To go? Or not to go? Anglican deliberations

Bishop Edwin Barnes, the emeritus Anglican bishop of Richborough, has written a piece on the Anglo-Catholic blog about the increasingly reticent sounds coming from Britain about the possibility of joining an Ordinariate. Entitled ‘Cold Feet’, the article gives a sense of the mood in England and Wales towards taking up the offer of an ordinariate among Catholic members of the Church of England.

Here is a teaser but go read the whole piece over on Anglo-Catholic :

“Because bad news always gets the boldest headlines, we have been hearing too much lately in England from priests with misgivings about the Ordinariate.

“Fr Philip North used the Pusey House Conference on Anglican Patrimony to say how very C of E he was; and if he could not be C of E with all its privileges, its capacity for being accepted in schools and other institutions and being part of the fabric of society, then he would become a Roman Catholic – but not via the Ordinariate. It seemed to me at the time that he had an unduly romantic notion of the place of the parson in England. He might have carved out a niche for himself in Camden, but Fr Philip is so much larger than life that he would carve out a niche anywhere – and he is just the sort of priest which the Ordinariate needs to get up and running quickly. And since the Holy Father has made this offer, what gall to say we know better than he does!

“Then this week, while my server was down and my computer inoperable thanks to a new router from AOL, Fr Trevor Jones of the famous St Peter’s, London Docks, expressed his own reservations in his blog. His preferred choice, he says, would be ‘a continued future as an Anglican’. Well of course, that’s a lovely idea. But not one ot be accepted on any terms.

“What these two good Fathers have been saying (and no doubt others feel much the same), is that if promises made in Synod in 1992 were kept, then we might just about hang on in the sort of way we have hung on since that time. This is a dreamworld. The promises have been broken consistently. I have been in the House of Bishops and seen it at work, diocesans blatantly ignoring their own ‘guidelines’ and using all their considerable power to undermine anything remotely catholic in their dioceses. The two parishes where I ministered for twenty years are now indistinguishable from their neighbours. A century of catholic practice has been dismantled within a decade. Fr Jones only has nine years before he must retire. The Bishop of London, on whom he and Fr North rely, has an even closer sell-by date. We said we wanted provision for our children and grandchildren. That has not been granted, and will not be.”

Read the rest here