“The Ordinariate has finally arrived”

So says Britain’s Damien Thompson, who blogs: 

There’s plenty of scepticism about the Ordinariate – especially since the careful circulation of a quote attributed to former Cardinal Bergoglio saying he didn’t see the need for it. Well, we shall see. Pope Francis – who would never have encountered Anglicans in the Catholic tradition in Latin America – now finds himself head of the Ordinariate in three continents; his spokesman has said that this will be a permanent structure of the Catholic Church.

And he finds something in the Anglican Ordinariate that the new pope might actually find attractive:

One of the treasures of Anglicanism that the Ordinariate can bring to Rome has nothing to do with vestments or prayer books – it’s the tradition of the Anglo-Catholic “slum priests” who carried the Gospel to the darkest alleyways of Jack the Ripper’s London. If that can be revived for the 21st century, then, like new movements before them, the Ordinariate will become part of the fabric of the Church. But first comes perhaps the most difficult part of all: blocking its ears to the carping and sneers of its critics.

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