English Jesuit On Fallin' Away Catholics And Getting Our Catholic Churches Back Lost In The Reformation

Fr Anthony Symondson, a former Anglo-Catholic vicar who became a Jesuit priest, doubted however whether mass conversion was inevitable. He predicted that if an English Ordinariate relies on "shared churches and temporary buildings" he felt it would

"represent a very small number of people with a very limited future". "None of us really know how the Church of England is going to respond to it and how the Church Commissioners are going to respond to it in terms of letting property go,"

he said. Congregations are likely to be split by the decision and may be tempted to experiment with parish-sharing, he said, but he explained that when this was tried at a church in west London in the 1990s it was soon halted by Cardinal Basil Hume because of divisions between Catholic converts and the resident Anglican congregation.

Fr Symondson added:

"A lot of divorced and remarried Catholics go to these churches because they are effectively excommunicated from the Catholic Church

and the last thing they want is to be under the jurisdiction of Rome again because it will put them back in the situation that they have tried to escape."

Link (here) to the full article in Virtue Online.
Photo is Westminster Abby