The Ordinariate has got Anglican and Catholic mediocrities seriously rattled

From The London Telegraph-

There’s an excellent piece on the Ordinariate in today’s Daily Telegraph by our new religious affairs editor Tim Ross, reporting that “senior figures in the Catholic Church in England expect the new body to accommodate ‘thousands’ of converts”.

I sense a change in the wind, don’t you? The Bishop of Fulham is (at least in his own eyes) an Anglo-Catholic “big beast”. As I said at the weekend, although I’m glad he’s coming over, his rhetoric about the “fascist” Church of England is… unhelpful, I think is the word people use. But if Bishop Broadhurst is joining the English Ordinariate, no one can say that it appeals only to an effete Anglo-Papalist fringe.

I wasn’t surprised when, unlike other members of the Catholic Group in Synod in 1993-4, John Broadhurst stayed behind in the C of E and accepted a mitre. He thought Anglo-Catholicism was worth fighting for. Now he knows that the battle is lost.

In the end, though, it’s not his generation that matters. And I don’t think we should get too excited about the small number of parishes that will attempt to “come over”. St Peter’s, Folkestone, has voted to join the Ordinariate, and good luck to the brave Fr Stephen Bould if he can achieve his aims. But I can’t see the Church of England releasing more than a few church buildings, and where will the money come from to sustain them afterwards? Large Anglo-Catholic congregations are likely to split over the Roman option; small ones won’t have the energy to reinvent themselves as parishes.

More here-

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100059526/the-ordinariate-has-got-anglican-and-catholic-mediocrities-seriously-rattled/