So it turns out that John Broadhurst, Andrew Burnham and Keith Newton will spend less than two weeks as laymen.
According to the Friends of the Ordinariate website,
the former bishops of Fulham, Ebbsfleet and Richborough will be
ordained Roman Catholic priests in Westminster Cathedral at 10.30am on
Saturday, 15 January, a fortnight after they were received into the
Church.
Everyone is welcome to attend.
By that stage they will already
be Catholic clergy, having been ordained deacons on Thursday 13 January.
I’d be interested to know whether this sets some sort of record.
The
late Mgr Graham Leonard, former Bishop of London, was, I believe,
ordained priest without a separate diaconal ordination, though I could
be wrong about that.
Does anyone remember when he was received?
One
difference is that Mgr Leonard was ordained conditionally, on 23 April
1994.
To quote his Daily Telegraph obituary from last January:
He told his former colleagues on the episcopal bench of the House of Lords of his decision to join the Roman Church, and sent papers to the Vatican outlining his claim to be a legitimately ordained bishop. This was because he had received apostolic orders from a bishop of the Old Catholic Church, which were considered legitimate even though it had broken with Rome at the first Vatican Council during the mid-19th century.
In Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, tactfully told Leonard that he could not confirm that he was a bishop or deny it, then went on to point out that he was addressing Leonard as if he were a bishop.
When Pope John Paul II met Leonard, the “Roman option” – a proposal for former Anglicans to have their own liturgy within the Catholic Church – had been turned down; but Leonard recalled afterwards the Pope asking: “Why are the English Catholic bishops so unapostolic?”
Let’s hope that this Pope has no need to ask a similar question.
SIC: TC/UK