If you want to get anything done in the English Catholic Church...

Don't have anything to do with her bishops. William Odie, writing in the Catholic Herald (UK) on Anglicanorum coetibus, reports fifteen years were lost owing to politically correct squishiness.

Why we waited 15 years for an Ordinariate: the inside story
In the words of Cardinal Ratzinger then, ‘what are the English bishops afraid of?’

(excerpt)

One day, I received a phone call from Rome. It was from a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose former prefect was now Pope. I was asked for an undertaking to mention to nobody either the name of my interlocutor or, at that time, even the fact that the conversation had taken place. Things were at an early and delicate stage, he said: but there was a real possibility of movement along the lines of the former negotiations. They had read my book. Could we talk?

I told them that I wasn’t as closely in contact with the Anglican side as I had been, for obvious reasons. But there was one thing I was sure of: that the whole thing would be sunk unless the English bishops were kept firmly out of the loop: they should be told nothing. There was a silence. “Your remarks are noted,” he said. But it was clear to me that if the English bishops hadn’t been told yet, that was a decision that had already been made.