When the wives of three former Church of England bishops pre­sented them with chasubles after they were ordained priests in the Roman Catholic Church in West­minster Cathedral on Saturday, it was clear that this was no ordinary service.

It heralded the beginning of the Ordinariate and the appointment of its first Ordinary, Fr Keith Newton. The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Revd Vincent Nichols, des­cribed it during his homily as “a unique occasion marking a new step in the life and history of the Catho­lic Church”.

Fr John Broadhurst, former Bishop of Fulham; Fr Keith Newton, former Bishop of Richborough; and Fr Andrew Burnham, former Bishop of Ebbsfleet, became the first clerics to be received into the Ordinariate, which was set up for former Anglicans. They expect to be followed by more clergy and lay people.

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Almost immediately after he was ordained a Catholic priest along with two other former Anglican bishops, Father Keith Newton was named head of the new ordinariate for former Anglicans in England and Wales.

The Vatican announced Jan. 15 that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had erected the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham “for those groups of Anglican clergy and faithful who have expressed their desire to enter into full visible communion with the Catholic Church.”

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Fr Keith Newton, a bishop in the Church of England until just a few weeks ago who is now an ordained Catholic priest and the head of the Personal Ordinariate of England and Wales, said he hoped churches could be shared between the different congregations.

But he insisted he did not want any “rancour or bad feeling” between Anglicans and those who go over to Rome under the unprecedented scheme.

The Ordinariate was proposed late in 2009 by the Vatican as a refuge for disaffected Anglicans worldwide who oppose developments such as women’s ordination.

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Ian Mabey is to be succeeded as rector of Collie’s All Saints Anglican Church by another Ian ”” Father Ian Bailey. He grew up in a Christian family but deserted the church as a young adult. However the spiritual impulse was not to be denied and he came back to the Christian faith via Buddhism.

Ian Bailey is excited about the opportunity to live in Collie, a place he has never even visited. Next month he will be arriving from New South Wales to become rector of the Collie’s All Saints Anglican Church.

From what he has seen on the internet, he is impressed.

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In its 100-plus years Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of English Catholicism, will have seen few stranger sights than Saturday’s procession of three Anglican bishops’ wives, in matching beige coats, one with an outsized brown hat, going up on to the high altar to embrace their husbands, all newly ordained as Catholic priests. Catholicism isn’t that keen on women on the altar ”“ to the pain of the demonstrators from the Catholic Women’s Ordination movement protesting outside the cathedral’s doors ”“ and it doesn’t usually countenance priests having wives.

But this was no ordinary ceremony. Almost everyone who spoke during it used the word “historic” to describe the ordination as Catholic priests of John Broadhurst, Andrew Burnham and Keith Newton, all formerly Anglican bishops.

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The Vatican on Saturday welcomed the first group of traditionalist Anglicans who plan to convert to Roman Catholicism through a new structure the Vatican created to facilitate such group conversions.

The Vatican angered many Anglicans, including the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, when it announced the new structure in October 2009, because it appeared to upend decades of interfaith dialogue by implying that the Roman Catholic Church sought to encourage the conversion of Anglicans, especially those uncomfortable with the Church of England’s ordination of women and openly gay priests.

But tensions were somewhat eased with Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit to Britain in September, which was widely seen as a success.

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Amy arrived at Virginia Theological Seminary in 2007, the same year as Brian.

“We took a lot of the same classes,” he said, and before long, “friendship turned into asking her to marry me.”

They finished seminary in May and married two months later. Brian’s passion is working with college students; Amy’s ministerial focus is middle school and high school students.

They wound up in Fredericksburg when Kent Rahm, rector at Trinity, was looking for a replacement for his assistant, who was ready to move on.

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Herewith the blurb from Vatican Radio:

This Saturday sees the ordination into the Catholic priesthood of three former Anglican bishops who will become the first priests of the Personal Ordinariate which is being established under the provision of Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Constitution issued in 2009. The Ordinariate is a special structure for groups of former Anglicans and their clergy who seek full communion in the Catholic Church whilst retaining some elements of their Anglican liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions. But what exactly is an Ordinariate? How will it be funded and how big is it likely to become? To find out more, Susy Hodges spoke to Father Marcos Stock, General Secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales. He describes the setting up of the Ordinariate as an event “of singular significance in the life of the Catholic Church” and goes on to explain that the move is “essentially a way of allowing a group of faithful from the Anglican Communion to retain some of their own patrimony” …. within the life of the Catholic Church… and is intended “to be a mutual exchange of gifts” between the two.

Asked how many Anglican faithful are waiting to join the Ordinariate, Father Stock says they are expecting about 50 clergy to be received into full communion and approx 35 (lay) groups, many of which are attached to those clergy and who have “indicated a firm desire to enter into the Ordinariate.”

Father Stock also says he doesn’t believe the Ordinariate “is perceived as an anti-ecumenical move… and adds “it’s quite the contrary in some ways….. “

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The cultural changes that rocked Catholicism after the 1960s made it even more of a challenge to answer these kinds of questions. [Archbishop Edwin] O’Brien saw this era up close, since he was ordained in 1965 and, as an Army chaplain with the rank of captain, served a tour of duty in Vietnam.

In the “heady years” after the Second Vatican Council, it seemed that Catholics “saw almost everything go up for grabs” in their parishes and “in Western Culture in general.” Priests were “leaving by the droves” and, at times, he noted, it seemed as if “follow your conscience” stood alone as the “only criterion for morality, heedless of any objective moral truth.” Many seminaries lowered their admissions requirements in an attempt to find more priests.

O’Brien offered a blunt analysis of that decision: “Many of the horrendous sexual scandals, I think, can be traced to the breakdown of seminary formation from 1965 to the early 1980s.”

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The jurisdiction of the Ordinariate applies only to England and Wales, so if Scottish Anglicans wanted to enter the Ordinariate they would need to apply to the Scottish bishops’ conference, would they?

Yes, but to establish an ordinariate there has to be capacity within the groups applying for an ordinariate to be self-sustaining, and the indications we received from the Scottish bishops was that there aren’t sufficient groups for there to be an ordinariate there.

Was an ordinariate that included Scotland ever considered, or does an ordinariate always have to correspond to the jurisdiction of a bishops’ conference?

It always has to be within a bishops’ conference. But that doesn’t preclude groups outside that being included in that.

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Will members of the Ordinariate still be Anglicans?

No. Members of the Ordinariate will be Catholics. Their decision is to leave the Anglican Communion and come into the Catholic Church, in full communion with the Pope.

The central purpose of Anglicanorum coetibus is “to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared”. Members of the Ordinariate will bring with them, into full communion with the Catholic Church in all its diversity and richness of liturgical rites and traditions, some aspects their own Anglican patrimony and culture.
It is recognised that the term Anglican patrimony is difficult to define but it would include many of the spiritual writings, prayers, hymnody, and pastoral practices distinctive to the Anglican tradition which have sustained the faith and longing of many Anglican faithful for that very unity for which Christ prayed.

The Ordinariate will then bring a mutual enrichment and exchange of gifts, in an authentic and visible form of full communion, between those baptised and nurtured in Anglicanism and the Catholic Church.

Do all Anglicans who wish to become Catholics now have to be members of the Ordinariate?

No. Any individual former Anglican who wishes to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church, may do so without becoming a registered member of the Ordinariate.

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John Broadhurst, Andrew Burnham and Keith Newton will be ordained into the priesthood at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday, it was announced yesterday.

The Ordinariate, the group for disaffected Anglican priests and their congregations who seek full communion in the Catholic Church, will also take in its first members.

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The Rev. Mary Bredlau has officiated at 350 to 500 funerals a year for 15 years. That’s 4,500 to 7,500 souls.

The teenagers are the hardest, especially the murders and suicides.

“To see the pain in the parents’ eyes, the despair and the shock in the other children’s eyes. Those are the most emotional,” she says.

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Move over the Vicar of Dibley – it’s time to recruit a new generation of priests and they don’t want stereotypes.

That’s the message from the Anglican Church, which is tackling a widespread priest shortage. With the number of priests dwindling and many rural parishes forced to share vicars, the Brisbane Diocese is doing all it can to attract younger people to the profession.

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Former congregants are returning after a divisive few years in the parish, and new congregants, mostly young families, are drawn in by the new priest, a bubbly 32-year-old mom who smiles easily, cracks jokes and is apt to talk about iPods or pop culture during sermons.

“I wasn’t very happy with the way things were and found myself going to the Whitman church,” said parishioner Suzanne O’Connor, who left the Bridgewater church for three years and returned shortly after [Natasha] Stewart arrived.

O’Connor says personality clashes between congregants and the former head priest were to blame and says most complaints stemmed from discomfort by parishioners who couldn’t afford to donate large sums of money to the church.

Since arriving about two and a half years ago in Bridgewater, Stewart says she has devoted great energy to welcoming all parishioners, regardless of social status and wealth.

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As traditionalist clergy threatened to leave over their opposition to women bishops, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said the Church of England would seek a system of sharing buildings so that defecting worshippers could continue meeting in familiar surroundings.

Yet the decision over whether to permit Catholic congregations to share Anglican church buildings was ultimately left to individual bishops, with the policy varying from diocese to diocese. The ruling that any defectors would have to leave St Barnabas was conveyed to its vicar by the Ven Clive Mansell, Archdeacon of Tonbridge and a senior clergyman in the diocese of Rochester.

“How sad that the Ordinariate seekers, good people who have contributed so much to this parish and its fabric over so many years, were plainly told they should leave with nothing,” added Fr Tomlinson.

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A longtime minister at one of the country’s largest and most prominent conservative Anglican churches has been fired for repeatedly using a church computer to surf for pornography, an official at the Fairfax church said.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

The English ordinariate, it seems, will be well on its way by the middle of this month. Three former Anglican bishops were received into full communion with the Catholic Church during a Mass at Westminster
Cathedral on January 1. One of the comments following the Herald online report, noting that they were received in secular clothing, opines that “For Bishops to wear ties is simply saintly and to lose all that prestige they once held is stunning to the mind of a Catholic Bishop”.

Well, indeed. But I think that their former prestige is the least important aspect of what they are giving up: they are abandoning certainty and recognition within an established institution, for uncertainty within an institution ”“ the ordinariate ”“ that doesn’t even exist yet. What this shows is an absolute faith in the Catholic Church of which it will be a part, especially as it is embodied by the present Holy Father.

I last saw the most senior of the three, John Broadhurst, formerly Bishop of Fulham, splendidly caparisoned in full episcopal fig (I have known him, on and off, for over 30 years, and have never seen him except in clericals: I can hardly imagine him in a secular collar and tie) at the 150th anniversary of that great Anglo-Catholic institution, Pusey House, Oxford, just after the publication of Anglicanorum coetibus. I asked him for his reaction to the document (it was pretty clear that most of those present were elated by it): his reply had to do, not with the visionary excitements of the proposed ordinariate, but with its practicability: “it’s doable”, he simply replied.

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The Very Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, dean and president of Episcopal Divinity School, and Mally Lloyd, canon to the Ordinary, married on Saturday at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston in front of nearly 400 guests. The Rt. Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, solemnized the marriage.

For orthodox Anglicans, the lesbian union was another act of defiance.

“This is another action of reckless disregard for the life of the Anglican Communion and the authority of the Bible by The Episcopal Church,” the Rt. Rev. David C. Anderson, president and CEO of the American Anglican Council, told The Christian Post. “They continue to ignore the Communion’s pleas for restraint and continue to go their own way.”

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By her own and others’ accounts, the Rev. Davette Turk has always had a thing for ruffling feathers.

“I believe in shaking things up,” said Turk, 75, of Jacksonville. “Jesus shook a lot of people up, and I believe in shaking people up for the sake of love.”

Today is the 25th anniversary of one major way in which Turk did just that: Becoming a priest in the Jacksonville-based Episcopal Diocese of Florida. That made her the state’s first female Episcopal priest, a fact that didn’t sit well with many.

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I was very sorry to hear this. Mike served as an alternate deputy to the General Convention of 1997, the first in which I served as a deputy–KSH

After 22 years at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Ventura, Pastor Jerome Kahler is hanging up his collar and looking to start a new life of gardening and furniture-making.

“I’ve got major garden work I never had enough time for, to raise vegetables and flowers,” said Kahler, 66, adding that he and wife Beth also plan to travel. He said he also likes to make Shaker-style chairs from kits and plans to do that as a hobby.

Kahler first came to St. Paul’s after the previous pastor, Robert E. Henry, was accused of child molestation and suddenly resigned. “It was a hell of a way to begin,” Kahler said. “There was the betrayal of the congregation, the betrayal of the sacred trust and betrayal of the clergy. This was the 1980s, and the issue of clergy misconduct was making the news.”

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Just how did Mary and Joseph make their famous trip to Bethlehem?

What did an innkeeper tell Mary and Joseph once they reached the city?

The Rev. Joe Alsay, rector of St. Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, asked his congregation these and other questions during the Dec. 19 services at the Oklahoma City church, 14700 N May.

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Pope Benedict XVI deplored the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and linked it to other vices, including child pornography, sexual tourism and drug abuse, which he said were all promoted by an ideology of social moral relativism.
The pope made his remarks on Monday (Dec. 20), in his annual Christmas address to leaders of the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s central bureaucracy.

Looking back over major events of 2010, Benedict put special emphasis on the clerical sex abuse scandals that broke out in several European and South American countries.

“To a degree we could not have imagined, we came to know of abuse of minors committed by priests who twist the sacrament into its antithesis,” the pope said.

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Healthy and growing churches pay close attention not only to their members but also to those who are not yet a part of the flock. New people are the lifeblood of a growing church. We want to ensure that nothing impairs or cuts off the flow of new people to the church.

[Parish clergy]… need to be aware of five significant facts about first-time guests looking for a church home….

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The Rev. William Melnyk, former rector of St. James Episcopal Church in Downingtown, resigned from the church in late 2004 amid investigations that he and his wife, the Rev. Glyn Ruppe-Melnyk, wrote two druidic ceremonies as suggestions for women’s liturgies. The druids were a Celtic sect that predates Christianity.

At the conclusion of the investigation, Bishop Charles E. Bennison declined to suspend the two priests from the church.

Ruppe-Melnyk still serves as the rector of St. Francis-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Willistown.

Melnyk said recently that Bishop Bennision agreed to reinstate him if Melnyk could agree to not write or speak about Celtic spirituality. Melnyk said he could not agree to those terms and that it became evident earlier this year that his reinstatement was not going to happen.

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On Dec. 3, I had the privilege of ordaining Dennis Garrou, a married former Episcopal priest, to the sacred order of deacons for the Archdiocese of Denver. God willing, Deacon Garrou will be ordained a Catholic priest in May.

All this is made possible by a “Pastoral Provision” implemented by Pope John Paul II in 1980. In its own small way this special occasion fulfills one of the main goals of Vatican II””Christian unity. As the first sentence in the Decree on Ecumenism says, “The restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council.”

The importance of Christian unity cannot be emphasized enough, because Jesus Christ founded one Church and one Church only. This is not just a matter of faith, but of historical fact. The divisions that have occurred over the centuries are a sad testimony to the Fall and the effects of original sin. The separation of Christians from each other is contrary to God’s will, a wound to Christ’s body and a scandal to the outside world. It is like the amputation of limbs from a body, or divorce and the breakup of a family.

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As the ordinations of bishops-elect Diane Bruce and Mary Glasspool approach on May 15, I hope we can all celebrate with them, their families, the Diocese of LA and TEC. At this time, it seems to me, we are living into our Baptismal Covenant and the resolutions ratified at the last General Convention; that we are following the Holy Spirit in calling the best people for particular ministries. We are modeling an Easter life for the greater Communion, and this is indeed who we are!

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Among some of the reasons for this failure to keep and recruit younger people, I would list the following:

1. The abandonment in the early 70’s of a National Curriculum for Church Schools.
2. The failure to have a unified teaching and age for confirmation, and the lack of emphasis by our bishops of the place on confirmation.
3. The moment toward ordination to an older and older age, along with making ordination almost exclusively a “second career” track for people.

These two reasons are closely related because it is younger leaders who have the best chance of reaching their own generation for Christ.

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