I read the other day on an Ordinariate forum that Church of England Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has been received into the Catholic Church. Well, that's nice, I thought, but that was about the extent of my reaction. These crossovers happen now and again and are of course always welcome, but they are few and don't generally have a great deal of larger significance; they don't represent a broad trend. 

But then I actually read one of the posted articles, and found that it's more significant than I thought. I was vaguely aware of Nazir-Ali's name and that he was somehow fairly prominent, but that was all I knew. It turns out that 

...he formed the centre of a nucleus of evangelical resistance to the slippage in the secular progressive accommodation embarked on by the Anglican Church. He was particularly outspoken on the serious consequences of ignoring the implications of the growth of Islam, and the importance of the Christian definition of marriage being restricted to a man and a woman with the intention of having children.

Previous high-profile Episcopal conversions were mainly of Anglo-Catholics. It was almost expected of them. Others shrugged their shoulders and passed them off as almost inevitable and of no great surprise or perhaps even of no great significance.

But Nazir-Ali is different. The route by which he came to prominence, which included holding the post of General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, was evangelical. And of course evangelicalism is usually uncompromisingly hostile to Catholicism.

I recommend that you read the entire article if you're interested. It's in a British publication called Christian Today, which initially and carelessly I thought was our well-known Christianity Today, in which I can't find any reference to this news. One bit in it made me smile:

What this crisis revealed was that Anglicanism lacked an essential tool in the struggle with secular relativism, the Magisterium.

Ya think?!?  I thought that was clear forty years ago; also that Anglicanism had pretty well already lost that struggle and was not likely to find its way back. That was probably the single most important factor in my conversion.

As I've mentioned (haven't I?) my local Ordinariate group is no more, but I'm still interested in its fortunes, which are in general not so promising right now, and cling to the hope that in time it will have a positive effect on the Church as a whole, chiefly through its liturgical and devotional traditions. So I rejoice that Bishop Nazir-Ali was received into the Ordinariate. I hope he doesn't have too bad a time there.