The theme for this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is “You Are Witnesses of These Things” (Luke 24:48). Coinciding with the Scottish centennial celebration of the World Mission Conference at Edinburgh, widely acknowledged as an ecumenical milestone, the theme strikes at the soul of collaboration between churches: what we memorialize together, what we work on, what we anticipate through God’s grace. Whether we speak in a prophetic voice, like the Paul Wattsons of a prior generation, there is always a call to set aside a passive stance and move.
Action of some sort never negates a stillness of mind and heart, but flows from it. Achieving that quietude comes from asking ourselves sometimes difficult questions: What do I believe? To whom shall I turn? Who am I? What is impressive about the path Fr. Wattson took is not so much his rather spectacular conversion or the issues attendant upon it, as much as the authenticity of its genesis, together with its manifold fruits. Roman Catholics cannot ignore the abiding fealty Fr. Wattson had toward the purest elements of the Anglican spirit, since part of that is its desire toward the vocation of unity. In an era of ordinariates, Roman Catholics will do well to observe how a new injection of Anglican culture into their midst will serve to heal and make whole again a body broken for too long.
In speaking of ordinariates today, canon lawyers refer to “extra-territorial” sees or “non-territorial particular churches,” which serve as instruments for service to the people of God that have, for purposes of identification, no visible boundaries but a clear governance structure that is necessarily flexible to meet extraordinary circumstances. One reason for the recent Anglicanorum Coetibus, the apostolic constitution of Pope Benedict XVI establishing personal ordinariates for those Anglicans entering a new relation with the Roman Catholic Church, is to supply a flexible response to legalistic questions. Both communions will do well to study whether the ecclesiological principles articulated in the constitution will be in service to the great challenge of ecumenism in our time, particularly as it conforms or departs from the legacy of visionaries like Fr.Wattson.
Mother Lurana Mary Francis and Father Paul James Francis co-founded the Society of the Atonement, a Franciscan order first in the Episcopal Church, but which moved into Roman Catholicism in 1909 (for those who didn’t take the time to read the whole article).
A salient item in the article says:
[blockquote]The convent’s property was owned by three women — all good Episcopal ladies of Garrison — who had permitted the sisters’ growth but never signed over a deed. Trustees of St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had stood as a ramshackle chapel on the property before the arrival of Mother Lurana, evicted the sisters in 1910, one year after they had become Roman Catholics.
Mother Lurana chose to follow the longstanding Franciscan principle of offering no resistance, thinking it better to be homeless than to be the source of conflict. Fr. Wattson saw the matter differently and vowed to pursue it in court—a decision that carried on for the next seven years. An agreement was struck, however, when Fr. Wattson met Hamilton Fish II on Election Day in 1917. Fish was not only a well known politician in the state of New York; he was also the senior warden of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Garrison. When Fr. Wattson explained his legal troubles, Fish offered to broker a settlement, which was finally won in March 1918, by an act of the New York legislature. As a side note, all of the original owners of the property became Roman Catholic and two are buried in the sisters’ cemetery at Graymoor. But the lesson of the story is simple: cooperation in the Christian household always brings a greater yield and is one more visible token in praise of God’s glory.[/blockquote]
St. John’s chapel was a “chapel of ease” owned by the Osborne family, the local patroons. The nuns built a small motherhouse and novitiate next to it (which are still there), so the nature of the property was ambivalent.
Notice the progress of the case. The Osbornes had been convinced that they were defending The Episcopal Church by refusing to allow a bunch of Papists to use the property. (This property was at the bottom of the hill while the friars were located at the top of the hill on property outright donated by two other people: Mr Gray and Dr Moore — hence the name) St. John’s chapel was closed to the nuns for any use by them. However, they were very quickly allowed to occupy the buildings that they themselves built. They lived for those 7 years under the continual threat of eviction, but were never actually put out into the cold: the ladies really just didn’t have the heart to do it. Mother Lurana, as a true Franciscan, always considered this to be great training for the community in the art of trusting in God’s Providence.
The settling of the case occurred because people of genuine good will on both sides decided that a genuine witness to true Christian Faith and Life demanded that they settle [i][b]out of court[/b][/i]. Everyone parted amicably in the end, and the cause of Christian Unity went on.
— A great parable for our times.
(I grew up very near Garrison, and knew the Franciscans of the Atonement well)
This should be forwarded to the PB and all the other Bishops in TEC.
Quite a difference in approach to ecumenism with that of the folks at EWTN.