UK - Former Anglican communities: the Ordinariate has challenged us all: do we really believe in the unity-in-diversity that has been the talk at so many ecumenical events?

The UK Ordinariate Three Years Later:

 A Snapshot

by Joanna Bogle

Some former Anglican communities thrive, some still struggle

 to find a permanent home after crossing the Tiber.

“Auntie Joanna, can I help you with your knitting?”

The difference between tapestry and knitting was not apparent to an uninitiated small boy, fascinated by the intricacies of bright wool and needles. Not one to discourage youthful enthusiasm, I gingerly showed my young nephew how to insert the wool through the mesh with the special blunt-ended needle, and with deep breaths of satisfaction he produced some creditable stitches. His contribution to the kneeler for St. Anselm’s, Pembury was small, but in a way he was helping to make history.

There are a great many magnificent and ancient churches in England, but St Anselm’s is not one of them. It’s a smallish, bleak hall, standing on a green rising up from the main road in Pembury, a village near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. It has bare walls, plastic chairs, a cramped feel, and no external ornaments to indicate its sacred use. And it is rented out for much of the week for ballet classes and a children’s playgroup.

But the reason for its place in history is important. The hall is part of the Catholic parish of Tunbridge Wells. When Pope Benedict XVI created the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. Ed Tomlinson—then vicar of a large Anglican church in Tunbridge Wells—responded with eagerness. Pope Benedict’s call, in his message Anglicanorum Coetibus—“to groups of Anglicans”—was an invitation to come into full communion with the Catholic Church, bringing along Anglican traditions, music, and what has been generally described as “Anglican patrimony.”

Father Ed—having been ordained a Catholic priest after due discernment, study, and acceptance—had to give up the beautiful church of which he had been vicar. He and his wife and small children faced a future which, humanly speaking, looked uncertain. What would the Catholic Church do with a married priest (the Church dispenses, in this very specific instance, from celibacy) and a group of faithful people from his former Anglican flock?

The solution was to appoint him as an assistant priest at the Catholic parish of St. Augustine in Tunbridge Wells parish, and he was given charge of the “outstation” at Pembury. Now, with generous financial support from the diocese (Southwark) and elsewhere, the hall will become an attractive church, serving what is already a small but thriving congregation.

And one tiny contribution to this will be the tapestry-stitched kneelers, replacing the hideous brown rubber mats that are in current use. Hence my busy stitching and the support of the Friends of the Ordinariate, which has donated to the project.

However, the Ordinariate story is not everywhere such a happy one. Some Ordinariate priests have been effectively merged into the normal Catholic diocesan structure, where sometimes the only Catholic parish available is many miles from their old Anglican one. This means they are cut off from the flock who came with them “across the Tiber,” and who now find that they can no longer remain as a group and simply have to attend Mass at a local church.

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