On Sunday evening, so many WeBelieve Festival attendees had filled the Pugin chapel at St Mary’s College, Oscott, that they had run out of orders of service.

They were there for the Ordinariate’s Evensong service, with Bishop David Waller presiding and the music and prayer of the Anglican tradition filling one of the most significant places in the history of English Catholicism.

The symbolism is hard to miss. In this same chapel, in 1852, St John Henry Newman preached his famous Second Spring sermon to the first synod of the restored Catholic hierarchy, proclaiming the renewal of Catholic life in England after centuries of persecution. More than 170 years later, Anglican patrimony was being offered there not outside the Catholic Church, but within it - preserved, cherished and shared as part of the life of the Church.

It was a fitting image for the Ordinariate’s presence at this year’s WeBelieve Festival.

Across the weekend, thousands of Catholics from around the country gathered at Oscott, hailing from different communities, liturgies, rites and charisms. Bishop David celebrated the principal Sunday Mass for more than 1,500 attendees. He also joined other bishops on stage for a conversation about Catholic evangelisation in the UK today, and later presided at that packed Evensong.

In other words, the Ordinariate was not somewhere at the edge of the gathering. As it has done since its erection by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011, the Ordinariate was participating fully in the life of the wider Church - while bringing something distinctively its own.

On the second day of WeBelieve, Catholic author and popular speaker Joanna Bogle had put a lingering misconception rather more bluntly during the launch of her latest book:

“I’m tired of people asking, ‘But are the Ordinariate really Catholic?’”

Her humorously impatient question was greeted by laughs and agreement from the audience packed into Oscott’s Museum for the launch of “Into Full Communion”. The book tells the story of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham and the journey by which Anglican patrimony has been brought into full communion with Rome. It was written (in part) as an answer to that doubtful question. And at this year’s WeBelieve Festival, the answer was given in practice all weekend.

Among those gathered with the Ordinariate was Nicola Chrismas, who had come to WeBelieve for the first time. Her own story offers another - and perhaps less expected - perspective on what the Ordinariate is and where it belongs.

Nicola is not a former Anglican. She is a lifelong Catholic and an associate member of the Ordinariate: someone who, without sharing its Anglican background, has found a spiritual home in its worship, patrimony and community.

That makes her perspective particularly interesting. Nicola did not need the Ordinariate in order to become Catholic; rather, within the Catholic Church, she encountered something in the Ordinariate which deepened her experience of the faith she already knew.

And for her, seeing that community so visibly present at a national Catholic gathering was incredibly important - an affirmation of a truth already in existence.

“It’s important that we [the Ordinariate] are there,” she says, “so that people stop seeing them as this quaint little group who trot along doing their own thing and aren’t really part of the Catholic Church.”

It is a misconception Nicola has encountered herself. Her own experience has been almost the inverse: not a community standing apart from Catholic life, but one which has enriched her experience of it.

“I think they’ve brought so much of value to the liturgy,” she says.

For Nicola, that has meant the Divine Worship Missal, reverent worship, a strong musical tradition - and the experience of being warmly and genuinely welcomed. That experience of belonging to a smaller family within the wider family of the Church perhaps made WeBelieve all the more striking. Nicola was immediately impressed by the number of families and young people gathered at Oscott.

“It was amazing, the number of people - particularly families, teenagers and young people,” she says. For her, it was evidence of a Church with life and confidence. “I think the Catholic Church is quite vibrant at the moment. I think a lot of younger people are coming. They’re looking for something.”

And what they are looking for, she suggests, may be something solid enough to withstand a rapidly changing world. “People want something that they can look to and say, ‘This is unchanging. It’s going to give me something to which I can hang on.’”

It was against that backdrop that Nicola walked into the chapel on Sunday evening. Serving as Bishop David’s MC, she had wondered how many people would remain for the later service. Instead, the chapel was full.

“We’d run out of orders of service,” she remembers. For a festival which brought together so many different communities, movements and expressions of Catholic life, the moment seemed to capture something of WeBelieve as a whole.

“We might have differences,” Nicola says, “but we are united as one Church.”

And the Ordinariate did not come to WeBelieve simply to be seen. It came to share something.

Fifteen years after its establishment, there are still Anglicans and Catholics encountering the Ordinariate’s story and purpose for the first time, and there will be many more in the years to come.

For those coming from an Anglo-Catholic background in particular, Nicola sees the Ordinariate as an invitation to discover that entering into full communion with the Catholic Church need not mean abandoning everything that has formed their Christian life.

And to Anglicans who are simply curious, her invitation is wonderfully uncomplicated.

“Come and experience. Come to a service, come to Mass, come to Evensong and experience what’s on offer.”

Perhaps that is ultimately the best response to the question raised at the book launch.

Is the Ordinariate really Catholic? At WeBelieve, the answer was not confined to the pages of a book or curious speculation.

It was there in the Ordinariate’s first Bishop celebrating Mass with the wider Church alongside the Bishops and clergy of England and Wales; in Anglican patrimony being heard and seen in the chapel where Newman once proclaimed a new springtime for English Catholicism; in an associate member whose life as a Catholic has been enriched by finding a spiritual home within the Ordinariate; and in new encounters with people discovering its mission for the first time.

Nicola’s straightforward encouragement - whether to those considering WeBelieve next year, or to anyone curious about encountering God through the Ordinariate - has been echoed over the centuries: Come and see.