The three former bishops, (from left) John Broadhurst, Keith Newton and Andrew Burnham, after the ceremony. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesFrom Peter Stanford at the Guardian:
In its 100-plus years Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of English Catholicism, will have seen few stranger sights than Saturday's procession of three Anglican bishops' wives, in matching beige coats, one with an outsized brown hat, going up on to the high altar to embrace their husbands, all newly ordained as Catholic priests. Catholicism isn't that keen on women on the altar – to the pain of the demonstrators from the Catholic Women's Ordination movement protesting outside the cathedral's doors – and it doesn't usually countenance priests having wives.
But this was no ordinary ceremony. Almost everyone who spoke during it used the word "historic" to describe the ordination as Catholic priests of John Broadhurst, Andrew Burnham and Keith Newton, all formerly Anglican bishops.
"...matching beige coats"? Coordinated before the ceremony as a proper color for Roman Catholic clergy wives?
I dunno. The reporter sounds breathless beyond what the event would warrant. The powers can pack the altar with 80 Roman Catholic priests and say, "Historic!" over and over, but, to me. the ordinariates seem much ado about not much. The stream of Anglicans flowing to Rome is nothing new. The stream that flows the other way, from Rome to Anglicanism, is nothing new either.
What is breathtaking about the whole initiative is the speed at which 550 years of post-Reformation practice is being overturned. Until two weeks ago Broadhurst, Burnham and Newton were still Anglican bishops. In the space of 14 days, they have completed a journey that usually takes other converts seven years: 12 months to go through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults to become a Catholic, and six years in a seminary.
So. The three bishops who, according to Rome, were never, ever bishops or even priests were ordained Roman Catholic priests with extraordinary speed. The former Bishop of Richborough, Keith Newton, who was chosen to be the first ordinary, comes right out of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' own diocese. Those years of faux ordinations and faux Eucharists must count for something to have put the "bishops" on the fast track to become RC priests.
I pray for and wish the members of the new Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham well. I crossed over the other way myself, from Roman Catholicism to the Episcopal Church, and I appreciated the prayers and good wishes of my Roman Catholic friends when they were offered. May God bless them all.
UPDATE: The editorial in the Observer brings a different perspective to the story than the breathlessness of the reporter.
In the face of poverty, climate change, natural disasters and all the other challenges facing our planet for religious institutions to be consumed in bickering about whether women can be priests is the stuff of satire.Read it all.
It is only institutional religion that continues to regard women as second-class citizens. If Catholicism believes that recruiting a handful of renegade Anglicans who share its institutional misogyny will buttress its position it is mistaken.
