All that opposition is to be expected. But here's some insider stuff most non-Catholics don't know. After the libcaths won, not long after the Sixties captured Middle America by 1973, they soon didn't take traditionalists (the people keeping the full true faith as well as its culture before the Sixties attack including from within) seriously, and sometimes were even nice enough to be condescending after John Paul II gave his very limited permission for the traditional Mass (because it is "the Mass that would not die"; Archbishop Lefebvre, Fr. De Pauw, and others kept it going), such bishops allowing one in their dioceses. By then our worst enemies weren't the heretics but our closest rivals in ecclesiastical politics, the orthodox but low churchmen of conservative Novus Ordo. As the turnaround has gotten under way, they've been changing their minds and high-churching themselves, even changing their minds about traditionalists, but in the '80s, at the heights of both JP2's reign and local liberal power in the church, they were as militantly low-church as the liberals, thinking the Protestant-inspired charismatic renewal (JP2's No. 1 fans) was the future. Give up that artsy-fartsy old-fashioned stuff and do that instead, they told us. They went as far as calling people who "stood still" or said no to the Sixties and only wanted the faith and culture the church had given them "no longer Catholic," literally, as if all these people were Dutch Old Catholics or garage-church vagantes with their own fake Pope.
An element of that remaining low-church conservative Novus Ordo is reacting badly to the ordinariates, as Thomas Day could have predicted: "Real Catholics don't need or want all that faggy lace." Throw in ethnocentrism and reverse snobbery: "Ex-Anglicans who want this stuff are snobs who care more about escargot forks and concert classical music than the truth." There's an ignorant thinking that the church is or should be a monolith: no "bubble," "church within a church," or "Barbie's playhouse" (what the British call a Wendy house from Peter Pan) for these misfits: "What some fussy Anglicans wish the Novus Ordo looked like." Sounds like ecclesiastical Mean Girls.
There's the understandable concern that the Book of Common Prayer texts are from a rank heretic, Thomas Cranmer (I think the only Protestant heresiarch who in the beginning was a valid Catholic bishop, not just a priest; but his Bucerian heresy about the Eucharist rendered his ordinal void). "Why not a Methodist Use for converts, or even Mormon or Muslim Uses"? the naysayers ask. The church approved these texts because they're not heretical and because the other things I mentioned have no tradition of trying to celebrate Mass and otherwise believing what the church believes. Generations of good would-be Catholics have been attached to them. Why Vatican II gave a nod to Anglicans without denying the truth the Leo XIII confirmed (Cranmer dogmatized Eucharistic heresy so no real orders in Anglicanism).
No, the real issue isn't that the converts aren't really Catholic, wanting to import Protestantism. Libcaths who still buy Sixties ecumenism (let's dump our doctrine, then we and the Protestants will just kumbaya together, working for justice and peace, man) would be staunch supporters of the ordinariates if that were so. The contention is really that the converts are Catholic, trying to get away from Protestantism, which the libcaths don't want. The newcomers don't want the libcaths' secondhand Protestantism. Well-meaning or bigoted (anti-English) conservative Novus Ordo Catholics opposing the ordinariates are dupes, useful idiots. That said, from what I can tell, most conservative Novus Ordo people think the ordinariates are great, as is meet and right so to do. Along with traditionalists, the ordinariates are part of the "reform of the reform" (high-churching Roman Rite Catholicism again) that Pope Benedict XVI is identified with.
As converts die off and their children and grandchildren are nurtured in the Catholic faith, those communities will cease to serve any function and hopefully will just fade away, and the integrity and wholeness of the Latin Rite will be reaffirmed.Another note about "bubbles" in American Catholicism and insisting on uniformity: that was the thinking of Archbishop John Ireland (an Americanist heretic too, an early version of Modernist libcath, even though he used the pre-Vatican II liturgy) and the American Catholic churchmen who pushed Orestes Chornock into schism; Ruthenians who only wanted to keep what they had as Catholics at home turned Orthodox. Bigotry (like the Orthodox' ethnocentric anti-Westernism, come to think of it). The parallel works despite the Book of Common Prayer's Protestant origin because again we're talking about a liturgical text approved by the church and people who are not heretics.
And: pre-Vatican II Catholicism is not a monolith; it's not uniform. Not only do we have the Eastern rites but within the Roman Rite you have different uses (sub-rites), different national cultures and spiritualities, different religious orders with different spiritualities, and even different schools of theological opinion that sometimes hate each other. Different customs such as lace vs. no lace. The church has both.
"So what is Anglican patrimony, Your Highness? Knowing which salad fork to use? Do you hold the chalice with your pinky up or down?"
Elevated classic English including prayers from the Prayer Book (which the church has approved, even though you don't like it, and which I mostly don't use!), Anglican chant, the unique English men and boys' choral sound, Evensong, certain hymns, and sure, things such as coffee hour (parishioners getting to know each other socially; how Protestant, snort). I'll further add a healthy "semi-congregationalism" that is a hedge against another Novus Ordo happening, something we can still learn from Anglo-Catholics. We could ordain married men as new ordinariate priests too, but the church isn't doing that for the foreseeable future, and of course it can say no.
I very much doubt that the ordinariates will be allowed married priests. And any semi-congregationalism that would thwart the Church exercising jurisdiction over those parishes would simply confirm my point about the bubble effect. The first second one of these ordinariate parishes tried to rebel in such a fashion, it should be immediately suppressed. We are not a congregational polity — that is heresy.I put "congregationalism" in mock quotes and added "semi-" because I know the heresy and the risk. I'm not talking about congregations writing their own doctrine (which is what libcaths want) or saying the bishop has no authority, just that there are other ways of doing things than what the American Catholic Church usually has done, which are not about our doctrine. If our American churchmen hadn't acted like idiots, a lot more Ruthenians would still be Catholic. Believe me, if a lay trustee-owned and run parish defended traditional Catholicism, the libcaths would shut it down faster than you can say "we are church." Watch what they do more than listening to what they say.
"It sounds like 'Anglican patrimony' just means giving the finger to the Novus Ordo. Bad idea." It's a great idea! Don't suppress the Novus Ordo as most Latin Catholics are attached to it, but make Bernard Fellay a cardinal to make the field fair.
The anglicanized English is better; deal with it. I can say that confidently exactly because I don't secretly "like escargot" (believe in heresy) so I don't feel like I have to yell "Fakedty-fake!" or "They don't have Jesus!" every time someone mentions the Anglicans.
But not wanting the ordinariates isn't heresy. The late Msgr. Graham Leonard didn't want anything like that.