With sadness I write to tell you that I will be leaving the Church of the Holy Communion at the end of this year; I will deeply miss being a regular part of this parish’s life and ministry, which I love. I also write with joy because I believe that I and my family are following what is “the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” for us (Phil 3.14).
God willing, sometime in the next year I will enter in to full communion with and be ordained to the priesthood of the Catholic Church in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter ”“ this is the “Anglican Ordinariate” (essentially a non-geographic diocese) established by Pope Benedict XVI for Anglican Christians who desire to convert to the Catholic Church while maintaining important elements of the Anglican liturgical and pastoral patrimony.
This is a conversion I have desired to make for some years, and I have understood my ministry as an Anglo-Catholic priest in the Episcopal Church as a special vocation to witness to the Catholic faith in the hope (real and possible if not “sure and certain”) of a reunion in the Church larger than my individual conversion. When the establishment of the Ordinariate was announced, I believed (and continue to believe) that the time for that hoped for reunion had come….
Soooo, in short, he has wanted to be an RC for years, has considered himself an RC in all but name only and has influenced people thusly, all on the Anglican/Episcopal dime? Goodbye and good riddance to him and his and may the door hit him on the way out.
Sorry, but I have absolutely no patience or understanding for people like this. They don’t have the guts to follow their “convictions” on their own, making the hard choices and sacrifices necessary, until things become easier and a path has been cleared for them. And now he wishes to dance off with violins playing and implied pleas for sympathy at a time when the congregation he was paid to serve needs his service the most? Rubbish.
The RCs deserve him.