Dr William Oddie writes about the warm welcome given by the bishops of England & Wales to the new translation of the Missale Romanum and, in doing so, speaks about the equally warm reception of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham:
It seemed to fit into a pattern of behaviour which the bishops have been exhibiting more and more since the papal visit. There was the way in which the bishops have welcomed the ordinariate, as the Pope asked them to in Birmingham. I had expected obstruction and barely disguised ill will from certain bishops who shall here be nameless (they were the ones who in the early 1990s squashed plans for a similar but less radical scheme); but all of them, even the most vocal opponent of what was, at that time, called by the aspirant Anglicans “The Roman Option”, have done everything in their power to make the new converts feel welcome. The point about the converts, of course, is that they are coming for papal authority from a Church which has no effective authority of any kind, doctrinal or otherwise: opposition to them back in the early 90s was precisely from bishops who were themselves less than wholeheartedly enamoured of the authority of the Holy See. Thus, genuinely welcoming them now could well indicate a change of heart not only about the idea of an Anglican Catholic presence, gathered as such within the Roman Catholic Church, but also about the authority of the Magisterium itself. Maybe I’m being naïf, but that’s my hypothesis and my hope.
William Oddie on CBCEW, the revised translation, and the Ordinariate
1 06 2011Dr William Oddie writes about the warm welcome given by the bishops of England & Wales to the new translation of the Missale Romanum and, in doing so, speaks about the equally warm reception of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham:
It seemed to fit into a pattern of behaviour which the bishops have been exhibiting more and more since the papal visit. There was the way in which the bishops have welcomed the ordinariate, as the Pope asked them to in Birmingham. I had expected obstruction and barely disguised ill will from certain bishops who shall here be nameless (they were the ones who in the early 1990s squashed plans for a similar but less radical scheme); but all of them, even the most vocal opponent of what was, at that time, called by the aspirant Anglicans “The Roman Option”, have done everything in their power to make the new converts feel welcome. The point about the converts, of course, is that they are coming for papal authority from a Church which has no effective authority of any kind, doctrinal or otherwise: opposition to them back in the early 90s was precisely from bishops who were themselves less than wholeheartedly enamoured of the authority of the Holy See. Thus, genuinely welcoming them now could well indicate a change of heart not only about the idea of an Anglican Catholic presence, gathered as such within the Roman Catholic Church, but also about the authority of the Magisterium itself. Maybe I’m being naïf, but that’s my hypothesis and my hope.
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