THE P RTAL


February 2011


Page 10 What I think about the Ordinariate by Aidan Nichols OP


ROUGHLY TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago, I started thinking about what an Anglican Uniate Church might look like. It was already obvious, even before the Church of England’s ordination of women vote in 1992, that the Anglican Communion, taken as a whole, would not be able to come into union with Rome.


Tink of the ‘Christian atheism’ of the ‘Sea of Faith’


movement, or attitudes to Eucharistic presidency in the Anglican archdiocese of Sydney and you’ll soon realize why!


So instead I went through the history


of Anglican theology and picked out the elements I thought would be compatible with communion with the Pope.


Thought-experiment Of course, this was only a thought-experiment.


It


produced a paper Church, not a real one – though I still think it would be a useful rough and ready guide when the powers that be are selecting what could usefully be taught to Anglican Use seminarians preparing for the Roman Catholic priesthood.


Tractarian ambition Anyhow, I’m obviously not a prophet because my


imagined Uniate Church doesn’t look much like the Ordinariate, which is what is actually happening. Te bishops, priests and people who are joining the Ordinariate come from the nineteenth century Oxford Movement. In fact, they are following out the logic of that movement to the end.


Te Tractarians were not mainly interested in looking


back at earlier Anglican writers for bits and pieces they agreed with (though they also did that). Tey were mainly concerned with restructuring Anglicanism root-and-branch on Catholic principles (for which the older writers were sometimes useful, and sometimes not). Te Tractarians wanted to reshape the whole of the Church of England – not just the High Church party – along Catholic lines.


We know how much was achieved along those


lines, in preaching, Liturgy, devotion. But when in 1992 the Synod voted for the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood, that crucial Tractarian ambition was frustrated for ever and a day.


Corporate reunion Tat did not mean, however, that the aims of the


Oxford Movement could not be realized in another way. Once the Tractarians admitted Rome was a genuine Church, and not a parody of a Church,


as earlier polemics had it, a number of those who remained loyal Anglicans started to thinking about ways in which corporate reunion might be possible.


Even when Anglo-Catholics were not Anglo-Papalist,


they were oſten what we might call ‘Patriarchalist’. Tey thought that the Church of England was a detached portion of the Church of the West which needed to be reunited with its patriarchate. So for the heirs of the Oxford Movement to enter into corporate union with Rome, preserving what is best in their theological, liturgical, devotional and artistic patrimony, is not to confess that the whole thing has been a failure.


It


is to say that there is still – thanks to Anglicanorum coetibus – a way in which the unionist aim can be made (spiritually speaking) a roaring success.


Pioneers Te pioneers who are going forward at this early


stage are, for the sake of this goal, taking a brave step into the unknown. I find it entirely understandable that many Anglo-Catholics baulk at the prospect. Tose who, despite having pictures of the Pope in their clergy-houses, sacristies or even churches, cannot imagine ever moving into another ‘part of the Lord’s vineyard’ (as Pusey put it) need to be clear, however, that achieving tolerated status within the Church of England (a.k.a. Te Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda) is not what the Oxford Movement was about.


Again, I appreciate that many mainstream Anglicans are irritated by the establishment of the Ordinariate.


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