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 simpl...