Abigail Frymann, 23 December 2011, 9:00It's almost a year since I sat in a rather chilly Westminster Cathedral for almost three hours while shoals of bishops and priests in all their finery hailed the launch of the first ordinariate designed for disaffected Anglicans.
So far 60 or so Church of England clergy and around 1,000 laity have joined the ordinariate that covers England and Wales. Their fledgling venture still lacks a central church and funding, and Mgr Keith Newton et al haven't been able to break into the £1m that senior figures in the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament brought with them when they joined because the Charity Commission are investigating complaints that they had no right to do so. Oh, and the Vatican has found that married Anglican clergy are the least of their worries - it's those in, let's say, "irregular" relationships that have caught them most off-guard. But at least an ordinariate exists, and maybe other Anglo-Catholics are waiting to get on board when there's something more substantial to join.
But in Australia, the man once fêted as a trail-blazer for convincing the Vatican to set up this new structure - Archbishop John Hepworth - has said he will step down in May and his College of Bishops have told him he should go now. This is a disaster; he was hoping to continue to play a leading role once he was back Rome-side, and the Vatican was happy to work with him and quietly overlook his rather complicated past (how he'd been ordained a Catholic priest, allegedly been abused, left the priesthood, and had since married, divorced and remarried). Now they're saying they won't have him as a bishop or a priest, only a layman.
The irony of the Tablet sticking up for the most unpolitically correct Archbishop John Hepworth is quite amusing on this dark January evening.
The best news yet about the English Ordinariate is that our beloved Bishop Robert Mercer, former Metropolitan of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, who turns 77 tomorrow, will be received into the Catholic Church by Msgr. Keith Newton on Saturday, Jan. 7.
Fr. Edwin Barnes, a former Church of England Bishop writes in the comments section:
Dear Abigail, your analysis is as faltering as your syntax. I think the word you were looking for was "foundering" on the rocks, not 'floundering' ... and, as it happens, we are not doing either, but getting founded upon the rock.
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