I don’t care if they “consecrate” women, they are just Protestants playing dress-up. But wouldn’t the Anglican laity rather be more motivated to enter in communion with the Catholic Church when they see their church leaders going so obviously against 2000 years of Christian tradition and teaching?
You note it was the laity that prevented women bishops
It feels like nowadays everything is determined by popular opinion. I wonder if God lets us “vote” in Heaven,
Well, agreed, if they sincerely believe they have valid orders. But how much more uncharitable is it to leave them in that illusion?
What I meant to suggest was that Anglicans converting to Catholicism usually do so because they are dissatisfied with what is going on in their church, such as changes to the liturgy and the ordination of women and non-celibate openly homosexual men to the priesthood. Add women bishops to that, and I suspect many more will seek to return to Rome.
Ultimately, it takes more than being dissatisfied with your own community to rightly decide to be Catholic. One should also, indeed primarily, be joining the Catholic Church because one believes that it and it alone is the true Church and possesses the fullness of the means of salvation God has made available to us. Anglican priests or bishops joining the new ordinariates that I’ve heard speak have essentially acknowledged this and sought to contradict the narrative that they are just “disaffected Anglicans.”
No more uncharitable than it is of them to refrain from questioning your beliefs about your religion. There are far more un-catechicized Catholics in the world than there are Anglicans. I suggest you start your charity there.
Yes, of course, ultimately they should be convinced of the Catholic faith. But I have often read in interviews and testimonies from former Anglicans that this or that change in the Anglican church moved them to investigate the Catholic faith. Suppose that the Anglican church was virtually unchanged from the days of Henry VIII, then many I would assume find little incentive to investigate the Catholic Church. Don’t you agree?
We may not accept as Catholics the Apostolic succession of Anglican Bishops, but there is no need to talk about them so disrespectfully.
Actually the Anglicanism has improved in some ways since the days of Henry VIII. Though the monarch remains head of the Church of England (and this is still an extremely bad problem in my judgement, as it ultimately affirms the theoretical authority of the State over the Church) he (or she, as it stands currently) does not wield practical power over it anymore (actually I have an inkling things would be much less “liberal” if she did, but it could easily have been the reverse). Also monasticism and other forms of religious life are generally respected again, and there are even Anglican Benedictines and Franciscans. And in any case they aren’t executing Catholics left and right anymore.