Personal Prelature of Opus Dei, Personal Apostolic Administration of Saint John Mary Vianney, and Anglican Ordinariates – What is the difference between them?
I don’t think they are religious orders because Opus Dei is mainly laity, but then they have priests and bishops? Also, what is the difference between the PAASJM and FSSP?
A “personal prelature” is an institution within the Church that is “juridically equivalent to a diocese” but is not an actual territorial diocese. Think of it as a diocese that’s determined by the members, rather than one determined by territory.
The word “personal” does not mean “belonging to one person” (like we typically use the word in English), but it means that the membership is determined by some characteristic that is shared by the persons rather than by lines drawn on a map.
In a way (a very limited way) a personal prelature is a bit like an ethnic parish. An ethnic parish doesn’t have a territory, instead its membership is open to people who fit that ethnicity. In the same way, personal prelatures are comprised of people who have something in common–something that the Holy See views as being important and distinct enough to grant that group of people their own bishop (or sometimes a priest who has all the administrative authority of a diocesan bishop).
The Anglican Ordinariates are (mostly) the same thing as a diocese. The Ordinarites do have their own territories (the one in the US is distinct from the one in Australia) but those territories are much broader than the actual diocese and usually comprise whole nations or groupings of nations.
A good example of this which might help explain things is the situation of Catholics in the US military. Obviously, they have something in common. Obviously, their situation is such that their unique needs cannot be served by simply telling them to come under the authority of the many local diocesan bishops. They’re located throughout the whole world, so they don’t have a given territory in which they all reside. That’s why the Holy See established a personal prelature for the military (which is now an arch-diocese). My point here is to try to illustrate why a certain group of people might need their “own bishop” and to say that this is the Church’s pastoral response to that need.
The Anglican Ordinarites are one type of personal prelature—so they’re not “different from” personal prelatures, they’re an example of them.
One difference between personal prelatures and dioceses is that a diocese must have an actual bishop as the ordinary (the head of the diocese), while a prelature might have a bishop as its head, or it might have a presbyter instead.
In general, a personal prelature can have all the features of a diocese (again, for example, a seminary, parish churches, chancery offices, etc.) the only difference being that these functions are in-place to serve the members of that prelature in contrast to the members of the territorial diocese.
The Anglican Ordinarites were established to provide for the needs of former Anglicans (now Anglican Catholics–we need a new vocabulary), to allow them to have a “place” where they can celebrate the Catholic Sacraments according to the Anglican use. That’s the common feature that both unites the members and makes them distinct from other Catholics. The members of the Ordinariates are both laity and clergy, so this isn’t a matter of having a group of people and “sending” them a priest, the clergy are an integral part of the ordinariates and are likewise members.
There are some features of the new Anglican Ordinariates that make them distinct from other personal prelatures. One example of this is that the local territorial pastor has joint jurisdiction with the local Ordinariate pastor over the members of that Ordinariate parish—this doesn’t usually happen with regard to other personal perlatures.
I’m not quite sure how much more to write. So far, that will probably open more questions than it will answer, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
