Two Incongruous Bishops

This morning, the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Given all that isn't happening with the BBB, the BIF, and the debt ceiling, yesterday's big news was the elevation of Dr Rachel Levine to the rank of four star admiral, a breakthrough for transgenders. The crack journalists at the RedState blog posted a word salad headline: Democrat Counter to Glenn Youngkin Enthusiasm Enters Into the Pathetic.

But with everyone else on virtual vacation, I can at least fall back on the Roman Catholic ordinariates for recovering, or maybe not, Anglicans. Let's take the case of The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali:

{T}he former Anglican bishop of Rochester, England, was received into the church Sept. 29 by Msgr. Keith Newton, head of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, which was established in 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI for the corporate reception of Anglican communities.

I'd noticed Bp Nazir-Ali on occasion when he was still in Rochester as a conservative voice in the Church of England, but his course since then strikes me as erratic. The story continues,

The married father of two retired from Rochester, England, in 2009 and, since 2010, has served as the visiting bishop of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina.

A "visiting bishop", at least in The Episcopal Church, is a largely honorary position awarded to retired bishops. Their chief duty is to "visit" parishes for confirmations and other ceremonial "episcopal visits", mainly to relieve the schedules of the diocesan and suffragan bishops. However, Bp Nazir-Ali held this position in the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, which is part of the Anglican Church in North America, a breakaway body from The Episcopal Church that is not in communion with it, the Church of England, or the rest of the Anglican Communion.

As a result, the Catholic reporting on Nazir-Ali neglects the point that by this time, he's an Anglican-with-an-asterisk and had already left the Anglican Communion. In fact, from what I hear of the screening process for former Anglican priests seeking ordination in one of the ordinariates, a reasonable question for the bishop would be why he chose to go to the more-Protestant-than-the-Protestants ACNA rather than simply to convert to Catholicism once his dissatisfaction with Anglicanism became clear to him.

In fact, the ACNA is known for being "low church", that is, leaning toward the side of Anglicanism that takes the XXXIX Articles seriously. These, among other things, denounce the pope and transsubstantiation. Was he not serious in going to the ACNA? If not, how do we know he's serious in now converting to Catholicism?

Another question that Msgr Newton might not ask him is why he chose to be received via the UK ordinariate, which is moribund. Few of its parishes own their property, and few use the Divine Worship missal that is used mainly in the US. Beyond that, Nazir-Ali is 72, retired first as a bishop and now as a "visiting bishop". It would seem his ordination is a purely political gesture, actually not much different from the elevation of Admiral Levine to flag rank.

A visitor sent me a link to this piece in California Catholic Daily, The strange race for chair of the USCCB liturgy committee with the remark that Bp Steven Lopes of the North American ordinariate, who was left indisposed for many months last year after a mysterious fall from an attic ladder, may simply have been practicing to climb another ladder. The article says,

But this year, the race to chair the bishops’ liturgy committee features an interesting pair of choices, Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of St. Louis and Bishop Stephen Lopes of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. Neither appears an obvious selection for the job, which might suggest that some potential candidates have steered clear of running for a seat on the third rail of American ecclesiastical life.

. . . Lopes was made a bishop in 2016, making him relatively young in the conference for a senior committee chair. Like Rozanski, he possesses no advanced degrees in liturgical studies, though he has studied sacramental theology. But perhaps most interesting is that Lopes doesn’t even lead an ordinary Latin rite diocese at all.

As ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, Lopes is responsible for shepherding former Anglicans who came into communion with the Church after Benedict XVI’s 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus.

Lopes's version of the liturgy, whose approval he facilitated while at the Vatican, is an overlong and clumsy merger of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer with a translation of the Tridentine Roman Canon, larded with archaisms and normally celebrated ad orientem. The ordinariate over which he presides has been dogged with repeated scandals and infelicitous ordinations. It numbers about 40 communities and has membership in the mid four digits, though with that, it's far more successful than those in the UK and Australia.

I ran this by my regular correspondent from the old blog, who reported on the consensus in the blogosphere:

Some support for the point of view in this article — ie nobody wants the job, but there is also the suggestion that Bp Rozanski does want the job and has made a deal with Cdl Cupich in return for supporting something or other. In any event, Bp Lopes seen as a no-hoper, but along with his Prayer Breakfast gig and some other appearances does suggest to me that he is trying to raise his profile and get away from narrow identification with the North American ordinariate, which is going nowhere.