The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

Father Jeffrey Steenson,

today named the first Ordinary,

celebrating an Anglican Use Mass

at the Newark Cathedral in June 2010.

In accordance with the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has today erected for the United States a Personal Ordinariate for Anglicans who desire to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving their Anglican patrimony. This new pastoral structure is titled after the symbol of the authority of the Bishop of Rome to teach, sanctify and govern as pastor of the universal Church: the Chair of St. Peter.


The first Ordinary is Father Jeffrey Steenson. Until his reception into the Catholic Church in 2007, Father Steenson was a bishop in the Episcopal Church and had previously served as rector of several traditional parishes in the Episcopal Church, including the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, PA where Father George Rutler has once served.


This is but another step in the long process of trying to gather together small groups of Anglicans, both clergy and laity, who desire to become Catholics while retaining their corporate identity as parishes in this new Ordinariate -- essentially a non-territorial diocese. Anglicans anywhere in the United States who desire to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church and preserve their corporate identity should now be in touch with Father Steenson.


The new Ordinariate website is at www.usordinariate.org.

Father Conrad Kimbrough, RIP

Father Kimbrough and friends.

Born 10 May 1927

Ordained 11 February 1978

Died 5 July 2011

Here is the text of my homily for the Mass of Christian Burial 

celebrated on 8 July 2011

at Sacred Heart Church, Salisbury.

In the Temple at Jerusalem, a veil of cloth separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the sacred precincts; this was a token of the distance between the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man. This is the veil that was torn in two at the death of the Lord Jesus (Luke 23:45), signaling that the types and figures of the Old Covenant had given way to the reality of the New Covenant. But even in these last days, sinful man is still separated from the holiness of the living God, and to glimpse his glory, the veil must be drawn back. The task of a priest, Father Kimbrough used to say, is to draw back the veil between God and man and then hide himself in the folds. And so he did, first as an ordained minister of the Episcopal Church and then as a priest of Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church; for decade after decade, Father Kimbrough drew back the veil for us and then hid himself in the folds.

One of the many reasons he found it so easy to rest content hidden in the folds is that he lived his entire life against the horizon of his death. In fact, it is arguable that no man ever thought so much about the day and manner of his death and with as much tranquility as did Father Kimbrough, with the possible exception of St. Paul, who wrote to the Church at Philippi that “… to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)

Conrad Lewis Kimbrough was born right here is Salisbury on 10 May 1927 -- or, as he loved to point out, on Confederate Memorial Day, and he wasn’t just born here, he was born again here by water and the Holy Spirit at the First United Methodist Church of Salisbury when he was eleven years old. He began to attend Methodist Sunday School when he was just three, and from his teachers, his mother, and above all from the Sacred Scriptures, he learned the truth of the Gospel and never departed from the life changing conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord.

When he was in high school, young Conrad suggested that the sanctuary of the Methodist Church seemed a little bit bare and that it should be adorned with a picture of the Lord Jesus, before which he thought should stand a table with two candles on it. Years later he would recall that day as the first of many times someone said to him, “You should be a Catholic.”

During the first year of his undergraduate studies, Conrad made a decision that changed his life. On 8 April 1945, one month before his 18th birthday and the end of the Second World War in Europe, he was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and in so doing, Conrad was convinced that he was fulfilling the counsel of his Methodist classmate to become a Catholic -- albeit, as he would have put it then, in the English, rather than the Italian, branch of the Church. This conviction would sustain his faith, his life, and his work in the Episcopal Church for over thirty years, almost all of which was in Wisconsin, near the seminary he loved, Nashotah House, in what was then called the Biretta Belt of the Episcopal Church -- a swath of Anglican dioceses and parishes that were, both in creed and ritual form, self-consciously catholic.

During those three decades in Wisconsin, Father Kimbrough mastered the art of drawing back the veil between God and man through the celebration of the sacred liturgy, the preaching of the Gospel, and the guidance of the lost. Father Kimbrough was heir to the renovation of Anglicanism initiated by the 19th century Oxford Movement, led by the brilliant English scholar and Anglican priest Blessed John Henry Newman, but like Newman, who later left the Church of England and became a Catholic priest, Conrad Kimbrough was increasingly beset by doubts about the reality of the ancient Church, of Catholic faith and order, in a Christian community formed by schism during the 16th century Protestant Reformation.

The resolution of these doubts took many years for Father Kimbrough to work out, and while he was still living in Wisconsin, he was invited by friends in Stevens Point to a large gathering of Catholics who were joining a cardinal visiting from Europe for a Mass in a gym. Father Kimbrough’s Catholic friends introduced him to the foreign cardinal, with whom he had a conversation about Anglicanism and his doubts, and Father Kimbrough was delighted that this Catholic bishop from a far country knew so much about Anglicanism and was so sympathetic to his situation. Although he could not receive Holy Communion at the cardinal’s Mass, Father Kimbrough stayed until the end, and to avoid being in anyone’s way, he sat high up on the last bleacher of the gymnasium. As the procession passed by far beneath on the gym floor, the visiting cardinal stopped and gestured for Father Kimbrough to come down. He was deeply moved and ever after said that he felt like sinful Zacchaeus being called down from the sycamore tree. He knelt down to receive the cardinal’s blessing, and that very night Conrad Kimbrough decided to be received into the Catholic Church. Less than one year later, the entire world was introduced to that same cardinal from a far country as Pope John Paul II.

Having become a Catholic in Wisconsin, Conrad Kimbrough returned to the land of his birth in the hope of being able to serve the Catholic Church as a priest in North Carolina. Bishop Michael Begley of Charlotte received Father Kimbrough with great generosity and respect for his twenty-five years of service as an Anglican minister, and on 11 February 1978, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, Conrad Kimbrough was ordained to the priesthood of Jesus Christ. He was 50 years old and just beginning the work of his life in the Catholic Church.

Over the next twenty-five years, Father Kimbrough served as pastor of five parishes in the Diocese of Charlotte, and in not one of those assignments was he ever accused of being a superlative administrator. Papers were scattered throughout his rectory on every horizontal surface, mail was left unopened for days, even weeks -- especially mail from the chancery, and when the mail finally was opened, it was then dropped wherever Father Kimbrough happened to be standing or sitting, usually never to be thought of again. But despite the administrative chaos, there was something going on in and through this priest that changed lives.

First as a Methodist, then as an Episcopalian, and finally as a Catholic, Conrad Kimbrough knew more surely than he knew his own existence that God exists; he knew that the one, only, living and true God has revealed himself to man through the Covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David; he knew that God has revealed himself through the Law and the Prophets of Israel; and he knew that God has revealed himself -- unveiled himself -- finally and fully through the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. With a combination of childlike trust in the truth of the Gospel and the simplicity of faith that is found only on the far side of decades of complexity and struggle, Father Kimbrough served as a powerful instrument of grace for those struggling to live the Catholic Faith, for those lost in doubt and sin, and for those searching for something or Someone they knew only that they did not yet know. This was true throughout his ministry as a Catholic priest, but it was perhaps nowhere more pellucidly clear than during his service as pastor of St. Benedict’s, Greensboro.

It was there that I first met him in 1985. I was a callow seminarian, and he was a crusty, cantankerous curmudgeon who had no patience for ecclesiastical fools. We were an instant pair: the Old Coot and the Young Coot. As I listened to him preach week after week, I heard the Fathers of the Church speaking down the ages. As I watched him spend hours in the confessional and in gentle conversation with the lost and broken souls who came to his door, I understood the Lord’s insistence that what we do for the least of his brethren, we do for him. As I served his Mass day after day, I saw the veil drawn back and watched the priest hide himself in the folds so that we could behold the glory of the Word made flesh, now made present on the Church’s altar. And I was not alone in seeing these things. The flowering of vocations to the priesthood and religious life which came forth from that small congregation is an enduring and remarkable sign of grace. Another powerful sign of grace were the many marriages formed and strengthened by this celibate priest’s faithful witness to God’s eternal plan for married love.

Besides seeking to strengthen marriages and to encourage vocations to the priesthood and religious life, Father Kimbrough’s twin passions were proclaiming the Gospel of Life and bringing souls into the Catholic Church. When he was arrested for praying in front of an abortion chamber, he started making converts behind bars. On one occasion he asked me to accompany him to the county jail with a Mass kit and the holy oils. In a glass room about five feet square, he baptized and confirmed a trembling young man who was accused of and later convicted for murder, and then Father Kimbrough celebrated Mass on a tiny table so that this new Christian -- now repentant and radiant in the certainty of God’s mercy -- could receive for the first and perhaps last time the flesh and blood of the Savior. In that dreadful place we chanted the Missa de Angelis while guards and inmates alike looked on in wonder.

Everyone who knew Father Kimbrough has a story like that: absolutely uncompromising faith expressed in always surprising tenderness. It was an irresistible combination, and the lives of countless souls were shaped for the better by the witness of a priest who sought always to hide himself in the folds of the veil drawn back and who spoke most often not of his ordination, but of his baptism, the sacrament in which he was made -- as he loved to say -- a member of Christ, a child of God, and an heir of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Beyond his passion for the Church, the Gospel, the sacraments, and the life of grace, Conrad loved the place of his birth and loved everyone to whom he was related, which, if you give credence to his tales, was pretty much everyone he ever met. “Sure is good to be back here in Rowan County,” he would say every time he came home, and he meant it. He intended to lie here in this earth until the Last Day, when he would be restored to his parents and siblings and nieces and nephews and first cousins, and second cousins, and third cousins, and all his cousins from the first generation of Man to the last. Betsy, Frank, and Norman, your brother loved you and your families because you are his flesh and blood, but he also loved you and all of us because he lived and loved in Christ Jesus.

In these last years, his health faltered and his body failed, but his faith never wavered. Let St. Paul speak for Conrad Kimbrough: “I consider that the sufferings of  this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” (Romans 8: 18-19) Another word for revealing is unveiling. 

After he returned to Maryfield from the hospital, Father Kimbrough knew that he was dying. He asked for the photographs of his spiritual sons and daughters in the priesthood and religious life to be moved to his little room, and family and friends came to speak to him of love and gratitude and grace. On the morning I saw him last, I arrived just after Father Benjamin Roberts finished saying Mass, and we sat together at the bedside. It was Eastertide, so we sang a hymn of the Resurrection:

Christ the Lord is risen today;

Christians, haste your vows to pay;

Offer ye your praises meet

At the Paschal Victim’s feet;

For the sheep the Lamb hath bled,

Sinless in the sinner’s stead,

Christ the Lord is ris’n on high:

Now he lives no more to die.

When we finished the hymn, I said to him, “Father, soon you will be at the wedding feast of the Lamb. The veil will be drawn back for the final time. There will be no signs, and no more sacraments. Just the reality of the Lamb once slain who dies no more.” He asked me to repeat those words to you today.

Now let’s return to St. Paul’s description of creation’s eager longing for the unveiling of the glory that makes us the free children of God. The Apostle writes that “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now, and not only creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8: 21-23)

St. Paul’s vision of our present suffering surpassed by future glory through our adoption by grace and the redemption of our bodies in Jesus Christ is why Conrad Kimbrough lived his entire life in joyful expectation of this day. And now that we are here to commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Father Kimbrough would be the first to remind us that we are here to pray for God’s mercy on his soul, to pray for the forgiveness of his sins, and to pray for the hastening of that bright vision in which Conrad Lewis Kimbrough will no longer need signs or sacraments because the veil has been drawn back once and forever so that this faithful priest, who will no longer need to hide in the folds, can see his Lord even as he is seen and be changed from glory into glory.

Thanks be to God for the life of his servant Conrad Lewis Kimbrough. May Christ Jesus the merciful Savior acknowledge him now as a sheep of his own fold, a lamb of his own flock, a sinner of his own redeeming, a preacher of his own Gospel, and a steward of his own Mysteries.

Grant rest, we pray O Lord, to your priest Conrad with all your saints in light, where sorrow and pain are no more, but perfect peace and everlasting life. Amen.

Anglicans and Invalid Sacraments

When Catholics speak of Anglicans and sacramental invalidity, most people would assume that we're speaking of Holy Orders. But there is another kind of sacramental invalidity which will make it impossible for many Anglicans, both lay and ordained, to be received into the Catholic Church through Anglicanorum coetibus or any other means, and that invalidity is in the Sacrament of Marriage.


The Catholic Church believes that only Catholics are bound to marry in the Catholic Church (according to canonical form) and, therefore, that any two baptized Christians who consent to marry each other are by their exchange of consent creating between themselves the bond of sacramental marriage. (N.B. And this is despite the fact that Protestants generally do not count marriage as a sacrament, but there it is.) So, for example, if two Anglicans get married by any means (a judge, an Anglican minister, an Elvis chaplain at a Vegas wedding chapel), then they are bound to each other by the lifelong sacrament of matrimony. If that marriage ends in divorce, however, and one or both them marry again, then in the second relationship they are married only in civil law and do not have the sacrament of marriage because the existing prior bond is presumed by the law of the Church to continue to exist in the sacrament, even after the civil divorce.


The only way to determine with moral certitude whether or not the first marriage was or was not a true sacrament of Christ and the Church is to allow an ecclesiastical court, or tribunal, to do a thorough investigation of the former marriage, which enjoys in law the presumption of validity. If sufficient evidence can be adduced to prove to moral certitude that the presumed sacrament never came into being, then the tribunal can declare that the former marriage was a civil contract only and not a sacrament, leaving the former partners free to marry in the Church as though for the first time.


Significant numbers of Anglicans are now in their second or third marriage (or more), and until and unless each of their prior marriages is investigated by a tribunal of the Catholic Church, it is not possible to receive them into the Catholic Church. Because this matter is so little understood, it often comes as a great surprise to people who want to become Catholics but find the way is closed to them by living in an invalid marriage, and given how sensitive this matter is, the persons involved will often give many reasons other than the real reason for their decision not to become Catholics. Look for this to happen with great frequency in the coming days as the personal Ordinariate comes closer and closer in the United States. The reasons given for remaining Anglicans may very well not be the real reasons.

Sturm und Drang Over the New Roman Missal

Unless you've been living in a tent for the past year, you should be aware that this fall on the First Sunday of Advent (27 November 2011), the Catholic Church in the United States will begin using a new translation of the Roman Missal, the book which contains all of the prayers needed to say Mass.


The new translation, the work of nearly a decade, is certainly not perfect, and the process used to reach the final product was perhaps not the best that could have been devised. Nevertheless, the new translation is certainly a great improvement over the "Sacramentary" that we've been using for forty years, a book that is not so much a translation of the Missale Romanum as it is an adaptation.


Now that we're in the home stretch of the process and parishes are beginning to study and practice the new texts, a few of the people who have been involved in preparing the new Missal but who did not get everything they wanted are beginning to hold their breath until they turn blue and fall down. That, at any rate, is how an open letter from Father Anthony Ruff, OSB to the bishops of the United States reads to me. This is simply petulant narcissism dressed up as noble protest of injustice. I regret that Father Anthony has chosen this forum to express these sentiments, not least because he has contributed in many ways over recent years to improving the celebration of the sacred liturgy in our country. But, I suspect that this sort of tantrum is to be expected in the final run-up to the new Missal, given the number of people who wanted a say in the work and didn't get what they wanted.


As for me and my house, we look forward to the new translation, even with all its imperfections, and I hope that in due course everyone will remember the purpose of the entire exercise: to celebrate more faithfully the sacred mysteries of our redemption in Jesus Christ.

Calling All Anglicans!

Any Anglican in the United States who wants to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church under the provisions of the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus should be in direct contact with Donald Cardinal Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington.


If not now, when? If not you, who? It's time. It's past time. Just do it.

An Extreme Need for Silence

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Yad Vashem is Israel’s official memorial to the martyrs of the Nazi Holocaust, or as it is called by the Jews, the Shoah. The Hebrew words Yad Vashem, taken from the Prophet Isaiah, mean “a place and a name.” At Yad Vashem the millions of Jews who were exterminated like vermin have both a place of final rest and a name to be remembered. During the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, Pope John Paul the Great made a pilgrimage to Yad Vashem, and there in the powerfully stark Hall of Remembrance he spoke of the horror inflicted upon the Jews by a dehumanizing ideology of hatred. In part, the pope said:

“In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember … Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah … I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially of human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust.”

Over six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and they were murdered in the most degrading of all possible conditions. The ideology of National Socialism had declared that they were subhuman and therefore unworthy even of the right to exist, and so by the millions they were murdered. But make no mistake; this was not the sudden violence of a rioting and lawless mob. No, the extermination of the Jews was carefully planned and methodically carried out over many years by well-educated professional men who loved their families, and were kind to their pets, and served their nation with skill and determination. These men went to concerts and plays; they went to fine dinners and took vacations with friends; they read poetry and classical literature and taught their children to play Bach and Beethoven. And they coldly, systematically murdered human beings by the millions with a clear conscience, because they found a way to convince themselves that those who were dying were beasts rather than men.

At Yad Vashem, John Paul asked: “How could man have such utter contempt for man?" Then the pope answered: "Because he had reached the point of contempt for God.”

But my friends, we do not have to look back to Nazi Germany and the death camps to find such contempt for God. No, we can find it right here among us, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. On 22 January 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a 7 to 2 vote, announced that it had discovered in the Constitution of the United States a previously unknown right of mothers to murder their children, and in the thirty-eight years since that national disgrace, we Americans have murdered more than 50 million human beings in the womb, with some estimates placing the butcher’s bill closer to 60 million. In other words, in the name of personal liberty and freedom of choice, we Americans have now exterminated more human beings than presently live in Spain and Ireland combined.

How could man, how would we, have such utter contempt for man? Because we have reached the point of contempt for God.

For decades before the infamous decision in Roe v. Wade, men and women of the radical and secular American Left -- taking their lead from the revolutionaries of the often violent European Left -- had been building a case to demonstrate that Biblical religion and the God revealed in the Bible are the enemies of human freedom. The default setting of the Mandarins of our high culture -- in our universities, in journalism, in entertainment and the arts, and in politics of the Left -- is that the human person is an autonomous individual free of all obligations to others, who must provide for himself the meaning of life and who has only the duty to pursue pleasure and self-realization wherever they may be found. Moreover, the secular mind holds that there is no universal moral truth, and even if there were, we could not know it; therefore, each person must find his own truth. This perverse philosophy was aptly described by Professor Allan Bloom (in The Closing of the American Mind) as debonair nihilism, and supported by the sexual revolution and the counter-cultural movements of the ’60’s, this vision of human life declares that unborn children are simply lumps of tissue that may be surgically removed from the mother’s body for any reason she may have. In fact, unquestionable commitment to this hateful ideology is now so deeply entrenched in the mind of the Left that we may call support for unrestricted abortion on demand the sacrament of secularism.

Think back to Nazi Germany: the atrocities committed against Jews were planned and executed by law-abiding and seemingly civilized men, and now we are doing exactly the same thing. Supported by unjust laws, our cultural and political elites are almost wholly captive to a hateful ideology that declares certain classes of human beings not to be human, and in the name of that ideology we are engaged in bloodletting of unimaginable proportions. Worse still, this abattoir of human misery is aided and abetted by false preachers in much of what remains of liberal Protestantism, who seek to excuse abortion as a private and tragic choice that is sometimes sadly necessary in difficult circumstances. But, friends, murdering innocent children is never necessary. And after nearly 60 million such murders, we’re no longer talking about private tragedies; in fact, after four decades of judicial murder, we’re facing a civilizational crisis.

Last week in Philadelphia, the depraved consequences of a generation of genocide were finally exposed to public view. We learned that a licensed medical doctor named Kermit Gosnell ran a chamber of horrors worthy of Dr. Mengele’s obscene experiments at Auschwitz, and this he did with impunity for decades because public officials looked the other way year after year after year. And this they did because abortion is considered absolutely sacrosanct by those who make and enforce the laws in too many parts of our country. Now, you might be tempted to think that the slaughterhouse of Kermit Gosnell is an extreme example that we may dismiss because it is so grotesque, but the only difference between what happened in Gosnell’s death chamber for decades and what is happening every day in every so-called clinic where abortions are performed is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.

How could man, how could we, have such utter contempt for man? Because we have reached the point of contempt for God.

My friends, the United States of America is drowning in the blood of tens of millions of murdered babies who are martyrs to a loathsome ideology which dehumanizes us by allowing us to dehumanize them. And the first step away from this abomination is for each and every one of us to refuse to consent to or cooperate with in any way the lies on which the ideology of abortion stands.

Let’s start with language. Abortion is not about the freedom to choose; it is about the license to kill. Abortion is murder. It is murder most foul, and it must stop. In the Name of God, it must stop. In the name of Man, it must stop. In the name of all that is holy and good and true and beautiful, it must stop. And so I beg you: never consent to abortion. Never cooperate with abortion. Never excuse abortion. Never vote for a politician who will support abortion. Never remain silent when your family and friends and neighbors and colleagues consent to abortion or decide to vote for a politician who will support abortion. Never accept the lie about human nature and human life which is required to imagine that a human child is a lump of tissue. Never be seduced by the seemingly civilized men and women who fill the air waves and the lecture halls and the court rooms and the political chambers and even, sometimes, the pulpits of this land with the lie that we can murder our children in the name of human freedom without becoming the same kind of monsters who marched millions of Jews into the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Next, let’s think about what we can do to promote a culture of life. We can support every effort by the Church and by pro-life groups to bear witness to the truth of the Gospel of Life. We can support programs that provide practical assistance to women with unwanted or crisis pregnancies. We can support adoption programs, chastity education, and a new counter-cultural movement informed this time by the Gospel which sets us free from slavery to sin. We can give pastoral care to those wounded by abortion, starting with the mothers who killed their children. We can bear witness to anyone who will listen that children, even in the womb, are human persons with inalienable rights, starting with the right to live and be nurtured rather than to be murdered, dismembered, and cast away as medical waste.

To paraphrase John Paul the Great: In the face of more than 50 million murdered children, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of abortion.

Let us dare to hope that one day, a day sooner rather than later, a great national monument will be raised in memory of the tens of millions of Americans who have died and are continuing to die in the holocaust of abortion. Let us hope that Americans of every creed and color, of every party and persuasion, will one day come to such a place of silence and remembrance to honor those who lives were taken from them by others who denied their humanity.

But until the murder of the unborn is ended and until such a shrine of silence and remembrance exists, we can hasten its coming by never being silent about abortion, never allowing our fellow Americans to forget that a holocaust is going on among us right now, every day. And even as we speak out about abortion in private conversation, in the public square, and in political action, let us now, in this holy place of remembrance, keep watchful silence in memory of the millions of martyred children and beg for the mercy of God upon our nation for this crime against God and man that cries out to heaven for His justice.

The culture of death and its secular sacrament, abortion, are indeed a great darkness. But “the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death, light has arisen” (Matthew 4:16). That light is the Lord Jesus Christ, and to Him we pray:

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.

The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham

Today in Rome and in England, something momentous occurred. In accordance with the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, the Holy See created a new canonical structure in England and Wales for Anglicans who want to be Catholics. It is called a Personal Ordinariate, and it is essentially a non-territorial diocese which allows Anglicans who become Catholics to preserve their Anglican parochial, liturgical, and devotional identity in the Catholic Church. The Ordinariate is named for the Mother of God as she is venerated at the ancient English shrine of Walsingham, and it has been placed under the heavenly patronage of Blessed John Henry Newman, the Anglican priest who became a Catholic and then a priest and a Cardinal of the Catholic Church in the mid 19th century.

This is a bold move on the part of Pope Benedict XVI. In a single stroke, Benedict has broken the logjam of official ecumenical conversations which began with such promise in the 1960's but which had lately become a moribund joke of official niceties being exchanged to no end except continuing the never-ending conversation. Moreover, if Anglican Christianity ever had a genuine claim (and it is doubtful that it ever did) to being something other than simple Protestantism in Catholic drag, that claim has long since been abandoned by almost every Anglican everywhere, starting with the hierarchy of the Church of England. The apostasy from Christian faith and life which is making shipwreck of Anglicanism throughout the First World is yet another reason for serious Christians within the Anglican Communion to find their true and lasting home in the Church from which their ancestors were separated in the 16th century. And now Pope Benedict XVI has provided the means for them to do so. Look for other ordinariates to be established in the United States, Canada, Australia and perhaps elsewhere in the coming months.

What Makes a Hospital or College Catholic?

It is relatively easy when speaking of a human person to say who is Catholic and who is not. Only a validly baptized person who is in communion with the local Catholic bishop and through the local bishop with the Bishop of Rome and the whole College of Bishops is a Catholic. But how does one know whether an institution is Catholic or not?


For example, lots of Catholics own businesses, but that doesn't make their businesses Catholic. So, what does it mean to speak of a hospital or a college as Catholic? Is it a matter of ownership? Of the religious identity of the patients, students, or customers? Or is it something deeper.


For the better part of a millenium, the Church has understood that associations of Catholic persons can be so closely bound to the Church's mission to the nations that by extension the institution sponsored by an association of Catholics can itself be called Catholic. And the two classic examples of this are in education and health care, because of their obvious connection to the ministry of the Lord Jesus and the law of love which binds his disciples.


But what happens when the identity of an association and its institutions begins to change? How is one to know when a once-Catholic hospital or college is no longer truly Catholic? This is a bit easier with an individual person: If Uncle Joe becomes an Episcopalian or an  atheist, he is no longer Catholic. But who is to say when a hospital has so far departed from the mission of the Church that it no longer is and therefore no longer can be called Catholic? The question of identity may be a complex one, but the question of who decides is actually quite simple: the local bishop.


The Bishop of Phoenix declared today that a once Catholic hospital in his diocese is now no longer in truth a Catholic institution and therefore may no longer be called Catholic. This will bring howls of outrage from professional dissidents who long ago ceased to believe what the Catholic Church believes about the usual controverted questions of the day, but faithful Catholics everywhere should be encouraged by the bold leadership of Bishop Olmsted. A hospital in which babies are murdered cannot be a Catholic hospital. A hospital in which men and women are sterilized is not a Catholic hospital. A hospital in which the irreformable teaching of the Catholic Church about the intrinsic dignity of human life is not respected is not a Catholic hospital, no matter how many nuns may be on the board of trustees. This is a massive problem in the United States, and examples of this sort of infidelity can be found in most of our dioceses. Let us hope that Bishop Olmsted's example will lead to other instances of bold leadership from our shepherds. The time for excuses and equivocations is past. It is time to take a stand.

What the Pope Did and Did Not Say About Condoms

Over at First Things, George Weigel explains what Benedict XVI did -- and more to the point -- did not say about condoms in his new book, Light of the World. As ever, the world press (once the Fourth Estate, now primarily the Fifth Column) misrepresented the pope's remarks in so tendentious a manner that it beggars belief for their reporting not to be deliberate deception. And whether or not the AP reporters and those who followed their lead knowingly lied about the pope's remarks, it remains true that their headlines and stories effectively turned Benedict XVI's entire point on its head. So, have a look at The Pope, the Church, and the Condom: Clarifying the State of the Question.

A Courageous Bishop

Thomas Olmsted is the Bishop of Phoenix, and since learning several months ago that an abortion was performed in a "Catholic" hospital in his diocese, he has been engaged in an effort to be certain that such a thing will never happen again. The hospital is owned by a congregation of women religious who evidently do not want the local bishop looking into the ways in which ethical decisions are made at the hospital. After a prolonged effort to reach an understanding, Bishop Olmsted has now informed them that if they do not accept the instructions he has already given, he will declare -- as it is his canonical power to do -- that the hospital in question is no longer a Catholic institution. You can read about the bishop's effort to call this hospital to account in USA Today.


BIshop Olmsted is a courageous reformer of the Church and is a model of how the office of overseer should be exercised. Pray for this good shepherd of Christ's flock.


UPDATE: A few more details from the backstory of this disgrace.

Doesn't Play Well With Others

Though most lay Catholics are unaware of it, the discipline of secular psychology has been a powerful force in almost every seminary and religious community in the Western Church since the early 1970's. During the naive enthusiasm of the years just after the Second Vatican Council, secular psychology was imported, usually uncritically, into the life the Church in her seminaries and religious communities, and we are still tallying the cost in vocations lost or destroyed and communities cut loose from their foundations.


I think of that today because the Church keeps the feast of St. Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church, who -- among the many accomplishments of his long life -- rendered the Holy Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. He was also famously (or, depending upon your point of view, infamously) cantankerous, and I suspect that in most seminaries today, such a man would be sent away because he doesn't play well with others.


I am not suggesting that we should make a point of ordaining men who have grave psychological illnesses, but the sort of direct and honest toughness which makes a man an outstanding soldier or corporate executive is badly needed in the priesthood today. The problem is that even now, men with such qualities are subjected in our seminaries to constant criticism and ceaseless efforts at re-education. Being "nice" is too often prized above being honest and taking initiative, and a man who will not submit to this sort of "sensitivity training" will quickly be shown to the door of the seminary. And then we wonder why so few priests will stand in the breach against the toxic waste dump of our degenerate culture.


St. Jerome, pray for us!

Time to Put Up or Shut Up

With whom are you in ecclesial communion?

Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC has been appointed by the Holy See to direct the implementation in the United States of Anglicanorum Coetibus. Any Anglican parish, association, religious community or other group which desires to be restored to full, visible communion with the Catholic Church should write to him immediately:

The Most Reverend Donald W. Wuerl

Archbishop of Washington

Post Office BOx 29260

Washington, DC 20017

It has been eleven months since Benedict XVI responded to the request from groups of Anglicans around the world for a way to come into full communion with the Catholic Church while at the same time preserving all of their Anglican patrimony that is in harmony with the Catholic Faith. So, you've had a year to think and pray and talk and argue and pray some more. Enough. The time for excuses, evasions, rationalizations, dithering, and delaying is over. It's time to become Catholic or decide once and for all that you are really Protestants with cassocks and surplices. You simply can't have it both ways. The choice is yours. With whom will you stand?

Lead, Kindly Light

Here's a splendid introduction to the life and work of John Henry Newman, who will be beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday 19 September during the pope's pastoral visit to Britain. My own journey to the Catholic Church almost thirty years ago was guided by this man's writing.

Baptist Bishops?

According to a report in the Boston Globe, increasing numbers of Baptist pastors -- particularly Black Baptists -- are retrieving the signs of the episcopate from the long-locked treasure chest of Church history and beginning to talk about the importance of the apostolic succession. So, just as Anglicans around the world are trashing the episcopate after 450 years of trying to preserve it, Baptists are dusting it off again. Curiouser and curiouser.

Weirder and Weirder, But It Makes Sense in a Twisted Anglican Way

From Damian Thompson in the Daily Telegraph

I thought this was a spoof at first, but it seems not: a General Synod working party is exploring whether the Church of England’s male bishops can join religious orders previously reserved for women. In other words, become Anglican nuns.
As usual, the Synod’s topsy-turvy ecclesiology is a mystery to me, but I gather that the idea is that bishops would be entitled to take vows in orders of nuns so that they can provide special episcopal oversight to the sisters. It’s a typically ingenious Anglican response to the forthcoming ordination of women bishops. “There will be jokes about bishops in wimples, but having bishop-nuns would introduce a degree of mutual cooperation that could make the introduction of women bishops much smoother,” says my Synod source.
And just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder, I learn the identity of the bishop who is rumoured to have volunteered to take nun’s vows: the Rt Rev Nick Baines, Bishop of Croydon, often spoken of as a successor to Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury. Says my informant: “Nick is a big fan of Sister Act, and we knew he was keen to ‘get ahead,’ as it were, so he was the obvious person to ask. And apparently he was delighted, because he’s all about challenging gender stereotypes.”