In the early 1990s, when the former bishop of London and a group of other prominent Anglo-Catholics were in negotiation with a group of Catholic bishops – over the possibility of Anglicans being received into the Church in parish-based groups, rather than as unconnected individuals – the Tablet surmised what Pope Paul could have meant by his aspiration that an Anglican “patrimony” might be “united not absorbed” into the Catholic Church.
The Tablet summarised what the Anglicans concerned were hoping to bring into the Roman Catholic Church: it was, the paper thought, “their widely based evangelistic expertise, their English liturgical style (rather than an “English Rite” which hardly exists in reality), and their tradition of lay involvement”. The Tablet, as might have been expected, got it wrong. The tradition of lay involvement as it had evolved within Anglicanism - bringing in its train endless political activism (often highly divisive) surrounding elections to parochial church councils and diocesan and General Synods, all with their multiple layers of endless bureaucracy – was actually part of what they wanted to leave behind.
As for “evangelistic expertise”, where it existed, it was part of something larger. It derived from an aspect of the medieval Catholic Church which had survived into Anglicanism, despite all the ecclesiological and doctrinal rupture, and which was still a real and precious part of Anglican parish life which they were deeply reluctant to leave behind – which they wished, in effect, to “repatriate” into the English Catholic Church.
