The New Roman-Anglican Initiative: Significant for Lutherans?

By Michael Root
October 21, 2009

The initiative of Rome to receive bodies of Anglicans, priests and laity, and permit them a ongoing corporate existence as “personal ordinariates” with distinct traditions may be of great significance for Lutherans and for all Western Christians – or it may not. (For details, go to the source and read the Vatican statement). In short, structures will be set up within the Catholic Church whereby parishes and priests would be under an ‘ordinary’ (the Vatican statement says a priest or a bishop) from the Anglican tradition. Such ordinariates would preserve Anglican liturgy and spirituality. Their priests could be married, but not the bishops. Anglicans could thus enter communion with Rome, while preserving many aspects of Anglican worship and spiritual life.

The apostolic constitution that will set the details for how such personal ordinariates will function has not yet been made public, which accounts for some of the present uncertainty. The term ‘personal ordinariate’ is not in the Code of Canon Law. Just how much independence will the personal ordinariates have? Larger uncertainties about the significance of this new move, however, can only be clarified by time and further developments. Will large groups of catholic-minded Anglicans who so far not left their churches now move in this direction or will the ordinariates remain small? Will such personal ordinariates be intellectually and spiritually lively or will they become museums of Anglo-Catholicism of a particular date? Will these ordinariates be strong only in a few countries (perhaps England) or will they gain a foothold in the US and, more importantly, Africa? There is no way of answering these questions now. the rest