Bishop Peter Elliott: The Personal Ordinariate – An Historic Moment
June 7, 2012 10 Comments
The Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne:
Pope Benedict XVI will officially name Australia’s Personal Ordinariate Our Lady of the Southern Cross, under the patronage of St Augustine of Canterbury, on 15 June.
Bishop Peter Elliott, project delegate for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the name of the Ordinary, the person who will lead the Ordinariate, would also be announced that day.
“The Ordinariate is a national diocese for former Anglicans who will enter full communion with the Catholic Church and yet retain their own heritage and traditions,” Bishop Elliott said.
“Many requests had come from groups to Rome in recent years, that is from Anglicans in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, who were deeply distressed at the ordination of women as priests and bishops and also most unhappy about other liberalising trends in the Anglican Communion.
“They requested that rather than being reconciled to the Church individually they might come to some corporate style of arrangement.
“I would encourage all the Catholics in Melbourne to take an interest in this new venture. It is an historical moment, of course it is small but from small things bigthings grow and I think this will have a remarkable future.”
Two main sources will make up the Ordinariate in Australia: members of the Anglican Church in Australia, the official Anglican denomination; and members of the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia, which is part of the breakaway Traditional Anglican Communion—people who left mainstream Anglicanism for the same reasons that they are now seeking ull communion with the Church. “In Melbourne the Ordinariate community is drawn from several mainstream parishes and also from a small community of the Traditional Anglican Communion,” BishopElliott said.
“To these two main groups we can add their immediate relatives who may already be Catholic and there is a provision also for any Catholic who once was an Anglican, which is an interesting feature.”
He said they were not sure of the precise number of people likely to enter the Ordinariate at this stage.
“There are groups in every state who have been preparing for reconciliation; that is, taking special courses in the catechism of the Catholic Church. The numbers are not clear at this stage, in the next week they will be clarified as admission forms circulate.
“Anglicans will have a choice. They can either come in and be official members of the Ordinariate. Or they can become Catholics and associate with the Ordinariate. Or they are free not to have anything to do with he Ordinariate, it’s their choice.”
All Catholics will be able to attend Mass and receive the sacraments celebrated within an Ordinariate parish.
Bishop Elliott said that the challenges that faced the Ordinariate at present were finance and property.
“In some places a church is already available for the Ordinariate but in most Catholic dioceses a church will have to be shared,” he said.
“In Melbourne it will be the Church of the Holy Cross in South Caulfield.
“The Ordinariate is part of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church; it’s not a distinct rite. It will have the privilege of a liturgy of its own.
“I am a member of the international commission preparing that liturgy. We are preparing a liturgy which draws upon the Roman Rite, the new rite and the old, plus various books of Common Prayer. This liturgy won’t be obligatory but it will be an option.”
Bishop Elliott has been following the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in Britain closely.
“I am friends with the Ordinary, Mgr Keith Newton, and I was present at the first birthday celebrations at St James Spanish Place in January,” he said.
“It was a magnificent occasion, with a lot of optimism and hope. They have problems with sharing property with existing Catholic parishes but they are working these things through and generally they have had a very warm welcoming from the bishops and the lay faithful. I think it’s heading for about 100 clergy. It’s growing steadily in the UK.”
Bishop Elliott, who himself converted from the Anglican Church to Catholicism, said, “It’s very strange the providence of God in my own life here, in a way that deeply moves me.
“There have been negative critics who have said ‘pigs will fly’; well at the Melbourne Ordinariate group meeting [recently], I was solemnly presented with a cast-iron pig with wings and we all cheered.
“It will not do harm to ecumenism because if these people are not happy where they are and seek full communion, let them have it. I think that is the attitude of the official Anglican authorities with whom we have spoken.”
One thing is for sure, they are ready… and organised! And while the coming Ordinariate may not be big, they’re certainly prepared, and getting on with it.
About Fr Stephen Smuts
I really do pray for a smoother movement and unity for them, perhaps since they might be smaller? And this was it seems a clearer statement by the Australian Bishop Peter Elliot, himself a one time Anglican. “The Ordinariate is a national diocese for former Anglicans who will enter full communion with the Catholic Church and yet retain their own heritage and traditions,” Bishop Elliott said.
“The Ordinariate is part of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church; it’s not a distinct rite. It will have the privilege of a liturgy of its own.
“I am a member of the international commission preparing that liturgy. We are preparing a liturgy which draws upon the Roman Rite, the new rite and the old, plus various books of Common Prayer. This liturgy won’t be obligatory but it will be an option.”
Btw, here is a bit older link concerning statements by the Catholic Bishop Elliot, and Anglo-Catholicism…
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1100828.htm
I want to know why we can’t just use the English Missal, which, while never official in mainstream Canterbury Anglicanism, had been used by the types likely to go towards the Ordinariate pretty solidly for most of the 20th century, and is still in use in the TAC. What is there in it that is doctrinally offensive, and if nothing is doctrinally offensive, why do we have to have some sort of hybrid mish mash that ISN’T OUR PATRIMONY?
Why do they keep having to invent our patrimony for us?
And what’s the other ‘option’ if we don’t take this ‘option’–why, nothing but the hideous modern Roman liturgy, recently upgraded to sound more like a technical manual, which isn’t our patrimony at all. They are just trying to make us prottier, like them.
it’s all a hideous lost opportunity.
Mgr. Keith Newton has authorized Fr. Mercer and the congregation of St Agatha’s Portsmouth to continue to use the English Missal. Apparently the ordinaries are quite at liberty to authorize various forms of liturgy provided a Catholic Eucharistic Prayer is used. Similarly, St John’s Calgary uses the same liturgy it used as an Anglican Parish (a homemade mix of English Missal and Canadian BCP with the Roman Canon).
+ PAX et BONUM
Sandra:
First and foremost: “they” is really “us” insofar as the Ordinariates are concerned. The priests of the Ordinariate are former Anglican clergymen or one kind or another and they are under the authoritiy of ordinaries who generally are former Anglican bishops. At the last count, the UK Ordinariate has six former Anglican bishops on its rolls.
Second: one of the primary reasons for joining an Ordinariate is to achieve unity with the Catholic Church and the Pope. That involves accepting both the teaching of the Catholic Church and the authority of the Church and part of that authority is to watch over the ways in which divine worship takes place so as to ensure that no error creeps in. As a result, no Catholic priest of the Latin rite (and Ordinariate priests are fully Catholic priests) may use a form of sacramental liturgy which has not been vetted and authorised for use.
Third: The Book of Common Prayer and other liturgical texts concocted at the time of the Reformation are indeed written in some of the most sublime English but they were written by (not to put too fine a point on it) heretics. If you will, the “hybrid mish mash” started then.
When the Pastoral Provision was developed (in the USA alone) as the first endeavour to make it easier for Anglicans to come into full communion, a text known as “the Book of Divine Worship” was developed. It was very much an interim effort because while it uses much taken from the Book of Common Prayer in its various revisions, the Canon of the Mass is a straight lift from the Roman Canon and the English text of the Canon sits rather uneasily with the remainder.
That is why there is an Interdicasterial commission hard at work to develop and approve texts for Ordinariate use. But this is not done lightly for any texts. It usually takes 5-10 years of scrutiny before any text is finally approved after scruitny by scholars around the world.
As you may know the OLW Ordinariate is about to bring out a book called “The Customary of Our Lady of Walsingham”. This will contain much that is very familiar – the Psalter is that of Coverdale. I understand it will contain a rite for Divine Worship which willl on an interim
basis be authorised by the Ordinaries pending definitive approval.
In the UK at any rate, and to a greater or lesser extent in Australia and the USA, Ordinatiate Groups worship in existing Catholic Churches and many lifelong Catholics like to attend Ordinariate worship. Thus one is finding that Ordinarite clergy are at the forefront of restoring to English parish life the wholesome custom of the Divine Office in Church – for example, Morning Prayer and Evensong – and this is catching on.
So, I would suggest to you that, far from being “a hideous lost opportunity” what we are actually seeing is a “heaven-sent golden opportunity” – a chance to reconnnect to the historic roots of the Church IN England – but without the innovations and ambiguities introduced by the heretics at the time of the great schism of the English Church.
This is a great gift Anglicans are bringing back to the Catholic Church!
Sandra: I agree, I find it simply a kind of a theological hypocrisy for “Rome” to cut and paste the BCP! Note our friend Mounrad here, the BCP was simply and profoundly something of Thomas Cranmer’s personal work! Even the Dom Gregory Dix called Cranmer’s theology Zwingian!
I understand all about authority and the need to knuckle down, and I’m worried about a number of the ‘us’ among our clergy headed towards the Ordinariate who have spent most of their lives being embarrassed about being Anglican and seem to like nothing more (apart from doing modern Roman rite) than scrawling all over any Anglican version of the rite they can come across. As for hybrid mish-mash, look at the Book of Divine Worship, which is apparently authorised for use in Australia, although based on the 1979 American BCP that has nothing to do with us–simply patches passages of 1969 English into classical Anglican texts–it’s both NOT OURS and also HORRIBLE. It’s nice to know the English Missal has been authorised for St Agatha’s–the reason why I’m attracted to it is that there is nothing that I know of in it that is in any way contrary to (Roman) Catholic doctrine–or any that is is so small that it can be excised and replaced with something that is already an alternative in the book. We are meant to be bringing our patrimony with us, I thought, not having it made up by a committee of people who haven’t been Anglicans either at all or at least for more than 40 years. I feel they are doing all they can to absorb us. I suppose I shall have to see how it goes, but if what I have to drive half an hour across town for is hardly different from what I can get 10 minutes walk from home, why should I make the journey? By the way, there is a perfectly good translation of the Roman Canon IN the English Missal. And I’m not talking about using liturgies not vetted and authorised for use, but about not bothering to vet and authorise what is, but rather bending over backwards to MAKE THINGS UP. One thing I hear is that we can’t have the English Lectionary because it’s too much like the Extraordinary Form lectionary and there’s already an Extraordinary Form. Sorry, but it’s the English Lectionary, and it happens to go with things like Septuagesima and Sundays after Trinity. I have no choice, I think, but to enter through the Ordinariate, but whether I stay there or just give up and move on to the local or not will depend on whether there is any authenticity and whether or not we get a Hepworth clone as Ordinary.
The other thing–it is the ‘young’ people (by which I mean the people under 60–which is on average very young for us) who want the ‘old’ ways. We are being dictated to by wrinklies who have a longing for the 1970s. Fortunately we have some wrinklies who agree with us, but it still remains to be seen whether they’ll be allowed to be priests in the Ordinariate.
Indeed Sandra, I am closer to Luther, the liturgical is the real presence of Christ, and not about “how” HE got here, indeed HE is Risen & Ascended! And as an Anglican, it is always and forever ‘Word & Sacrament’! I hope my High Church Anglican and R. Catholic brethren can understand this?
I am no “liturgist”, but an Anglican priest/presbyter, and just where is the Kerygma (the action and words/message) in today’s gospel preaching? Yes, the Eucharist is itself the proclamation of the Lord’s death, “till He come”! (1 Cor. 11: 26) And HE is Himself somehow the “mysterium fidei”, the Presence and Sacrifice: ‘Both are areas of “mystery” which ultimately defy definition’.
Don Henri: I have seen the comment elsewhere that St John the Evangelist, Calgary, continues to use its former liturgy, except for the Canon, but am not sure if this is hearsay or direct observation. I do recall that in bulletins in the run-up to parish reception there was some explanation regarding liturgical changes, including dropping the General Confession. The gist was “The liturgy at St John’s has changed before; you can cope.” Can anyone currently attending St John’s clarify whether the BDW is being used or a local rite?