The Vatican announced today that it has created a canonical structure for Anglicans disaffected by developments in the Church of England. They will be allowed liturgical latitude under the rubric of personal ordinaries. What precisely this all means remains unclear, but some are announcing the end of the Anglican Communion. The New York Times article is here, but more information is available at the Lede and at Thinking Anglicans.

The significance of this isn’t quite clear. In fact, it seems on the surface not unlike the system that already operates in the US, where Episcopal priests (yes, even married ones) can become Roman Catholic priests. Rather curiously, and somewhat inconsistently, they must be reordained.

Whether this will be true in England remains uncertain, and whether married Anglican bishops might be able to serve as bishops in the Roman Catholic Church is highly unlikely.

The importance of this is largely for the English context, where there is an ongoing debate over the ordination of women as bishops. Anglo-Catholics are very resistant to this as they are to the ordination of women to the priesthood, and many people think that if and when the Church of England finally admits women to the episcopacy, there will be a wholesale departure of Anglo-Catholics from the Church of England. We will see.

It is probably not a very important move for the Episcopal Church. Those who have left in recent years include a few Anglo-Catholics, but many more of a more Protestant theological bent, who would chafe at papal supremacy.

I’m sure we’ll hear much more about this.