With the news about the Vatican’s change for Anglicans desiring to come into the Church, I decided to ask the perspective of an American who has taken that journey.
Father Douglas Grandon, pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Moline, Ill., is a former Anglican pastor who is married and has children. He came into the Catholic Church in June 2003 and was ordained a Catholic priest in May 2008.
“It’s a monumental and historical event,” said Father Grandon. “I’m absolutely delighted. We’ve been hoping for this for a long time.”
While Anglo-Catholics in England have long used the Roman Rite including the Breviary, American Anglo-Catholics at least since 1979 have been Prayer Book Catholics and much less enamored by Roman Rites and ceremonies and perhaps more doctrinally conservative than the average RC priest. For many of us the papacy and enshrining pious opinions about Our Lady as doctrines necessary to the Faith remains a large hurdle to jump over. If I could accept Roman doctrine ex animo I wouldn’t seek some form of Anglican entity in communion with Rome, I would convert.
If this new structure creates parishes only open to dissident Anglicans, as is true in the Pastoral Provision parishes already in business,it is a prescription for eventual extinction and lacks any evangelical component other than attracting Anglicans.
wvparson –
I guarantee that were you to become Catholic, a year of contemporary Catholic music would change your mind. You would be dragging yourself to the nearest Anglican Use parish you could find just to hear a couple of stanzas of.
Isn’t it sad that Rome literally stifles creativity and tradition. I imagine heaven to be a place replete with multitudes of tongues and traditions, all of course orthodox. I don’t understand why Rome doesn’t at least make an effort to do likewise?
wvparson, it isn’t true that the Pastoral Provision parishes are “only open to dissident Anglicans.” The parish of which I am pastor, Our Lady of the Atonement, has nearly 600 families, which translates to some thousands of individuals. About half of those families have one or more converts within them, and the other families are life-long Catholics who have found a spiritual home at the parish. Our school has 491 students from Pre-K through 12th grade. These children attend the Anglican Use Mass every day, and take part in Evensong on a regular basis, along with other devotions from our Anglican patrimony. Our parish, and the other Anglican Use parishes, aren’t simply waiting for the occasional dissatisfied Anglican to walk through the doors. Certainly, I always have a number of Anglicans “in the process” of becoming Catholic, but the parish is a vibrant and growing center of spiritual growth, social outreach, education, and a program of music which incorporates the finest from the Church’s treasury. Our students can sing Anglican chant like you’ve rarely heard because they’ve been raised with it. They never were Episcopalians; they’re growing up as Catholics in an Anglican Use parish, and for them, the way we do things is completely normal. I’ve been pastor long enough so that I’m starting to baptise the babies of the babies I had baptised twenty-five years ago. This is the future of what the Holy Father is establishing with the Apostolic Constitution. Ironically, it’s Pope Benedict XVI who’s doing more to preserve the best of Anglican worship and devotion, while the Anglican hierarchy is doing it’s best to destroy it!
#3: Yes, terribly sad. Just imagine if Dante, Michelangelo, Palestrina or Newman had been Protestants – how much richer the world would have been.
As for liturgy, there are over 20 different rites in the Roman church – the Latin rite is only one. The great problem over recent years, I gather, has been trying to get some of the Eastern churches in communion with Rome to keep their traditional liturgies rather than Latinise.
To add to #5, not only do we have the different Rites with their own liturgical traditions, within the Latin rite itself we have the Ordinary (either in the vernacular or Latin) and Extraordinary forms of the Mass as well as others such as the Dominican and Ambrosian rites. Oh, and, of course, the Anglican Use Missal.
[Comment deleted by Elf – please be respectful in comments to other commenters]
[blockquote]And Chris moulter: find me an RC Anglican Use service in Augusta, GA, and I will attend. Of course it’s not available, or, up until now, allowed. [/blockquote]
I wish I could! Moreso, I wish I had one here in Orlando! Perhaps now that the Pope has effectively detached the Anglican convert clergy from the local Ordinaries (if I’m reading the whole thing correctly), we will see a liberalization of the Anglican Use or whatever replaces it.