A New Bridge Across the Tiber

From Crisis Magazine

By Father Dwight Longenecker

The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham has now been established in England. By Easter this year, three bishops, sixty priests, and nearly one thousand lay people had left the Church of England to be received into the Catholic Church. Archbishop Donald Wuerl is working with interested parties to establish the ordinariate in the United States, and progress is being made in Canada and Australia for ordinariates to be erected there later this year.

What will be the future of this new ordinariate? It could be that it will simply bring into full communion with the Catholic Church a small number of conservative Anglo-Catholics. They were an eccentric church within a church in the Anglican Communion, and some predict that they will continue to be an eccentric church within the Catholic Church. Around the world, there will be small groups of traditionalist Anglicans who will differ from all the other tiny Anglican schismatic churches, in that they will actually be in full communion with Rome. They will keep to themselves and be viewed by mainstream Catholics as an eccentric rump of dissident Anglicans who like incense and lace, old-fashioned language and splendid old hymns, who somehow managed to worm their way into the Catholic Church. They will be regarded with bemusement and some bewilderment. Anglicans will shake their heads and wish them well and wonder why they didn’t become “proper Catholics” if they wanted to swim the Tiber. Eventually, the theory goes, they will die out. Their descendants will be absorbed into the mainstream of the Catholic Church, and the whole thing will be a footnote in the history of ecumenism.

A second possibility is that the Anglican Church herself will eventually disintegrate or morph into something unrecognizably Anglican, and the ordinariate will be all that is left of historic Anglicanism. In this scenario, an increasing number of Anglicans worldwide will see that, if they want to be historic Christians within the Anglican tradition, the only place to do that will be within the ordinariate, and they will flee the sinking ship of Anglicanism to join it.

This is almost certainly not going to happen, for several reasons: First of all, the Evangelical Anglicans are Protestants. After they have made the polite ecumenical noises, they do not really understand or appreciate the Catholic Faith. Secondly, many Anglo-Catholics also do not really want to be Catholic: They want to be Anglican. They honestly do not see the importance of being in full visible communion with the Catholic Church. They have serious misgivings about some of the Catholic dogmas, and they continue to believe that they are “Catholic within the Anglican Church.” Thirdly, the liberal wing of the Anglican church certainly has no wish to be in full communion with Rome. They dislike Roman authority, dogma, and moral teachings and are increasingly anti-Catholic.

However, there is a third way. The ordinariate could develop in a very different and exciting direction. The way to understand this more dynamic possibility is to see the ordinariate as a new bridge across the Tiber for a whole range of Protestant Christians. Already, conservative, liturgically minded Lutherans are asking why there isn’t a Lutheran ordinariate, while some of them point to the formal intercommunion that already exists between Lutherans and Anglicans and argue that the Anglican ordinariate should naturally be open to Lutherans as well. 

Attorney's Explosive Claim, Obama Changed Name in 1982

"The only people who don't want to disclose the truth, are people with something to hide."

Barack Hussein Obama

The Ecclesium Choir - 'O God the King of Glory' - Philip Stopford

This beautiful composition was written by Philip Stopford and is the Collect for the Sunday after Ascension Thursday.  It is performed here by Ecclesium in Saint Anne's Cathedral, Belfast.

"Catholicism" Documentary to Premiere on Public Television Nationwide

We have posted previously about the epic, multi-part documentary, Catholicism, that is being produced by Father Robert Barron. Now WTTW, Chicago's premier public television station, has announced that it will premiere and distribute four episodes of Catholicism in Ocober 2011 to public television stations nationwide.

This lavish documentary, considered by those who have seen it as the greatest media project in the history of the Church, illustrates the history and treasures of a global religion shared by more than one billion people around the world. The series is filmed in stunning high-definition and spans more than 50 locations in 15 countries. 

Here is an excerpt from Episode 1:

And the following presents an excerpt from episode 6:



Father Robert Barron, the Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture at Mundelein Seminary and a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, is the creator and host of the series. The executive producer is acclaimed filmmaker Mike Leonard, a veteran correspondent for NBC’s Today Show and producer of the popular public television series Ride of Our Lives. Together, Fr. Barron and Leonard spent two years traveling the world with a crew of seasoned network television producers. 

Poland Remembers Cardinal Wyszyński on the 30th Anniversary of His Death

 "The Primate of the Millenium"

From Polskie Radio

He died on 28 May 1981 at the age of seventy nine. A mass for his beatification will be celebrated in St John’s Cathedral in Warsaw at noon on Saturday by the Papal Nuncio Archbishop Celestino Migliore. Cardinal Jozef Glemp, who succeeded Stefan Wyszyński as Primate, now in retirement, will take part in the anniversary celebrations in the Black Madonna shrine of Czestochowa.

Cardinal Wyszyński was at the helm of the Catholic Church in Poland as Primate for over three decades. During the communist repression against the Church, he addressed the authorities with a letter entitled ‘Non possumus’ (We cannot go any further), in which he, together with other bishops, refused any further concessions to communists.

This act of defiance led to the arrest of Cardinal Wyszyński in September 1953. He remained in internment until the autumn of 1956.

One of the Cardinal’s major achievements was the nationwide celebration of Poland’s Millennium of Christianity in 1966. His triumph came in 1978, with the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II.

In a message to his countrymen, the newly-elected Pope referred to Cardinal Wyszyński saying: “There would be no Polish Pope on this Chair of St. Peter [...] if it was not for your faith undiminished by prison and suffering, and your heroic hope.”

During the Solidarity revolution in 1980-81, Cardinal Wyszyński appealed to both sides, the communist authorities and the striking workers, for a sense of responsibility. 

The funeral of Cardinal Wyszyński in 1981 was attended by some half a million people. Three days before his death, he had a telephone conversation with Pope John Paul II, who was undergoing hospital treatment after the assassination attempt on his life. Ten years ago, the Polish Parliament declared 2001 the Year of Cardinal Wyszyński, describing him as a great Pole, religious leader and statesman.

Pat Buchanan: 'Obama in a Dream World'

By Patrick J. Buchanan

At the G-8 summit in Deauville, France, the news was dramatic, delivered by Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Barack Obama.

To sustain the Arab Spring, America, Europe and Japan will provide $40 billion in fresh foreign aid for Arab nations that take the democratic path.

The $40 billion breaks down thus: $10 billion from the G-8, $10 billion from the Gulf Arabs, and $20 billion from the World Bank and the international development banks.

Now, as Gulf petrodollars come from U.S. consumers of gas and oil, and we are to be the largest contributor of direct aid, and we are the largest contributor to the World Bank and the development banks, U.S. taxpayers have just been put on the hook for untold billions.

George Weigel Responds to Catholic Academics Who Criticized John Boehner

Reactionary Liberalism and Catholic Social Doctrine 

From First Things

By George Weigel

The debate over Catholic social doctrine and U.S. social welfare policy took an unhelpful turn in May when a gaggle of academics fired a shot across the bow of House Speaker John Boehner, prior to his commencement address at the Catholic University of America. Their charge? That Boehner’s House voting record showed him to be a man who fails “to recognize (whether out of a lack of awareness or dissent) important aspects of Catholic teaching.” Why? Because he had not supported legislation that, in the professors’ view, addressed “the desperate needs of the poor.”

Speaker Boehner, a Catholic with a solid pro-life voting record, is a big boy who can defend his votes on various issues. What bothered me about the open letter to Boehner was its tone (smarmy), its assumptions about the one-to-one correspondence between the principles of Catholic social doctrine and the policy preferences of the Democratic Party, and its suggestion that anyone who challenges that linkage is in “dissent” from settled Catholic teaching.

The 2012 election seems likely to be defined by a major national debate on the welfare state, government spending, and social responsibility. If libertarian minimalism of the sort espoused by Ron Paul sits poorly with the rich and complex tradition of Catholic social doctrine, so does reactionary liberalism of the sort espoused by the anti-Boehner pedagogues. So perhaps a review of the basics is in order, to put the forthcoming argument on a more secure footing.