Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Answering neo-RCs who hate traditionalists. Again Arturo is spot-on.
• The only future(s) for Anglo-Catholicism. In England as RC national parishes (‘ways that allow us to bring our folk with us’ as Andrew Burnham says); in America the same (which is what Anglican Use parishes are) and/or as Western Rite Orthodox parishes. RCs might laugh at the notion of ‘Western Catholicism reconciled with the Orthodox’ as a tail wagging a dog, and Orthodox anti-Westernism is a problem, but it would be a lot of St Augustine’s, Denvers under Mgr Mangels and of course would be a good thing. Note that it looks a lot like Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival. The Continuing Churches? They do good but the world doesn’t need more denominations as Jeffrey Steenson has said.
• To answer LutherPunk’s question (more), locally, no, they don’t, which is why there are about four times as many WRO parishes (not a lot but still) as AU RC ones; the Antiochians train new priests to do it as needed and the local Romans don’t.
• Anyway what if the Anglican liberals are right? The Spectator’s Theo Hobson thinks so approvingly. Like RC converts he sees a Protestant and Erastian institution put in its place by the state (Harry and Liz Tudor and Joe Stalin shared the latter notion), sort of a spiritual concierge to the ruling class. He notes that conscientious Christians in it have always felt guilty about that — Anglicanism ‘half-hating’ its inherent liberalism — and so Evangelicalism, Methodism and Anglo-Catholicism were attempts to correct it. In the despised Third World, now free of the Erastianism (no more ‘empah’), the Evos may have won. But it’s still not Catholic.
• Somebody who denies an infallible church (agrees with Articles XIX and XXI) but accepts everything else in the faith is not a Catholic; likewise a Catholic who reads Coverdale is not an Anglican. That said this ethos, ‘a culture that began in England but isn’t limited to the English today, of a Benedictine-based emphasis on the divine office in daily prayer and a love of moderation and fair play, not necessarily tolerant of heresy but of people’s failings’, is something everybody from Ref to Dan to Charley to Derek to this Coverdale-reading Catholic come from and take part in even though it’s not enough to have a communion (‘I thought we were Church of England’ said the old parishioner in Hobson’s story). But it’s still not a bad thing to share.
• BTW, what do you say, Jorge? Is denying gay marriage a heresy according to Affirming Catholicism?
• Damian Thompson in the Sunday Times, found here: A priest who looks barely out of his teens explains what he does when unsolicited copies of The Tablet — a liberal [Roman] Catholic magazine that opposes the Latin revival — arrive at his church: “I painstakingly remove the staples and feed it into the shredder. It’s time-consuming, but God’s work.”
• This blog is not a denominational cheering squad. Rod Dreher: the priestly underage sex scandal in the US RC Church is not over.