Anglican aspect of life in Ordinariate questioned

From The Church Times-

DOUBTS have been raised about whether former Church of England clerics would have distinctive “transferrable skills” to bring to the Roman Catholic Church, if they ceased to be part of the Anglican Communion.

At a meeting on Saturday at Pusey House in Oxford, the Revd Jonathan Baker SSC, Principal of Pusey House, said that a group was gathering to reflect on what was the “distinct tradition” within the Anglican Church, fostered since the Reformation, which was “potentially capable of finding its way to enrich the life of the wider Catholic Church”.

Under the norms of Benedict XVI’s Anglicanorum Coetibus, clergy trained in seminaries in the pro­posed Ordinariate (News, 23 Octo ber) would be tutored in “those aspects of Anglican patrimony that are of particular value” to the RC Church.

One speaker, Eamon Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge, and an Irish Roman Catholic, asked what “transferrable skills” Anglicans would bring. He said that what was distinctive was that they had been “shaped” by the Royal Supremacy, which had had a “moderating impact” on the differ ences in the Church of England between Catholics and Protestants.

“A fundamental part of the nature, identity, and patrimony of Anglican ism comes from the enforced co-existence of the Catholic dimension of Anglicanism within other more Protestant streams within an establishment,” Professor Duffy said. There would be “big problems ima gining how it would retain its coherence and Anglican identity outside those constraints. . . Could choral evensong survive in a minority uniate Church . . . within Roman Catholicism?”

Canon Robin Ward, the Principal of St Stephen’s House, said that the Pope, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, had seen in Anglicanism “a significant Catholic potential — a self-renewing Catholic principle”. Part of the Pope’s motivation in Anglicanorum Coetibus was to find a “juridical and theological way” in which this worthwhile distinctiveness could make a contribution to the greater communion of the catholica.

More here-

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=93683