THE
P RTAL
August 2011
Page 9
The Ordinary’s Page
Monsignor Andrew
Burnham writes
MY SUCCESSOR as Bishop of Ebbsfleet lives just up the
road from me – twenty minutes when the A34 is behaving itself
– and our main activities are based in the same city. Indeed,
during Trinity Term this year, we used the same church: the
Oxford Ordinariate Group borrowed Pusey House
Chapel on Saturday evenings.
Relationships are good: some Puseyites came to
our Ordinariate Mass and some of our Ordinariate
members began their Christian pilgrimage as members
of the Pusey House congregation. The third Bishop of
Ebbsfleet and the fourth Bishop of Ebbsfleet remain
good friends.
my own space
What do we priests and people of the Ordinariate
make of those who have chosen to remain in the
Church of England? I don’t mean those who are
entirely at home in the Church of England, where the
most persuasive flavour now is a very attractive ‘Open
Evangelical’ one.
the Anglican tradition?
dilemmas
As they wrestle with these dilemmas, they need and
deserve our support and prayers. Those of us who
chose to remain in the Church of England in the early
1990s, often because of the responsibilities of caring for
young families, ought to be particularly understanding
I mean those who are looking for some living space about those who are doing the same twenty years later.
for traditional Anglo-catholicism, where the ‘flying
bishops’ really can continue to be bishops for their
Those of us who have become Catholics recently,
priests and parishes. I have to confess that I became including some remarkable young clergy with real
a Catholic not beca use I thought that there was no family responsibilities, think that 2012 is different
longer a space for me in the Church of England.
from 1992. But there were plenty of courageous people
in 1992 who thought that the game was up then and
As a bishop, I was always rather insistent on making became Catholics at that point. Many of them looked
my own space, and space for those whom I cared for. askance at those of us who remained Anglicans. Some
I became a Catholic because I became convinced that were openly contemptuous of Forward in Faith and its
the imperative for unity with the Holy See was clear campaigns. Plenty of them remained prayerful and
and urgent. It was a calling and one which I hope that charitable, well-disposed to those who were taking
all Anglo-catholics hear and heed, and, for the sake their time.
of the mission of the Church and the coming of the
Kingdom, sooner rather than later.
My experience of Ordinariate priests is that most of
them – all of them as I have encountered them – are
Anglo-catholics who remain have several dilemmas remaining prayerful and charitable, well-disposed to
to face. One is that the Pope, for whom most of them Anglo-catholic clergy and laity. But our understanding
pray each day, has issued an invitation, which, for the of what ‘Catholic’ means is now very different.
present, they are declining. Another is that what is,
for Anglicans, an unauthorised Rite of Mass is being
An early lesson from the inestimably wise Fr Stephen
replaced by another unauthorised Rite of Mass. Will Wang, our tutor, was that we were not coming into full
they stay with the 1970s or move on to new texts? A communion with the Catholic Church but entering
third is, will they continue to insist – as some of them into the full communion of the Catholic Church. Not
are doing – that the Ordinariate is not a flowering of a merger but a rebirth, one might say.