Tracey Rowland on Benedict and the Anglican Patrimony

Tracey Rowland - Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage & Family in Melbourne, Australia - sought to give definition to the 'Anglican patrimony' in an Australian conference on the Ordinariate.  (The full text of the address can be found at the Ordinariate Portal.)  Two particular aspects of the Anglican tradition emphasised by Rowland indicate why Benedict XVI has offered Anglicanorum Coetibus as a means of both enriching the Universal Church and healing Anglicanism's rupture with the See of Peter.

Firstly, there is liturgical theology and practice:

Although the Pope has not made any public statements about what he thinks might be the ‘gifts’ Anglicans could bring to their full membership of the Catholic Church, many commentators have observed an affinity between the Anglo-Catholic approaches to liturgy and Pope Benedict’s own liturgical theology ...

I think that Anglicans do have an appreciation of the importance of beauty and an understanding of ritual and that those who join the Ordinariate can bring with them a great liturgical tradition which many Roman-Rite Catholics will find attractive.  Aidan Nichols OP calls this particular gift of the Anglican communion ‘a high sacral register of liturgical language’.  The Evensong liturgy is perhaps the best example of this particular gift, but there are many others.

Secondly, under the influence of the Caroline Divines Anglicanism re-received the Christological and Trinitarian theologies of patristic catholicism:

I would suggest that there is much treasure to be retrieved from the works of the Caroline Divines ... The Anglo-Catholic theologians retained a strong interest in Patristic theology and thus avoided the extremes of baroque-era scholasticism, while their aversion to Calvinism inoculated them against anything like Jansenism.  Blessed John Henry Newman was the heir to this heritage and is perhaps the paradigm example of someone who has appropriated its better elements ... in the works of the Caroline Divines one finds some of the most beautiful reflections upon Patristic thought to be found in the English language.

Rowland goes as far as to suggest that Benedict "would have felt more at home with Lancelot Andrewes" than he would with the Neo-Scholasticism which the young Ratzinger strongly critiqued.

What unites these two aspects of the Anglican patrimony - liturgical theology and the Caroline's re-reception of patristic theologies - is what Rowland terms "the transcendental of beauty", the very transcendental which Benedict XVI regards as primary:

I therefore believe that now is a time in the life of the Church when we have a pope who is temperamentally suited to appropriating the Anglican patrimony which in so many ways is strongest on the transcendental of beauty.

Rowland's address provides a theological and historical context in which to understand the significance of Anglicanorum Coetibus and the dignity of the vocation it gives to those Anglicans who take the step of faith and re-enter communion with the See of Peter.  The Ordinariates and Anglican-Use communities in the Catholic Church are called to contribute to the new evangelisation their rich heritage of liturgical and theological beauty in the flattened and disenchanted world of postmodernity.