From Huffington Post-
I may be a bit late in weighing in on the Roman Catholic attempt to poach Episcopal priests, but that's because I've been busy ministering to an Episcopal congregation that's quickly growing, largely thanks to all the disaffected Roman Catholics (we fondly call them "recovering Catholics") who keep showing up at my church. In the past three Sundays alone, they've increased the size of my congregation by nearly 15%. Of the rest, about 70% are former Roman Catholics, and my church is probably not unusual among Episcopal churches in these statistics.
Back when I had more time, though, I was a member of the Episcopal Diocese of New York's Episcopal-Roman Catholic Dialogue Committee, which met every couple months at the Roman Catholic Archdiocesan offices in New York City to discuss areas of "convergence" between our two traditions. I was also involved at that time with the American Friends of the Anglican Center in Rome, which is how I wound up in Rome in 2006 for the 40th Anniversary of the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue, a week-long affair involving the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the president of the Pontifical Council Promoting Christian Unity, and Pope Benedict.
That trip and those dialogues taught me two interesting lessons: first, that the clergy scene in Rome certainly seems very gay -- and, particularly once cocktail hour was well underway, fun. But more importantly, I realized that the relatively few Anglicans ("Episcopalians" in the U.S.) involved in these dialogues -- and thus the Anglicans that the Vatican probably comes into the most (perhaps sole) contact with -- seem to wish they were Roman Catholic.
Read more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-astrid-storm/memo-to-rome-some-of-us-l_b_334819.html
2 comments:
Let's do a little math. According to Ms. Astrid's (what is the proper form of address for a female priest?) website, her parish's Sunday attendance is 50-60 people. 15% of 60 is 9 people, and 70% of 9 is 6. So she has six new parishioners who are disaffected Roman Catholics. New Hamburg is in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. According to Wikipedia, the Archdiocese has about 2.5 million Catholics, which is more than the whole Episcopal Church USA (including its foreign subsidiaries). Or, to look at it another way, if the entire Episcopal Church converted tomorrow, the world-wide Roman Catholic Church would increase by less than 0.2%. Although pastorally the loss of even a single soul is a matter of concern, We aren't worried just yet.
The whole Anglican/RCC saga has played out a variety of ways over the past few days. Happiness, bitterness, acceptance, rejection. . .such a plethora of emotion in such a short time.
For my part, I view this situation as rather disturbing. As a keen observer of the Vatican, I find Benedict's move clear evidence that he intends to "up the ecumenical ante" so to speak.
There is no question that he, as the Bishop of Rome, seeks to unite all of Christendom beneath his ring. And there is no question that he is progressing along quite nicely. The difference now is that he is demonstrating a willingness to make drastic and even unprecedented offers in order to draw in as many disaffected "religious people" as he possibly can.
Anyway, I could go on for hours about this. Check out my blog when you get the chance, www.thevaticanlobby.blogspot.com. I update it all the time with open source intel on the Vatican's various political and religious power moves.
Rome makes no attempt to keep her ambition for world "evangelization" (read, "subjugation") a secret. I tend to take her at her word.
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