The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: How Anglicans Really Are

I keep thinking back to Fr Lengenecker's 2018 Lenten mission at our parish, where he gave very insightful remarks on Anglicanism that were actually just a brief digression in a much more extensive talk. One point that he made was that, given the wide spectrum of Anglican belief, after his years of experience in the denomination, if he listened to an Anglican for some minutes, he could discern roughly where the speaker stood in relation to the diagram above, but this would still be with only about 90% certainty.

The odd thing for me is that, in my 30 years as an Episcopalian, nobody gave me anything like the explanation in the diagram above. In my confirmation class, there wasn't even mention of a high church-low church polarity -- it was just the XXXIX Articles were established so everyone could compromise, but they never even reviewed the Articles themselves, which are very Protestant. It didn't matter, because everyone compromised.

It was only after I became Catholic and began to look into the matter that I realized that Bp James Pike, who denied the Trinity from the pulpit and was surrounded by public scandal, was a perfectly good Anglican of the broad church persuasion, and there have been bishops like Pike before and since who've been sanctioned far less than bishops who opposed innovations like gay marriage, or sanctioned not at all. This was one of the main issues that led to Frederick Kinsman's resignation as Episcopal Bishop of Delaware in 1919. Pike, or John Spong, or Eugene Robinson, was noothing new.

The emergence of "continuing" Anglicanism in the 1970s can be seen now, I think, as part of the more general decline of main line Protestantism, which was already shrinking and no longer represented a bourgeois consensus. Far more Episcopalians, after all, simply quit coming to church, than the relatively small numbers who broke away into the dozens of tiny "continuing Anglican" denominations. And the numbers of continuers are now shrinking as cataclysmically as the numbers of Episcopalians.

The "continuers" can be placed (keeping Fr Longenecker's remarks in mind, with maybe 90% certainty) in the left part of the diagram above with the callout "new 'Anglican Orthodoxy', GAFCON". It's a combination of sorts, though a highly uneasy one, between low church dissidents like David Virtue and the largely defunct Anglo-Catholic blogs and websites, although the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society is aligned with this wing of the movement. Most of the "continuing" groups are low church, but the few relatively high church groups like the Anglican Church in America are also rapidly shrinking and have been forced to merge for survival.

This is the environment into which Benedict XVI promulgated Anglicanorum coetibus. He appears to have been influenced chiefly by Bernard Law, who had been encouraging a small group of dissident Episcopalians behind the scenes since the late 1970s with the prospect of a personal prelature for Anglicans who wished to enter the Catholic Church as a body. The problem was that Law seems not to have understood this group very clearly, and he seems not to have understood Anglicans in general -- if Anglicans see their own doctrines, such as the XXXIX Articles, only as a departure point for compromise, they won't adjust well to the Catholic Church.

And most in that Anglican dissident continuum are low church. David Virtue was violently unsupportive of Anglicanorum coetibus and held unsuccessful efforts to go into the ordinariate by parishes like St Mary of the Angels Hollywood up to ridicule.

So Cardinal Law never understood the potential market for his idea. But the problem goes beyond that, because the actual intake in the North American ordinariate has been people who continue to dissent in the name of "orthodoxy", and not all of them are former Anglicans. As a vistor puts it,

Such growth as there is in Ordinariate congregations comes almost entirely from “disaffected Catholics”—-the “TLM-lite” crowd I think you call them—-although they often keep a foot in both Ordinariate and TLM communities. It is not uncommon for the same diocesan parish to host both EF and DW masses. So for the most part it’s poaching, not evangelism. Hence the emphasis on maintaining the elusive “Anglican Patrimony,” despite the fact that in the ten years I have been following this story I can see it devolving into “Tex-Mex” or General Tso’s Chicken right before my eyes.

Of course, the diagram above suggests any "Anglican patrimony" that exists is hard to parse indeed, and the loudest voices in the ordinariate who insist on it seem to be those who've spent little or no time in Episcopalian or Anglican Church of Canada parishes.

There seems to be an emerging consensus among US Catholic bishops that figures like Fr Zuhlsdorf must be brought to heel, and Bp Barron has become increasingly critical of the pre-Conciliarist movement, although he's careful to separate it from those who simply attend Latin mass. One ordinariate priest has already been removed and is apparently in the process of laicization for being openly pre-Conciliarist, but I dom't think he was ever the only problem.