The Pope has made it as easy as possible for traditional and “continuing” Anglicans to convert to Roman Catholicism while retaining key elements of their ecclesiastical heritage.

The eagerly awaited Apostolic Constitution, published by the Vatican yesterday, will enable hundreds of thousands of disaffected Anglicans to become Catholics.

Married Anglican clergy will be allowed to train for the priesthood in seminaries set up within the new Anglican Ordinariates — as long as their marital state is not “irregular”. The constitution states that the admission of married men will be considered “on a case-by-case basis”.

It even allows for married Anglican bishops to be granted the status of retired Catholic bishops, to become members of the local Catholic bishops’ conference and to be granted permission to use the “insignia” of episcopal office, such as the mitre, pectoral cross and staff, by the Holy See in Rome.

The decision by Pope Benedict XVI to allow Anglicans to preserve “elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony” while entering “full communion” with the Catholic Church raised questions about the discipline of celibacy among Catholic priests. After a hard-fought battle within the Holy See, though, there is no change to the Vatican’s line on priestly celibacy.

Former Catholic priests who left the Church to marry and subsequently became Anglican clergy will not be permitted to return.

Newly converted Anglicans will be responsible for funding the new clergy and seminaries. This is unlikely to create dissent because, given recent crises in Church of England finances and the almost total erosion of funding from the centre in many dioceses, most Anglican congregations are used to paying their vicar’s £20,000 stipend and pension contributions.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which published the constitution, will be in charge of the new Ordinariates. The former Anglicans will be encouraged to gain secular employment to help to finance this new branch of Catholicism.

The British branch of the Traditional Anglican Communion, which has about 400,000 “continuing” Anglican members worldwide and is led by Archbishop John Hepworth in Australia, has indicated that its members will move over to the Ordinariate. This will have the effect, almost overnight, of taking a small and non-influential group of former Anglicans from the fringes of Church life in Britain to its centre.

The most significant group to convert in Britain is likely to be the more than 1,000 members of the traditionalist group Forward in Faith. After years pleading with the Church of England’s General Synod without success for an extra-territorial jurisdiction, the Pope has offered what the Synod would not give them.

Bishop John Broadhurst, chairman of Forward in Faith and Bishop of Fulham in the London diocese, said he thought that the offer from Rome was “extremely generous”. He told his members: “We all need now to ask the question ‘is this what we want?’. For some of us I suspect our bluff is called. This is both an exciting and dangerous time for Christianity in this country.”

In a statement the Holy See said: “In recent times the Holy Spirit has moved groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately.”

The constitution is expected to be discussed by the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, in Rome in two weeks. An adviser to the Archbishop said that he did not wish to comment on the Apostolic Constitution because it was a matter for the Catholic Church.