The service was conducted by Father Eric Bergman, a Yale Divinity School-educated former Episcopal clergyman who was ordained a Catholic priest in 2007. Father Bergman stresses that this is not an overture to effete Episcopalians who are angry about changes in their church and want to sneak into the Catholic Church bringing nothing more than their pretty music. Being “angry about Gene Robinson,” he says of the openly homosexual bishop of New Hampshire, isn’t enough reason to become a Catholic. There must be a real conversion to the tenets of Catholicism.<\/p>\n
Father Bergman says he began his journey to the Catholic Church by thinking about something that has taken many liberal Catholics out of the church: contraception. He regards Anglicanism’s 1930 embrace of contraception as a mistake: “Out of that came a confusion about the roles of men and women, a theology of androgyny,” he says.<\/p>\n
Father Bergman and his wife, Kristina, have six children. They and more than 60 members of his Episcopal parish came into the Catholic Church in 2005. He is now chaplain of the St. Thomas More Society in Scranton, Pa., which seeks to establish Anglican Use parishes.<\/p>\n
Naturally, many liberal Catholics are less than thrilled at the prospect of stodgy former Episcopalians importing traditional opinions along with their non-Catholic thou’s and thy’s. In a Nov. 23, 2009, story “Where Hype Meets Reality,” the liberal National Catholic Reporter pooh-poohed the idea of large numbers of Anglicans coming in under the pope’s new rules.<\/p>\n
But Father Bergman not only predicts a mass movement toward Rome. He believes Anglican Use may mark the beginning of the end of the Reformation.<\/p>\n