Bishop Lopes' address at the University of Vienna

Bishop Steven Lopes of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter gave a lecture at the University of Vienna on March 28, 2017 that contains important information about the process at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the  Faith where he worked for 10 years leading up to Pope Benedict XVI's Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus.

You can read the lecture here.  Here's an excerpt.

In 2007, the Congregation received a new cluster of letters from groups of Anglican clergy posing a different kind of question. Yes, they were writing to say that their own individual journeys of faith had led them to the point of seeking full communion with the Catholic Church. But they were also writing as pastors responsible for the care of souls. They were concerned for the faithful who were willing to follow them into the fullness of Catholic communion. What of them? Was the idea just to assimilate them into normal Catholic life? Would their faith and devotion, nurtured and developed in an Anglican context, survive that process of assimilation so that these faithful truly became Catholic? Could there not be some "space" opened up in the Catholic Church where the faith practices and devotional life of these faithful could continue to thrive? One such letter the Holy See could ignore. As it happened, within a span of 4 months, the Congregation received very similar letters from groups of Anglican clergy in England, from Texas in the United States, from Australia, and from the so-called continuing Anglican groups, notably the Traditional Anglican Communion. Some response on the part of the Catholic Church was required. The first step was to determine which entity at the Holy See was responsible Page 9 of 18 for this discussion. At the point, the conversation could have been turned over to the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, for example, except that these groups of Anglican clergy were not asking for dialogue. They were professing their readiness to end the period of schism and enter into full communion. The groups stressed their readiness to accept the Catholic faith in its fullness. To stress the point, bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion sent Rome a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which they had all signed as a mark of their acceptance of the Catechism as an authoritative articulation of the faith once delivered to the Saints. This, therefore, was clearly a matter that fell into the competency of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.