Gotcha!
The Vatican is setting up special arrangements to welcome disaffected catholic-leaning Anglicans into the one true Church.
The announcement caught everyone by surprise, not lease Vatican-based journalists. An account of their disorientation and consequent questions is here.
The impact in England is likely to be numerically insignificant. The bigger impact is the casual discarding of decades of careful ecumenical discussion. The Pope clearly prefers the certainty of an estimated 1/2m conservative adherents immediately to the slow, improbable and probably undesirable process of greater theological understanding and mutual acceptance.
The main body concerned are the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) (Wikipedia) said to be strong in Zimbabwe and Tanzania with smaller groups in various parts of the world.
The manner of the announcement also seems to have been 'humiliating' to Rowan Williams who was informed (not consulted) just the night before the press conference.
And in the US the decision could pose a dilemma to Forward in Faith members who have only recently signed up with ACNA, notwithstanding the determined opposition of some of the conservative evangelicals in that grouping.
What does seem to be happening, if by different routes, is the slicing away of conservatives from the main body of Anglicanism, one stroke at a time.
