The impending establishment of an Anglican Ordinariate was both “timely” and “welcome”, Perth’s Archbishop Barry Hickey said during a visit to the Traditional Anglican parish of St Ninian and St Chad Church in Maylands on Sunday, September 25.
Under the Pope’s leadership, Archbishop Hickey said, Catholics and Anglicans could worship and share their treasures with one another.
“You will bring enormous gifts into the Church which will be recognised and prized,” he said.
“I think the beauty of the Anglican liturgy will attract some of our traditional Catholics because they get a bit sick of guitars and things.”
When the ordinariate is formally established, members of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) will be able to join the Catholic Church while retaining their own traditions under a process established by the Pope in 2009.
Giving an address entitled “Living Biblically”, the archbishop said in worship and preaching, Jesus needed to be inculturated into the immediate context while the basics of the faith remained the same.
“If there are people in the Anglican church who feel that, for various reasons they are not being recognised, that they’re not getting anywhere… a group that was Catholic at heart, they should have an opportunity to consider reunion as a group,” the archbishop said. “I am welcoming of it.”
In changing to the vernacular after Vatican II, he said, he was conscious that Anglicans had, for over 400 years, developed English hymns and liturgy while retaining many great, Catholic traditions from a shared past.
TAC Bishop Harry Entwistle said his congregation had already made moves to integrate with the local Church in advance of the formal establishment of the ordinariate.
Members of his congregation had been attending Catholic institutes and events, and reading The Record, for some time, he said.
In response to Archbishop Hickey’s news that he would soon open an evangelisation centre, Bishop Entwistle said he was also committed to reaching out to the wider world.
“The ordinariate is not in existence to be the Anglican preservation society or the prayer book society,” he said. “If we don’t evangelise we will simply die out. We will be absorbed, which is what some people fear… We must be part of that evanglisation.”
Archbishop Hickey was asked if the mainstream Anglican Church had tried to dissuade him from welcoming TAC members and if he was aware of any opposition from Catholics. He said he had been visited by an Anglican archbishop who told him he had done everything within his power to allow TAC Christians to remain in the mainstream Anglican Church.
That drew guffaws from many among the 50 people who were present. Archbishop Hickey said he was sure the archbishop sincerely believed what he had said.
He said he thought Catholics knew little about the Ordinariate and expected most would not be opposed but would instead trust the bishops “to do the right thing”.
There was some opposition from “hardened feminists” who “wrongly” thought the TAC’s move was simply about opposition to ordaining women as priests, he said.
Most Catholics who knew about it, however, were welcoming, Archbishop Hickey said. “And I’ve already told you what I think about the matter.”