Convert now, then join the ordinariate after it’s started
Gordon Reid’s right about John Broadhurst. Like how some converts like John Saward have been ordained under the Pastoral Provision years after converting.

Bishop John Broadhurst, Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of London with the title of Bishop of Fulham, has just announced that he has decided to become a Roman Catholic. He is going to do this by joining the new Ordinariate set up by the Pope for unhappy Anglicans.

I wish him well in his new Church, but cannot understand how he can with a clear conscience take any more confirmations or ordinations in the Church of England. The Bishop of London should have accepted his resignation the day he made his announcement (during which he described the C of E “fascist”, while saying he was leaving because it had become too liberal for him).

He must know that in the eyes of his new Church he is a mere layman and that if he wants to be a Roman Catholic priest he will have to be reordained. So is he already exercising that prized Anglican right of private judgement and saying Rome is wrong about his Anglican orders? Maybe that is one of the “treasures” that the Pope has said he hopes Anglicans will bring with them into the Ordinariate — and here was I thinking it was just their wives!

Labels: Anglicanism, England, the Catholic faith