The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: The Target Audience

In thinking over the past few months about why Anglicanorum coetibus failed, it occurs to me that nobody at the start of the project gave much thought to Anglicanism. This is puzzling, because there's been effective opinion within the Church all along that could have provided insight, most specifically by the former Episcopal Bishop of Delaware Frederick Kinsman. but other Catholic writers like Hilaire Belloc have offered similar opinions.

Even the former Church of England priest Fr Dwight Longenecker, now a Catholic pastor in South Carolina, noted in a 2018 Lenten mission at our California parish that Anglicanism "looks like" Catholicism, but it isn't. Figures like Bernard Law, Joseph Ratzinger, Jeffrey Steenson, and others who drafted Anglicanorum coetibus at the start seem to have been lulled by appearances. It's a little like the warning about the coral snake: red touch yellow, kill a fellow.

The Complementary Norms for Anglicanorum coetibus simply breeze past the question of Anglicans -- it simply assumes that large mumbers of Anglicans are eager to become Catholic. The constitution itself refers to "groups of Anglicans" who have petitioned "repeatedly and insistently" to join the Church, as though the sacraments of initiation had previoiusly been denied them. Article 5, §1 of the Norms simply says

The lay faithful originally of the Anglican tradition who wish to belong to the Ordinariate, after having made their Profession of Faith and received the Sacraments of Initiation, with due regard for Canon 845, are to be entered in the apposite register of the Ordinariate.

The Norms say little else about who is an Anglican, and more important, who Anglicans are. For starters, they're Protestants. It's worth noting that a key element of Protestant formation is that Protestantism arose because something was essentially wrong with the Catholic Church. I went through Presbyterian confirmation in my early teens and Episcopalian confirmation in my early 30s, and both had some version of that. For Anglicans, there's less insistence that the Christian faith went wrong with "accretions", but there's no question that Anglicans see themselves as a via media between extremes, of which Catholicism is clearly one.

This should have suggested to the drafters of Anglicanorum coetibus and the Norms that even candidates for confirmation who come from Anglican backgrounds would need greater attention to catechesis, but the assumption appears to have been that only some minimal touchup would be required. That so few actual Anglicans ever signed up for the North American ordinariate shows how badly the drafters understood the market. Recall that the original estimate given Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993 was 250,000 Episcopalians who would come in. The actual number, especially considering the number of non-Episcopalians who joined, is probably only in the low four digits.

At minimum, this suggests that the drafters badly underestimated the task of evangelization. Bp Barron, the USCCB's evangelization lead, sees riper fruit among "nones", people never reached by or affiliated with any Christian denomination, Catholic dropouts, and even New Atheists. Protestants of the traditional main line denominations are a cataclysmically shrinking group. "Non-denominational" Evangelicals are a different task. To a serious professional evangelizer like Bp Barron, it would appear that Episcopalians were never low-hanging fruit.

This accounts for the drafters' misunderanding of the target market, their assumption that Protestants of any stripe, whose spiritual identities are based on an inculcated notion that the Catholic Church is irrededemably corrupt in countless ways, would suddenly clamor for admission to that same Church whose demands in areas like sexuality, the sanctity of life, and ritual observance are regarded as unnecessary and even repugnant.

This accounts for their misunderstanding that Anglicans are Protestant, not just dreamy quasi-Catholic wannabes. That would be why there was so little uptake in the first place. But there's another misunderstanding of Anglicanism that reflects the problems within the body of the ordinariate faithful who did join, which I'll go into tomorrow.