The Rev. Mark Lewis is married. He also wants to become a Catholic priest. Lewis is the rector of St. Luke’s in Bladensburg, the first [Episcopal]… parish in the U.S. to seek to become Catholic under Anglicanorum coetibus, a process outlined by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 that allows groups of Anglicans to join the Roman Catholic Church without discarding their liturgical heritage. Raised Episcopalian, the 52-year-old Lewis entered the ministry 10 years ago and has two grown children. He will become Catholic with his parish in October.
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
Obviously, I am of the Catholic faith. Even as Episcopalians, we believed we were Catholic Christians. The Episcopal Church is a very broad church. In it you can have very evangelical people, and in it you can also have very high church Anglo-Catholics, of which I was one.
Why did you and your church convert?
I teach Catholic theology to my people. Once the apostolic constitution was announced, it opened a door that had previously been closed to us. I didn’t really want to sway them with my excitement, so we looked at it together: “Is this something that is really of interest to us?” We looked at the difference between being a Catholic in the Anglican tradition, and being a Catholic in the Roman tradition. And we realized as a church that we needed to be in communion with the Church of Rome.
My advice to this gentleman (and all others swimming the Tiber, as I have done myself): for your own good, drop speedily all references to ‘Church of Rome’. Even Roman Catholic. True, there are Eastern Catholics, and technically we are Latin Rite. But in common parlance we simply call ourselves Catholic. Perhaps wrong to arrogate all catholicity to ourselves, although a people who call themselves Americans, as if they represent an entire continent, ought to think twice before raising that objection.