Former Episcopal bishop and now Catholic priest Father Jeffrey Steenson has written a nice piece on the Anglican ordinariate over at mercatornet:

Here’s a sample:

It was not a sudden decision. The goal of Catholic unity has been, more or less, an integral part of Anglican identity since Newman, as the agreed statements of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission plainly show. The conditions for corporate reunion seemed favorable for a brief season in the years immediately following Vatican II. But powerful counter-intuitive movements within Anglicanism had pushed the goal of full communion so far over the horizon that it was no longer realistic to expect that the established ecumenical instruments could heal the schism. And so various groups and individuals approached the Holy See, not with the intention of repudiating Anglicanism, but rather to discover a new path toward unity.

I was a part of one such effort in 1993-1994. In reviewing our submissions to the Holy See from that time, I was astonishing to find so many echoes in the Note of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) about Personal Ordinariates. For those who are interested in following this story, William Oddie’s The Roman Option (Harper/Colllins, 1997) is essential reading. To add one note to Dr Oddie’s fine study – the request for a canonical structure similar to the military ordinariate was initially proposed by Msgr William Stetson, for many years the secretary to the ecclesiastical delegate for the Pastoral Provision.

Please go and read the whole thing over at mercatornet.com

HT: Dwight Lindley