News this week that the Vatican would carve out space for Anglicans to join the Roman Catholic Church, while retaining some of their own liturgy and traditions, elicited starkly different reactions from journalists and church leaders.

The press reacted excitedly to the news coming out of Rome and London, where the 77-million-member worldwide Anglican Communion is based. A front-page story in The New York Times called Pope Benedict XVI’s move “an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse.” The Wall Street Journal’s front-page story called it “one of Rome’s most sweeping gestures to a Protestant church since the Reformation.”

The reaction from church leaders, was more bewildered than breathless.

“I was a little confused at first, ” Bishop George Wayne Smith, leader of the 14,000 members of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri, said in an interview. “I didn’t see anything new in it.”

The “it” in question was a “note” released Tuesday by Vatican officials that described a coming “Apostolic Constitution” intended to “allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic church, while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony, ” according to the note.

That patrimony includes “traditions of piety and devotional practices that revolve around the Book of Common Prayer, the heart of Anglican spirituality, ” said the Rev. James Massa, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops office of ecumenical and interreligious affairs.

“These Anglicans who want to enter in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church, want to bring with them one of their spiritual treasures, and that’s completely understandable, ” Massa said. “It would exist alongside the Catholic Mass as an equally valid expression of Christian worship.”

In the flurry of analysis that followed the note’s release, two news threads gained currency. The first was that Benedict was taking advantage of a growing rift in the Anglican Communion over social issues.

The second thread focused on celibacy, and whether the welcoming of married members of the Anglican clergy into the 1-billion-member Catholic fold would mean that some day, Roman Catholic priests, too, could marry and have children.

One angle that was buried under drifts of concern about celibacy and sheep-stealing this week was that when the Apostolic Constitution is official – in what experts estimate will be the next few weeks – for the first time in history, the Catholic church’s western expression will feature two rites, or liturgical practices. The Latin rite will exist alongside the Anglican rite (which will exist alongside other eastern Catholic rites.)

“This is telling the rest of the Christian world that there is legitimate diversity within the Catholic church, ” Massa said. “There’s no uniformity when it comes to liturgical piety and liturgical practice. There’s room for different expressions.”

The Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion, and its bishops sparked a firestorm in the rest of the Anglican world in 2003 when they voted to consecrate an openly gay bishop. In July, the Episcopal Church ended a freeze on electing gay bishops and approved blessings for same-sex couples.

Responding in part to the decision by Episcopal Church officials in 1976 to ordain women, Pope John Paul II created a “pastoral provision” in the United States in 1980 to allow Episcopal clergy to celebrate the Roman Catholic liturgy, while incorporating elements of the Anglican tradition.

The provision, called Anglican Usage of the Roman Rite, or Anglican Use, allowed married Episcopal priests, to be re-ordained as Roman Catholic priests.

“There has always been an interest in this elsewhere within the Anglican church – notably in Canada, England and Australia – among people who were not happy with the liberal traditions that were evolving, ” said Joseph Blake, president of the Anglican Use Society in Bethlehem, Pa., “but the pastoral provision didn’t apply to their countries.”

Now it does.

The Times of London reported this week that the Church of England could lose up to 1,000 priests to the Roman Catholic Church. Archbishop John Hepworth, the leader of a group called the Traditional Anglican Communion, which split from the Anglican Communion in 1990 and claims 400,000 members worldwide, called the Vatican’s move “an act of great goodness on the part of the Holy Father, ” and said the note “more than matches our prayers.”

Perhaps because of the pastoral provision that’s been in place for a generation, conservative Anglicans in the United States responded less enthusiastically.

The Rev. Paul Walter established the Anglican Church of the Resurrection in Town and Country, after leaving the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church with many of his congregants in 2004. His church, and three others he’s planted since, are now under the authority of the Anglican bishop of Kibungo, Rwanda, instead. Walter said the Apostolic Constitution would not lead his congregation from Rwandan Anglican authority to Roman Catholic authority.

“There are reasons why people are Anglican and Protestant, ” Walter said. “The ordination of women or the consecration of a homosexual bishop isn’t going to be enough to drive somebody to Rome unless they’ve already (accepted) Roman doctrines that made us Protestant in the first place.”

The Anglican Communion is often described as a “big tent” church, with a wide spectrum of doctrinal practices that fall under the Anglican label – often called latitudinarianism. Many so-called Anglo-Catholics practice a “high church” liturgy that’s very close to what most Roman Catholics would expect to see at a Sunday Mass. Other, more evangelical Anglicans, practice a “low church, ” or more Protestant liturgy.

Lawrence Welch, executive director of the St. Louis Archdiocese’s office of ecumenical and interreligious affairs, conceded that there would likely be large groups of American Anglicans who “are not ready to come into full union” with the Catholic church.

“Particularly, members of the evangelical wing of the Anglican church may not be prepared to do that, though some may, ” he said. “The constitution is for Anglicans who are ready.”

Those Anglicans will be grouped into “ordinariates, ” virtual dioceses under the authority of a former Anglican priest or bishop, who has been re-ordained a Catholic priest (or bishop.)

What might all of this look like locally? In a statement, St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson said he “welcomes this important ecumenical development and stands ready to collaborate in the implementation of the new Provision in the Archdiocese of St. Louis.”

But eastern Missouri’s Episcopal leader, Bishop Smith, said he was not worried about a mass exodus from his pews.

“I can’t imagine any of our parishes or clergy who would leave the Episcopal Church for the Roman Catholic Church, ” Smith said. “There’s always been an exchange of clergy between our two communions, and there’s an honorable way of responding to that.”

Speaking of the river that runs through Rome and borders Vatican City, Smith said: “I suspect some will swim the Tiber, just as it has been swum before.”