For five years, members of Saint Anthony of Padua in Hackensack, a church in the liberal Episcopal Diocese of Newark, have sought spiritual guidance from a bishop in a socially conservative diocese in South Carolina.
The reason? They oppose the liberal tendencies of the Newark diocese and their national church, which in 2003 seated an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire over conservative opposition. The following year, St. Anthony’s began periodically hosting Bishop William J. Skilton from Charleston, S.C.
The arrangement helps explain why parish members probably will not accept the Vatican’s special offer, made last month, to allow dissatisfied Episcopalians and Anglicans to convert to Catholicism, said the Rev. Brian Laffler, the pastor. The Episcopal Church USA, with 2.1 million members, is part of the 77 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion.
[url=http://sergesblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/not-news-new-jerseys-anglo-catholics.html]My pennorth on this story.[/url]
The ordinariate will be English. What’s unusual about this or explains it depending on how you look at it is St Anthony’s, historically Italian, began in 1914 when the bishop turned down immigrants’ request for a neighbourhood church. At first loosely affiliated to the Polish National Catholic Church, then America’s Old Catholic dioceses as they were until 2003, for some reason they went under the Episcopalians in 1925. Their refusal’s understandable as they were burned a long time ago, and [i]paisani[/i] have long memories, God love them (they were Catholic when the English were still dancing around trees), but they’re still stuck in mainline Protestantism where they don’t belong.