From The London Guardian-
How will cradle-Catholics welcome the Anglican flying bishops, their colleagues, wives and retinues currently flapping towards Rome and its blessed ordinariate? Well, it hardly behoves someone who is pretty lapsed these days from spurning their gracious presence, but I know enough still-practising Catholics to appreciate that the Anglicans' much delayed arrival at the departure terminal will not be greeted with unalloyed joy and unconfined rapture.
John Broadhurst, the disaffected Anglican bishop of Fulham, recently had the sublime impertinence to compare his treatment at the hands of the Church of England's General Synod – of all tyrannical bodies! – to persecution by fascists. As a comparison it is so surreal as to be beyond parody, though he has excused it as no more than an attempt to gain attention with a soundbite, which somehow makes the whole offensiveness worse. But his attitude does somewhat create the suspicion that these people inhabit another plane of proportion and delusion. Fortunately, Broadhurst is hopping off the pyre before synod starts lighting the faggots.
What makes Catholics suspicious is, if Broadhurst and his ilk were so convinced of their Catholicism, what has taken them so long to convert? They could have done so at any time. It would have been arduous, conceivably long, possibly lonely, maybe even difficult and certainly low-profile, but it would have had an integrity which seems lacking now that they have had so long to get used to the single issue motivating them now: the ordination of women as bishops, so long after they were first consecrated priests.
More here-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/nov/09/uneasy-welcome-flying-bishops
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