This is as good a place as any to discuss an odd American blog I have come across. The author is a Californian convert to Catholicism who as an Anglican was associated with a High Church parish that tore itself apart over the Ordinariate. He has acquired from this experience a fierce loathing for the Ordinariate and believes it should be suppressed, the sooner the better.
stmarycoldcase.blogspot.com/ The thing about the blog is that it does make some substantial criticisms of the ordinariate, especially the American arm. These include:
(1) Its failure to attract large numbers of Anglicans en bloc (it was based on the assumption that whole parishes would come over, which rarely happened).
(2) He complains that some individuals who have acted as clergymen in "continuing Anglican" splinter groups are often ordained to the priesthood with insufficient training. He gives examples, with varying degrees of evidence - some of which are quite substantial and very serious - where individuals have shown serious personal instability or clear connections to the homosexual subculture which has been in evidence in Anglo-Catholicism since the C19.
(3) He also gives - often with chapter and verse - examples of ordinariate groups making overambitious financial commitments without sufficient provision.
(4) He notes that some in the ordinariate have brought with them the habits of indifference and contempt to legitimate episcopal authority which have been endemic to Anglo-Catholic Ritualism within Anglicanism. (As he does not mention, even Newman observed this and was critical of it - he wrote that he simply could not understand how Pusey could simultaneously regard the Anglican bishops as real bishops and disregard their authority in practice, even to the extent of usurping certain episcopal functions, such as granting faculties for confession.) Anyone who reads Fr Hunwicke's blog regularly will recognise the Puseyite attitude. He also argues that, again like Puseyites, the Ordinariate fails to recognise the extent to which Anglicanism is fundamentally Protestant and marked from its inception by forms of Protestant sensibility.
(5) He complains that the ordinariate takes away congregants and resources from the dioceses, and that its members regard themselves as a superior breed of Catholic. (It is noteworthy that he is also very hostile to Opus Dei and to EF trads, and that he is quite venomous about trads who attach themselves to ordinariate congregations even though these are only supposed to be for former Anglicans and other Protestants.)
(6) He picks up on the ways in which much American cultural and political conservatism is an expression of snobbery based on romantic fantasies of Anglophilia which ignore the seamier sides of British history and especially its aristocratic tradition, and suggests that this is the basic motivation of the Ordinariate. He jeers at the difference between its pretensions to tradition and the "storefront churches" it uses [to which one response might be that better people than you or I have worshipped in storefront churches]. He even insinuates at times that the Ordinariate was created by a conspiracy of homosexuals,the CIA or both.
It's getting late and I'm getting tired, so I'll point out some problems with his objections:
(1) Any religious order or spiritual tradition by definition believes it possesses something which other expressions of Catholicism don't have. That doesn't mean that Dominicans are snobs for not being Benedictines, or vice versa, that those who prefer Salesian to Ignatian spirituality are fantasists. I might add that there is such a thing as inverted snobbery, and the blog author seems to have a bad dose of it.
(2) Quite a few of the Eastern Churches originated in bodies which were condemned as heretical by General Councils, and whose rituals had to undergo certain modifications (e.g. the Church of the East had to drop liturgical denunciations of St Cyril of Alexandria and invocations of Nestorius as a saint). I fail to see how that differs in principle from the adapted Anglican ritual adopted by the Ordinariate and sneered at by the author. [BTW the author asks why there is no Lutheran ordinariate and suggests this is due to snobbery, but I believe there is in fact a similar organisation in Germany for Lutheran converts. The reason why there is no Presbyterian ordinariate, which the author seems to think highly significant, is quite obviously that Presbyterians do not have even nominal bishops, so that a Presbyterian ordinariate would be so different in structure from Presbyterianism as to be unrecognisable.]
(3) Similarly some of the recognised Eastern Churches are very small and have failed to fulfil predictions that they would attract much larger numbers back to Rome (the Bulgarian and Russian Greek-Catholics are clear examples). Does the author think they should be suppressed and their members forcibly latinised?
(4) His arguments about diverting resources from dioceses etc have been used in the past to argue (for example) that the orders of friars should be suppressed, that Eastern Rite Catholics outside their traditional areas should abandon their customs and conform to the Latin Rite, etc. These arguments are generally held to have been misguided, and the resemblance should at least give him pause.
(5) His dismissal of both EF trads and the whole Oxford Movement tradition as a pack of fantasists (he does not seem to mention Newman) is facile to say the least. (To take one example, Fr Hunwicke is clearly eccentric and some of his affectations irritate me, but he is an experienced patristic and classical scholar quite far removed from some of the Society of Creative Anachronism types the blogger seems to encounter in California.) He is quite ignorant on some points (for example, he says in a recent post that even schismatic trads have long abandoned the use of houselling cloths on the altar rails, but I have often encountered them at indult EF Masses. Since he professes himself ignorant of how they are fastened, I will explain; they are attached to strings which are looped round the altar rails and tied.) I might add that while romanticism can go rotten very badly, it can also stimulate an interest which leds to genuine recoveries and discoveries (the history of the liturgical movement is a case in point).
(6) I have only once in my life attended an Ordinariate Mass and I have no attachment to the Anglican tradition at all. Temperamentally I find Presbyterianism more congenial (though I am not sure this is the proper attitude). If cradle Catholics were given general permission to transfer to the ordinariate (and I think they should, within reason, just as it is possible to change rites) I certainly would not do so.
That said, I find the blogger's attitude of sustained loathing and contempt, his utter refusal of empathy or sympathy, and his confidence that he is qualified to dismiss other people's spiritual and liturgical preferences as so much buncombe, to be remarkably repulsive. Nobody is forcing him to join the ordinariate or keeping him from attending a diocesan parish, and his zeal to force other people to do as he says while claiming that their mere existence constitutes aggression against him is not attractive. I'm with Gamaliel.
I may add that if you want people to pay attention to your legitimate criticisms it is not a good idea to scream incessantly at the top of your voice that they are nothing but a pack of morons and are not entitled to disagree with you about their own actions and priorities.
For a different, and probably over-roseate view of the ordinariate see here:
anglicanorumcoetibussociety.blog/