I have just read the text of the Wikileaked cable from the US Ambassador to the Vatican, where the British Ambassador to the Vatican seems to cast doubt on the Anglican Ordinariate and predicts some violent backlashes from enraged Protestants in England and a chilly reception from the Royal Family of the Pope during his recent visit to the UK. It made the morning news on Radio 4’s Today program this morning, and all I could think of was, “It must be a slow news day.”
First, the cable displays a profound ignorance of the facts on the ground and the back story to the Ordinariate. As I have posited previously, the Ordinariate is not a vehicle for the Vatican to welcome disaffected Anglicans with open arms into the bosom of Holy Mother the Church. It is, in fact, a quarantine camp or, more bluntly, a leper colony into which those disaffected Anglicans can be placed so as to cause minimum damage to the Roman Catholic Church. The cable does admit that the number of Anglicans going over is likely to be a trickle rather than a flood, but there are no startling insights available from the text as given.
Second, the cable documents the dismay of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams at not being consulted over the Ordinariate. This is undoubtedly true (as I have seen in other fora and heard from people who might actually know something of the subject), but was widely known beforehand. What the cable didn’t say, but what is undoubtedly the case, is that Williams is relieved that the malcontents are swimming the Tiber and only annoyed at the fact that more of them won’t be going. Rome’s centralised power structure means that they can control the Ordinariate more closely than Williams could ever control or even mildly influence the malcontents.
What concerns me is that our representative at the Vatican (and probably the US’s as well) is so uninformed about religious matters that they could write this stuff. “Tell us something we don’t know or can’t deduce from afar!” we cry. One would expect that the British Ambassador to the Vatican would be better informed about the state of Vatican-Anglican relations and more able to make predictions and sense trends in them.
This perhaps means that instead of posting Catholic laypeople to the Vatican as representatives, the UK ought to send people there who are clued in about Anglican affairs as well, regardless of the altar rail at which they receive Communion on a Sunday.