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....

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • TEC Conflicts • TEC Conflicts: South Carolina • TEC Polity & Canons • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology

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