A 150-year-old Anglo-Catholic charity has given £1 million to
Britain’s Personal Ordinariate – enough to keep it financially afloat
for up to a year.
The money, donated by the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament,
will ensure that priests in the ordinariate will not be left penniless
in the coming months. It represents almost half of the charity’s total
assets.
Trustees agreed to the grant after checking with lawyers
that it would be compatible with the charity’s objects – namely, “the
advancement of the Catholic faith in the Anglican tradition”.
The
Confraternity changed its rules in April last year so that ordinariate
priests could become members. Five out of six of its trustees have now
been ordained as priests in the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of
Walsingham.
But one Anglican minister has already lodged a
complaint with the Charity Commission and written letters of protest to
Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster and the Pope.
The Rev Paul
Williamson, from Hanworth, south-west London, said the grant was a
“disgrace”.
A Facebook group opposing it has attracted nearly 300
members.
Mgr Keith Newton, the head of the ordinariate, said the
grant guaranteed an income for its priests.
He said: “A million pounds
sounds like a lot of money but it’s not an awful lot to run something
like an ordinariate. It needs at least a million pounds a year – and
that’s without thinking that it will grow.”
Mgr Newton said there
was still “a lot of work to do”, citing pensions as well as life and
health insurance costs for clergy.
But he said that all of the 60 or so
ordinariate priests now had somewhere to live. “It’s a great relief,” he
said.
Fr Christopher Pearson, superior general of the
Confraternity, said he would be consulting in the coming year on whether
Catholics should be allowed to remain members, and if it could continue
to exist as an Anglican charity.
He defended the grant against
criticism, saying that the Confraternity was never a Church of England
society.
He said that when it was founded in 1862 priests who reserved
the Blessed Sacrament or led Benediction risked imprisonment.
Its
assets, he said, did not originate from the Church of England either.
He
said they were largely down to a £450,000 donation by Anglo-Catholics
in 1870.
Fr Pearson also pointed out that critics of the grant
“had their own incomes, churches, tabernacles, chalices”, but priests in
the ordinariate did not.
The Confraternity has also given £10,000
to three Walsingham nuns who joined the ordinariate at the start of the
year.
According to Fr Pearson, the money paid for “clothes, shoes and
housing”.
The Confraternity, which has about 120 priest members in
England and 1,500 worldwide, was founded by the Rev Thomas Carter, a
prominent Anglo-Catholic, in 1862.
Its six trustees are supposed
to be elected by district councils of priest members, or associates, but
some of these councils have not met in decades.
In these cases the
appointment is made by the superior general.
On its website the
Confraternity states: “There is no more precious thing in the world than
the Blessed Sacrament of the altar and our joy is to help … others to
regard as such this most precious gift: Christ’s own abiding Presence
among us.”