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The new leader of the Ordinariate in Great Britain is a former Anglican priest – Father David Waller.
The Vatican has announced Waller – currently the parish priest and vicar general of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham – will replace Msgr Keith Newton.
Newton is retiring after serving over 13 years as the Ordinary of the ecclesiastical structure for former Anglicans.
Newton says the Vatican’s announcement is “momentous” given that Waller, who is a celibate, will become the first bishop Ordinary of the Ordinariate.
As someone who was already married as an Anglican clergyman before entering the Church through the Ordinariate, Newton was not allowed episcopal consecration.
Choosing the bishop
In keeping with the Anglican emphasis on consultation and in accordance with the Anglicanorum coetibus, members of the Ordinariate’s governing council (made up of Ordinariate priests) chose Waller as one of three people they recommended to the Holy See.
“Although we’re full Roman Catholics, our ordinariate allows us to preserve something of our Anglican patrimony within the universal church” Newton says.
“As a priest however, I’ve also been one of very few bishops’ conference members not in episcopal orders.
“The Holy See has wanted us to be governed by a bishop to clarify our ecclesiastical status within the Catholic Church.”
Pope Benedict XVI established the ordinariate in 2009.
The personal ordinariates function as Catholic dioceses with Anglican traditions. They celebrate the Mass, divine office, sacraments and other liturgies in traditional English according to the liturgical books approved by Pope Francis.
Benedict originally conceived these ordinariates as a permanent, pastoral response to whole congregations from the Anglican tradition asking to enter the Catholic Church with their traditions intact.
In 2019, Pope Francis expanded the ordinariates’ missionary mandate to invite all Protestant Christians into full Catholic communion.
They would enliven the faith of Catholics who had weakened or fallen away from the practice of the faith, he said.
General acceptance
Newton said while the UK’s Catholic bishops “generally accepted” him as the UK ordinariate’s shepherd, he noted it had been difficult for other prelates to accept the first “overlapping Western jurisdiction” within their church.
Unlike a typical diocese of the Latin Church which has immediate jurisdiction within a set territorial boundary, a personal ordinariate’s jurisdiction can extend over its Catholic members nationwide or across national boundaries.
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