The Pope has honoured three former Anglican bishops, the first members of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, with the title of monsignor.
Fr Keith Newton, the leader of the Ordinariate who has most of the functions of a bishop, and Fr John Broadhurst, the former Bishop of Fulham, have been granted the papal award of Apostolic Pronotary, the highest ecclesial title for non-bishops. Fr Andrew Burnham, the former Bishop of Ebbsfleet, has been granted the papal award of Prelate of Honour, and is therefore also a monsignor.
The three men became the first clergy of the world’s first personal ordinariate set up for groups of former Anglicans as a result of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus in January.
Signing bonuses?
#1: 200 years off purgatory.
So the ordinariate effectively has its own episcopate, with Msgr Newton as archbishop and Msgrs Broadhurst and Burnham as bishops, in all but name. So much for the RCs who predicted this could never happen.
And the local RC bishops will have no influence or effect on the Ordinariate, except to the extent that his Holiness permits. Quite a shift in power…
Inasmuch as the Ordinary (here, Msgr Newton) is simply a member of the local Catholic bishops’ Conference (in this instance, of the UK), it isn’t quite accurate to interpret these titular honors as indicating the making of an archbishop and bishops. It seems likely also that one intent is to draw these Ordinariate clergy close to the Pope, as the titles confer membership in the ‘Papal Family’ (can be looked up on Wikipedia, that’s what I did). It could also be they are a way to indicate respect for their past ministries as Anglicans; in fact, it is said that Cardinal Ratzinger used to address Msgr Graham Leonard after his conversion as ‘Bishop Leonard’. It seems Pope Benedict had been thinking about these developments a long time in advance…..
Actually, I guess it’s the CBC of England and Wales, or ‘CBCE&W’, and not the UK – sorry about that.
Where is the laiety in all this, however, and how can they hold on to any vestiges of Anglican identity as their clergy become absorbed in a different millieu?
3. Yes. People are catching on. Glad to see it. The key is the word, “ordinary.” An ordinary is anyone who exercises authority like a diocesan bishop, but who is not necessarily a bishop. Likewise, not all bishops are ordinaries. The head bishop of a diocese is its ordinary. Priests who are the administrators of dioceses between bishops are ordinaries. Provincial superiors of clerical religious orders are ordinaries. Auxiliary bishops are not ordinaries.
Ordinaries have a kind of final authority unless there is an extraordinary intervention from Rome which is extremely rare, such as with Cardinal Law in Boston.
So, these priests, now monsignori, will exercise the quite final authority of bishops without technically being bishops. The solution is canonical genius!
The whole thing suggests how irrelevant Apostolica Curae is, despite the protestations of ultramontane Catholics and Anglo-Catholics who imagine the former to be ubiquitous. Yes, they had to be re-ordained — as Fr Hunwicke has said, that is the [i]juridical[/i] submission necessary; but no one denied his priesthood (some even had celebratory final masses as Anglicans), and no one in the RC hierarchy (outside of England, anyway, where some prejudices refuse to die) is treating them like baby priests. Whatever one might say in technical and canonical terms about “validity,” it is clear that the obsession with validity as the [i]sine qua non[/i] of identity is much more prominent in Protestant polemics than in contemporary Catholic practice.