What are people's opinions on the Personal Ordinariate?

As an Anglo-Catholic, who like most Christians whose churches follow Apostolic Succession, I do hope for the reunification of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church (Anglican, Orthodox and Catholic churches under one communion). It just comes down to what theological differences are we prepared to forgo. For me the major issues for not being a Roman Catholic are the doctrines of Papal Infallibility, the immaculate conception, Purgatory and the ecclesiastical issues of celibate clergy, consanguinity laws and the belief that the wedding couple are the celebrants of the sacrament of Holy Matrimony with the Priest being the officiate.

As a result I am not perfectly content with the Personal Ordinariate as a way to unite Anglicans and Catholics. I am hoping to attend Mass at a Personal Ordinariate parish some time in September as I am still open to the idea.

 

Yeah, the Ordinariate is not Anglican. It's just appearances.

Interestingly, I'm okay with most of your list!

 

I was with the group who eagerly waited for the Ordinariate with Fr. Christopher Phillips. It looked and sounded good on paper.

I saw the politics. Good Orthodox priests were ignored because they were not connected to the TEC or they did not have a large enough group the Romans would want to crow about how the Anglicans are coming home.

Cardinal Wurel and lackey destroyed the chance of an Ordinariate as the Bishops wanted. In none of the countries is the Ordinariate growing. Yes Our Lady of the Atonement has finally joined and is breathing some life into the Chair of St Peter. None of the programs Rome has put in place has really worked.

Rome is like the borg from Star Trek. You will conform, assimilate and become Roman. The Anglican Use they have created, the liturgy is a mix of various forms.....does not look like Anglicanism. You will have to accept ALL that Rome teaches. The extra biblical and the heresies. Everything the Church in England corrected will have to be abandoned to conform to Rome's view. And no other view is valid.

I spent many years in Rome. I was approved for re-ordination, even though I was ordained by a Bishop with valid line of succession (per Rome) it was not Roman so no good. Same with confirmation. What they told me and what they did was different.

Rome will tell you anything to get you to convert. So be very wise and understand that you will be expected to toe the line with their social justice reasoning. Rome is just as rotten as the TEC, they just look better on the outside and hide it much better. Matthew 23:27-28.

The fellow priests I went to Rome with, we all have returned. My friends who have parishes where large numbers of people left for the Ordinariate have had people returning. Most of the people in the Ordinariate are not cradle Anglicans.

If you feel the Holy Spirit is leading you to Rome, by all means obey the Holy Spirit. Just know who will cease to be Anglican and will be Roman regardless of what they tell you. The liturgy may remind you of Anglicanism, the theology is definitely Roman.

Blessings

Fr. Mark

 

The other part of the issue is that I hear from priest who have joined the ordinariate is that the Romans see them as 2nd class Romans or fake romans or nearly romans and actually have more respect for Anglicans who stay Anglican. I think it ends up in the neither fish nor fowell basket.

 

Mark had a lot of good thoughts.

One thing that distresses me is the intellectual dishonesty of most of the Ordinariate clergy. They cannot help themselves from disparaging their former ministry as Anglicans and distancing themselves from anything they might have accomplished in those years. I don't believe them when they bring forth their paltry arguments, "Oh, I don't know what I had as an Anglican, but it wasn't the fullness of the faith. I don't know what I accomplished sacramentally, but my orders were invalid." I don't believe a word of that nonsense.

They have got access to a treasure trove of money which, at least for the ACA guys, is probably a novel experience. I was recruited by them at one point and they promised to throw money at me, 100% seminary tuition and so on. Most of the parishioners were Romans who liked the convenient time of the Mass and didn't know the Anglican use from the Latin. The priest started off every week explaining that his Mass was licit to reassure his mostly unconcerned faithful.

I thought the Ordinariate would fade away and be absorbed into the larger Roman pool when Jeffrey Steenson retired and they were given a bishop from outside their fold. Whatever hope they have is based on their appeal to Catholics who appreciate the novelty of a Mass that looks rather high (even though I read a paper from +Lopes the other day arguing that the Ordinariate Missal is an expression of the Ordinary Form) compared to the vagrancy of most Novus Ordo celebrations. Ordinariate parishes are not producing any great number of vocations and even those who do arise are forced to learn to serve the Novus Ordo as their primary rite. And they are not exempted from the requirement of priestly celibacy. So there is very little of the 'Anglican patrimony' that makes it through the Roman screen.

 

About the one thing I will say for the Ordinariate is that the liturgy is beautiful and is essentially an Anglo-Catholic style expression of the BCP, similar to the services of the Oxford Movement churches of the 19th century. I'm not going to defend the concept of the Ordinariate or the doctrines of Catholicism, but I can't fault the Ordinariate liturgy. Some groups also offer Evensong from time to time which is a good route to see what they are up to without feeling left out at Communion time.

 

My concern is that the Ordinariate will simply absorb the Anglo-Catholics into the Roman system and not maintain a presence like the other rites (Byzantine, etc.). My reasoning is that without an Anglican rite seminary to produce more priests, within a generation, the specialness and knowledge and "all things Anglican" will fade as general Roman rite priests are assigned to the Ordinariate parishes.

 

In the States there is not a seminary for the Ordinariate. A candidate for Holy Orders goes to a Roman seminary with a few special classes to maintain the Anglicanisms. The priests who were approved for re-ordination had to go to re-education classes to unlearn what they had been taught and taught the new that is Rome. I was getting ready for 2 years of Roman education when I realized it was a sham.

There are those within the ordinariate who will get on Anglican websites and facebook pages to tell everyone how great it is to finally be Roman. That is tongue in cheek. They try to pass themselves off as "fully Anglican" since coming into communion with the Pope.

The new Bishop for the Chair of St Peter (USA) is a Portuguese Bishop. Never been an Anglican, like Steenson. They hang their hopes on Our Lady of the Atonement. But Fr. Phillips has been removed, so it will be interesting to see how Our Lady of the Atonement fairs and if it will survive. I pray it does, but the Ordinariate does not have any cash, the coffers of Our Lady has well over $1 million. I don't know how long that will last as Rome has had to infuse cash into the UK Ordinariate to keep it afloat.

Fr. Mark

 

I joined the Ordinariate even though I am many miles from an Ordinariate parish.

I mentioned in my new member introduction here that I was raised a little bit of this and a little bit of that but have had Anglican predispositions since I first became a Christian.

Rome has never felt completely like home. The liturgy, the theology, the legalism have all felt like an ill-fitting coat. On numerous occasions I’ve flirted with leaving Rome for an Anglican Church but never had the guts to really pull the trigger.

So I joined the Ordinariate as a compromise. I get my Ember Days, my evensong, my thees and thous… all on my own time of course. My parish priest can’t baptize my kid in the Ordinariate form without the special permission, which has been about as difficult to get as refined uranium.

 

Suppering at the worldly smörgåsbord of religiosity and ritual is not the same as actually experiencing the indwelling spirit of Jesus Christ and sharing his sustenance in an eternal repast. No denomination, including Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Greek or Russian or Coptic or any sect or faction within any denomination, has a monopoly on true discipleship.

Rules, regulations, rituals and traditions do not a Christ-Disciple make.
.

 

yep that’s the problem with it

 

To me as a Anglo-Catholic its very deeply insulting

 

If you're not being pressured to convert, why do you find it insulting?

 

It’s a sanctioned way to attempt to be one thing while pretending to be something else, and only the individual participants truly know which is which.

 

It seems to me like they don't have a lot of momentum left in the US. And the initial interest from the liturgical fetishists in the rad-trad Catholic sphere is waning quickly. There's just not enough availability of the Anglican Use Mass.

 

I have only just noticed this thread (I don't know how I've missed it until now). I fully agree with you on the issue of papal infallibility. As many of the other things you list are accepted by Anglo-Catholics I wonder what you have against them. Why would God not ensure the Blessed Virgin Mary was free of original sin because she would eventually carry Christ in her womb? Again, I have no issue with us having to undergo some form of cleansing after death before we are fit for heaven.

I am with you on clerical celibacy. I do not think it should be imposed. It ought to be the choice of each priest. However, I would go so far as to insist that if he entered a relationship a priest must marry a woman.

In the C of E we have a bit of a problem with respect to marriage. We Anglo-Catholics regard it as a sacrament but not all Anglicans do. I also appreciate that in the C of E the priest marries the couple. I do not, however, have anything against the idea that the man and the woman administer the sacrament to each other. I do, however, believe this idea is unique to Roman Catholics. In the Eastern Orthodox churches a couple must be crowned (i.e. married) by a priest.

Which rules on consanguinity do you disagree with and why? I think they're sound rules, especially with what we now know about genetics.

 

Think it was quite common in historic Puritan and non-conformist circles to view the couple as being the ministers of the marriage, but to them it wasn't a sacrament, rather a covenant.

 

I've been to the local ordinariate church three times and like it very much. But I do share the view/fear of some here that it's a bait-and-switch. Even though the teachings don't require it - witness Roman use of the Eastern rites - many Roman churchmen really want to turn everybody into garden-variety, Novus Ordo Roman Catholics. An ecclesiastical Borg. This hurts the various Eastern Catholics too.

Let's look at this as a plus. It's not sheep-stealing. I've seen this in real life. Some born Roman Catholics are discovering, ecumenically, that the English language has had a Christian tradition for centuries that had been kept from them, and they like it.

 

From a hostile Roman Catholic blog - they want everybody to be Novus Ordo: "In 2019 the OOLW was reported to have 97 priests and 1,850 lay members, meaning that for every priest who has joined in Great Britain, only 19 laypeople have done the same. The ratio is higher in North America’s Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter (OCSP), which reportedly has 74 priests and over 6,000 members, as well as Australia’s Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross (OOLSC), which reportedly has 23 priests and 1200 members."

I predict they'll be shut down in 10 years.

 

I've gone back and forth on my views of the Ordinariates. At this point I'd agree with Anne that they aren't Anglican. There's very little that's distinctly 'Anglican' that has been brought over. One could say that they are a continuation of the English expression of Roman Catholicism and that's partially true. Then again many of the traditions that were incorporated into the Ordinariates as 'English' actually have their origin in Gaul and were never distinctly English.

I also don't think it's right to refer to them as a sheep-stealing operation. Most of the early members were halfway across the Tiber before the Ordinariates became an option. As has already been pointed out most of the people joining now are cradle Roman Catholics or converts from other denominations that are now seeking shelter from the run of the mill RCC parishes.

All that said I still think they serve a purpose and have had a positive impact on the RCC. They are maintaining a lot of beautiful traditions (regardless of origin) that had all but vanished from the RCC. It may never come to pass but they are the middle ground that the Novus Ordo was supposed to be and I still hope they'll pave the way to a more balanced Roman Catholic Church.

I'm actually considering joining the OCPS if my Abbot will sign off on it. I'm never going to be a member of one of their parishes but I'd still like to do my small part to support them.