Anglicanorum Coetibus And Conservative Wishful Thinking

I've already posted here about the schism dividing the United Methodist Church over same-sex marriage and the fact that Methodists are already fully eligible to enter the Roman Catholic Church as intact parishes with their clergy under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus. This is, at least in theory, an option available to the thousands of UMC parishes that are investigating disaffiliation and joining a more conservative denomination. However, I concluded in that post that this isn't what William James would call a "living option":

[L]et us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.

A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

For whatever reason, we must conclude that for United Methodists, 7.6 million in 20l0 in the US, a number closely approaching zero has elected to enter the Roman Catholic Church via Anglicanorum coetibus even as individuals since the erection of the North American ordinariate in 2012. As far as anyone is aware, no United Methodist parish has ever attempted to join, or even inquired about joining, the North American ordinariate. Thus in William James's terms, we must come to the conclusion that for any UMC parish determined to disaffiliate, although it is canonically and legally possible, the option "continue as a corporate body affiliated with the UMC or affiliate with the Roman Catholic Church via the North American ordinariate" is not living -- neither is it forced, and neither is it momentous.

This, of course, does not cover the entirely separate option of individual United Methodists, or for that matter baptized Protestants of any other denomination, to enter the Roman Catholic Church via RCIA or other catechetical process -- and many thousands do this each year. For all of them, this is a living option. It's just the ordinariate option that isn't living.

I may be completely unique among commentators in having made the observation that it's even possible for a UMC parish to elect to join an ordinariate. I'm not aware, for instance, of any wave of anticipation at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society that any UMC parish will elect to do this, much less dozens or hundreds. And I'm not aware of anyone asking why this might not be the case. (I'll leave any attempt to answer that myself for another post.)

What does intrigue me is a blog post by Fr Dwight Longenecker, Will the Church of England Split? Fr Longenecker is a Roman Catholic priest, married with a family, who was raised a devout Evangelical but was attracted to Anglicanism, went to seminary in Oxford, and was ordained and served as a priest in the Church of England in the UK. He left the CofE in the wake of its decision to ordain women in 1994. At that time, the Roman Catholic Church created a provision for ordination of married former CofE priests, but its implementation was uneven, and Fr Longenecker's ordination was stalled until the US Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina was able to ordain him via an obscure provision dating from Pius XII and return him to the US as a married priest in his jurisdiction.

Thus Fr Longenercker is in a situation completely outside either the Pastoral Provision or the ordinariates, a married former Anglican Catholic priest who serves in an ordinary diocesan parish. My impression is that although he is somewhat conservative theologically, he isn't closely aligned with traditionalists, though he often expresses sympathy for them. But it seems to me that, as a former priest in the Church of England, his views on a potential split there are naive:

[T]he answer to those in the Church of England who are troubled is close at hand. The Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was established to help Anglicans who treasure their traditions and patrimony to retain their customs and culture while also being re-united into full communion with the Catholic Church. I had mentioned that it was mostly the Evangelicals in the Church of England who were upset. Would Evangelicals be welcome in the Ordinariate or is it only for disaffected Anglo-Catholics? You must ask those who are already in the Ordinariate, but in my opinion there is no reason why good, orthodox Evangelicals should not be able to find a home in the Ordinariate and bring into the Ordinariate the strengths of their own Evangelical-Anglican heritage. No doubt they would have to make some adjustments to some of their theological opinions, but that could be a strong growing point and their Evangelical zeal, their entrepreneurial spirit and their love of Scripture and emphasis on personal conversion would all help to strengthen–not weaken the Ordinariate.

. . . Membership of the Ordinariate solves the problem of Anglican fissiparousness not through further division, but by unity with Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Catholics are supposed to be talking at this time about “enlarging the tent” of the church. The Anglican Ordinariate does just that.

In part, his view is understandable, becahse he's not just a former Anglican, but he's also a former Evangelical, but his own road to Catholicism, via Oxford and Anglo-Catholicism, was idiosyncratic. People who haven't traveled that particular path, which involved the need to resolve not one but several spiritual options in sequence that were living, forced, and momentous, will see a single option, "remain a low-church Anglican despite my discomfort, or become a newbie Catholic despite my even greater discomfort", as neither living, forced, nor momentous.

The actual state of the ordinariates as they currently exist isn't an encouraging factor, either. In general, conservatives tend to see the ordinariates as a good idea for everyone else, just like conservatives often see military service as a good thing for people in general, just not for themselves. Clearly Fr Longenecker never seriously considered reincardination into the North American ordinariate for himself, for instance; there were never, and still aren't, realistic full-time career opportunites in his part of the country (and indeed nearly anywhere else).

Despite a couple of well-publcized conversions of Church of England bishops to Catholicism and joining the UK ordinariate after retirement, no ordinariate parishes there own any property, and at best, membership numbers are stagnant. Someone -- significantly, no one currently active in the UK ordinariate -- is available to undertake the task Fr Lengenecker proposes of evangelizing low-church Anglicans and overcoming their instinctive distrust of Catholicism, when the predominant strain within all the ordinariates tends toward a somewhat dilettantish boutique Anglican Papalism.

Unfortunately, to comment on Fr Longenecker'ss blog, you have to be a registered financial donor, and our charitable budget is dominated by the need to support causes much closer to home. Otherwise, I wish I could have engaged Fr Longenecker more closely in this discussion by commenting directly on his blog. If anyone is in a position to make Fr Longenecker aware of this post, I'd welcome the opportunity to hear his views.