From "The Anglo-Catholic Blog"

Some Anglican priests see the need for Ordination before being accepted as a priest in the Ordinariate as a stumbling block. Perhaps in reality it is a great gift. To begin with, it requires humility from us; and that is a good place to start. We are not saying “Everything we have done in the Anglican Church is worthless”; far from it, at Ordinations of former Anglican Priests the Catholic Bishop seems always to be at pains to value what has gone before. Undoubtedly our ministries have been blessed; but they have been incomplete.

In that our priesthood was not in union with the priesthood of the whole Church it was defective. All the arguments about Archbishop Parker’s orders or whether the ‘Dutch touch’ has altered the case set out in Apostolicae Curae is beside the point. Holy Orders are about more than the validity or otherwise of an individual priest’s ordination. The plain fact is, we are part of a College of Priests, in our turn connected to a Bishop who is part of a College of Bishops. Surely that is part of what is being expressed when Bishops gather round to lay their hands on the head of the man they are Consecrating, and a Bishop is joined by other priests in the laying on of hands at the Ordination of Priests. It is also there in an induction, when the Bishop says “Receive the Cure of Souls, which is both mine and yours”. Ever since the first ordinations of women to the priesthood, that collegiality has been fractured. We are in impaired communion. The Eames Commission Report foresaw this, the Lambeth Conference endorsed it, and in England the Act of Synod made it seem respectable.

Yet I have had a Cathedral Dean in a fury that I did not receive Communion at an Ordination. He did not say this to my face, indeed he smiled and passed the time of day; and then he published his outburst in the Press. Were we a coherent church, his anger would have been very understandable, though not his failure to face me in person. But our priestly college is incoherent, fractured. We do not all recognise every priest as a member of the college, and the moment there are women bishops – not far over the horizon in England - neither shall we be able to see any collegiality among the Bishops.

It is this, more than what happened in the past, which invalidates all our Orders in the Church of England. The mere fact that I might have Catholic opinions does not alter the facts. Of course, the Lord is very good; the Spirit blows where he chooses, and is not restricted to the Sacraments. But if the Sacraments are available, we should use them. It pains me to say this, but at present the Sacraments as administered in the Church of England seem to me to be of at best dubious authenticity – and so of dubious value.

At an induction this week I heard the Bishop saying once again “The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church”. Would that it were still true!

(+Edwin Barnes)