An Anglican Home in the Catholic Church

A priest of the UK Ordinariate, Fr Matthew Pittam, has a great piece in the latest issue of The Portal showing how our Anglican way of being Catholic is an important part of the Church’s evangelisation arsenal. Embracing our Anglican tradition and liturgy is a unique complement to the wider Roman culture in Western Catholicism that only the Ordinariates can provide. He also shows that conversions to Catholicism from the Church of England (C of E) are an ongoing reality, aided by the Ordinariate’s patrimony.

He begins by describing how he used the Novus Ordo when he was in the C of E. “My parish as I was growing up certainly had some BCP Liturgies; Evensong and Benediction was a mainstay but latterly we were fully Roman in our liturgical outlook,” Fr Pittam writes. “The same was so when I was ordained into a title parish which was very consciously ‘Modern Catholic’. There were no Anglican service books in the place. At that time, it all seemed to make sense and feel right.”
 
He thus naturally continued to use the Novus Ordo when he became a Catholic priest in the Ordinariate, serving a diocesan parish as well, but identifies how this came about. “The idea of any sense of Anglican liturgical patrimony didn’t make any sense to me. On reflection now, part of the problem was that I had confused Anglican patrimony with Anglo Catholic or Anglo Papalist patrimony.”
 
Yet in the decade since the UK Ordinariate was set up, Anglicans have continued to enter into full Catholic communion. But differently from the first, founding wave of Ordinariate Tiber-crossers, this latest stream of converts have never conflated Roman patrimonial ways with Catholic doctrine. Fr Pittam writes, “Interestingly the majority of those who now form our Ordinariate group are not from the faded glory of the local Anglo Catholic ‘shrines’ but are from ordinary ‘middle of the road’ Anglican parishes. Their experience of Anglicanism was very different to mine and Divine Worship for them is something that makes sense and they are comfortable with.”
 
In the latest group of local Anglicans about to be received as new Catholics, Fr Pittam says “All are from the C of E but none would have considered themselves remotely Anglo Catholic. They were not shaped by the movement that shaped me.” For these newest Ordinariate members, the continued use in the Catholic Church of their Anglican liturgical tradition “creates a welcome and a place within the Church where they can feel at home.”
 
It is sometimes easy for us Catholics to overlook how jarring the difference in community and liturgical culture can be for someone considering entering Catholic communion. I myself experienced this when I first began attending Catholic masses in the years prior to any Anglican Use provision in Canada. For us, the Novus Ordo is perfectly valid but culturally foreign. As a result, when then-Pope Benedict XVI allowed us to begin using an Anglican form of Catholic Mass, it felt very much like a coming home.
 
Fr Pittam’s community members have clearly felt the same thing. “One person shared that often a Novus Ordo Mass can feel alien but that the liturgy in our Ordinariate Group feels natural, whilst still distinctively Catholic. We are located in a wide rural area and the local Catholic parishes are all large communities in large towns. For local rural Anglicans, fed on the BCP in tiny rural churches, these diocesan catholic communities can be a daunting prospect and even present a barrier. We can offer something culturally and liturgically which they are able to embrace.”
 
The Church’s evangelization of the English-speaking peoples depends on being all things to all people, as St Paul put it, and Fr Pittam has had a front-row seat to the specific boost the Catholic Church's Anglican liturgical option provides via the Ordinariates. “Our patrimony is not about looking to a narrow and fading tradition within Anglicanism but to the breath of tradition which has existed within the Church of England in its broadest sense and which is now planted on the fertile soil of the Catholic Church.” Praise be to God, and thanks to Benedict XVI!
 
Read the full article in The Portal by Fr Matthew Pittam here.

Learn more about the newest UK Ordinariate community, St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Husbands Bosworth, England here.

Christopher Mahon is the secretary of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society. 

Photo credit: husbandsbosworthcatholic.org.uk