Calgary Anglicans Move Closer to Rome

A year ago, Pope Benedict invited traditionalist Anglicans to return to the fold of Roman Catholicism. Calgary's St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church is the first parish in Canada to accept his offer.
 

The 70-member congregation held meetings for 10 months, conducted research, prayed, and discerned about the decision. A vote was held Nov. 21, with 90 per cent in favour of rejoining the Catholic Church.

"The pressures to leave have always been there within the Anglo-Catholic movement," said Father Lee Kenyon, pastor at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Parish.

"They were there when John Henry Newman converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism in the middle of the 19th century. There is a long history of Anglicans entering into full communion with the Catholic Church."

St. John the Evangelist opened its doors in 1905, with the church building opening in 1911. The church refers to itself as "Your Anglican (Anglo-Catholic) Parish."

"Essentially, St. John's and parishes like it have been trying to live out a Catholic life, a Catholic sacramental life, Catholic devotional life and a Catholic spiritual life. But they've been doing so without the full communion of Peter," said Kenyon, who is married with two children.

More conservative than most of Calgary's Anglican parishes, St. John's Anglo-Catholic parishioners were largely opposed to the increasingly liberal Anglican Church's recognition of same-sex blessings and other non-traditional practices.

"Most Anglo-Catholics within the Anglican Church of Canada actually left. They departed over the ordination of women and reforms in the liturgy. Certainly by the mid-1980s they were gone altogether," said Kenyon.

However, Kenyon said St. John the Evangelist Parish never sought to leave Anglicanism out of protest, and not out of anger or frustration over liberal reforms.

"Although those issues may have been the cause for people leaving the Anglican Church of Canada, it's very important to emphasize that they can never be the reasons in themselves for joining the Catholic Church," he said.

"Any Anglo-Catholic who has always had these goals in mind of corporate reunion cannot ignore the offer."

The pope extended the invitation, in a document known as Anglicanorum Coetibus, in November 2009. It allowed for Anglican converts to retain parts of their liturgy and traditions, including the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Kenyon hopes there will be mutual enrichment.

COLLINS OVERSEES

Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins will establish an Anglican ordinariate, aimed at helping convert Anglican priests and ordain them as Catholics. Kenyon hopes that by this time next year, the process will be complete.

Ownership of the red brick church building, constructed in 1911, has yet to be determined. Many of St. John the Evangelist parishioners have been attending church services there for more than 50 years and want to stay there.

"I am hoping that we can hold onto our building, but at the same time we are prepared to lose everything. What matters at the end of the day are the living stones and not the built stones," said Kenyon.

"What matters is the spiritual imperative to enter into the Catholic Church. Building and land are secondary."

COURT BATTLES

In November, a court ruled that four breakaway Anglican parishes in Vancouver continue to belong to the Anglican diocese. Other court battles are taking place across the country.

In England, five Anglican bishops recently announced that they want to be united with Rome.

The public and those Christians who know what this is about have been sympathetic, understanding, kind and considerate, said Kenyon. There have been no disputes with other Anglican clergy.

Advent: The Human Season

Advent is a season made for imperfect people, all of us, in other words, trying to maintain our balance as we scramble up the final slope of the shadow seamed mountain of the year. Advent's climb leads us to a view of the far reaches of the heavenly but in a profoundly human way. We pass through its weeks as we stroll by a succession of Christmas windows, surprised by images of ourselves superimposed on the displays, behold, as the angel of Christmas might say, this is what you really look like in everyday life.

Perhaps that is why the knowing liturgy allows us to view ourselves by candlelight so that we can gradually revise our self-images softened by its glow and be born again to a more homely, more human, and more livable understanding of ourselves.

These candles placed regularly along our climb toward the top of the year also embody the truth about the calling that transcends our occupations and professions. By their very nature, as we by ours, the candles let their substance be consumed by giving light, no matter how brief or flickering. These illuminations weave the weeks of Advent together by their symbolization of the Mystery of the Light of the World toward whose celebration they lead. 

These tapers, like the Christmas windows from which our avatars stare back at us, also illuminate how, as psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan expressed it, "we are much more simply human than anything else." We are called to give off the great human signal of the season to all the searching and the lonely in the growing winter darkness, come over here, there's plenty of room, we all belong to the same family. 

Advent is from the Latin that means "to come to," catching the period's significance as an ongoing journey, the being "in via," or "on the way," as our spiritual lives were described by ancient Christian writers. 

The word "Advent" is a plum pudding of meanings, for it signifies a "coming or arrival, especially of something awaited or momentous." We are aware of the biblical mystery of this long awaited coming but there are no feelings more familiar to men and women than those generated by our hellos and our goodbyes, by our longing for union and suffering separation, for our looking forward to comings or arrivals of all kinds, from graduations to weddings, to birthday parties and family reunions. 

Perhaps this wonder, that Advent underscores as it recognizes its utter humanity, is most powerfully experienced everyday before our eyes. As Joseph Campbell expressed it, "The latest version of Beauty and the Beast is taking place right now on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street." That is the Christmas-like wonder repeated when lovers find each other in the airport crowd as they first did, against all odds, in the great shouldering crowd of the world itself. 

If we travel far enough back in the origin of words we find a distant root of Advent in gwa that means "to come" but that is also linked to "welcome" and "guest." This archeological dig of words helps us grasp the many layers of the Advent Mystery and of how, in its illumination of our natures, it overflows with sacramental manifestations of what it means to be human. 

Advent allows us to rediscover not the sour version of a puritanical religion that is hard on humans but is one of living mystery and wonder. We feel this mystery in greater and lesser ways in all the comings and goings of this time of the year. We are all on the way to someplace else or are restlessly waiting for someone to come to us; we are suffused in the small mysteries of these defining human transactions that reveal the heart of our humanity. 

It also underscores all that is wondrous even in the more homely aspects of being human. We are always on journeys of one kind or another and the whole mystery of our destiny is repeated every time we leave home for work, take up an unfinished task, or dream about the future. There is nothing more human than our setting up camp only to break it at dawn and set off for another that seems filled with more promise or more challenge for us.

These all fit with Advent's pilgrimage that, as we reflect on it, puts us on a track that intersects with the Divine journey to the very same destination, to the "end," as Chesterton wrote, "of the wandering star," to becoming human that is the fathomless Mystery of Christmas.

[Eugene Cullen Kennedy is emeritus professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago.] 

Worry & Stress

"I'm learning it's what I do with my today that counts," said one group member. "I can make this a day to remember or a day to regret just by the kinds of thoughts I have about it.

"Let me explain what happened to make me realize this," he continued. "Two days ago, I woke up grumbling about my sorry lot in life. My divorce, my bills, and a recent argument with a close friend haunted me. Throughout the whole day I nursed my woes and convinced myself that this was just another rotten day. And do you know what? That's exactly what it turned out to be! Nothing went right. I even had a second argument with another friend who called to cheer me up.

"Yesterday, I overheard someone say that a person is made or unmade by what he thinks. I thought about this for a while and decided to try it out today. Instead of greeting the day with my usual, 'Good God, morning!' I consciously said, 'Good morning, God!' with the expectation that it would be a good day. And that's what it's been. I even called my two friends to apologize for my previous terrible mood, and I had a warm and friendly conversation with them both!"

TODAY I will lift up my thoughts. In expecting nothing but good to come to me, that is exactly what I will receive. 

Father Christmas?

 
Good day Church - a fitting photo of our Commander in Chief during this season of Advent.

That said, the topic of the "camauro's" (read Santa's Hat) brief return on December 23rd, 2005 made a cameo appearance in the freshly-released Light of the World.

Asked why the winter piece came out after nearly a half-century in abeyance, the Pope recalled that "I was just cold, and I happen to have a sensitive head. And I said, since the camauro is there, then let’s put it on."

Given the "stir" over what most of the press dubbed his "Santa hat," however, Benedict added that "I haven’t put it on again since. In order to forestall over-interpretation."

Message to Young Church from Vatican II: Re-visited

“Lastly, it is to you, young men and women of the world, that the Council wishes to address its final message. For it is you who are to receive the torch from the hands of your elders and to live in the world at the period of the most gigantic transformations ever realized in its history. It is you who, receiving the best of the example of the teaching of your parents and your teachers, are to form the society of tomorrow. You will either save yourselves or you will perish with it. 

For four years the Church has been working to rejuvenate her image in order to respond the better to the design of her Founder, the great Living One, the Christ who is eternally young. At the term of this imposing re-examination of life, she now turns to you. It is for you, youth, especially for you that the Church now comes through her council to enkindle your light, the light which illuminates the future, your future. The Church is anxious that this society that you are going to build up should respect the dignity, the liberty and the rights of individuals. These individuals are you. The Church is particularly anxious that this society should allow free expansion to her treasure ever ancient and ever new, namely faith, and that your souls may be able to bask freely in its helpful light. She has confidence that you will find such strength and such joy that you will not be tempted, as were some of your elders, to yield to the seductions of egoistic or hedonistic philosophies or to those of despair and annihilation, and that in the face of atheism, a phenomenon of lassitude and old age, you will know how to affirm your faith in life and in what gives meaning to life, that is to say, the certitude of the existence of a just and good God.

It is in the name of this God and of His Son, Jesus, that we exhort you to open your hearts to the dimensions of the world, to heed the appeal of your brothers, to place your youthful energies at their service. Fight against all egoism. Refuse to give free course to the instincts of violence and hatred which beget wars and all their train of miseries. Be generous, pure, respectful and sincere, and build in enthusiasm a better world than your elders had.

The Church looks to you with confidence and with love. Rich with a long past ever living in her, and marching on toward human perfection in time and the ultimate destinies of history and of life, the Church is the real youth of the world. She possesses what constitutes the strength and the charm of youth, that is to say the ability to rejoice with what is beginning, to give oneself unreservedly, to renew one's self and to set out again for new conquests. Look upon the Church and you will find in her the face of Christ, the genuine, humble and wise Hero, the prophet of truth and love, the companion and friend of youth. It is in the name of Christ that we salute you, that we exhort and bless you.”

--Pope Paul VI
Message to the Young Men and Women of the World
Closing of the Second Vatican Council
St Peter's Basilica
8 December 1965

Thought for the Day: Sharing Our Needs

Other people can't meet our needs if we don't tell them what our needs are.

We need tenderness and caring from our families and friends. We need their acceptance, understanding, and support. Sometimes we need their criticism and forgiveness.

Whatever our needs are, other people will probably be involved in getting them met. If we expect those close to us to read our minds and know exactly what we want without being told, we will probably be disappointed. Being honest and candid about our needs and feelings is an important goal of recovery. True, the other person may say no, but being able to make a reasonable request raises our self-esteem and opens the door to communication.

Today, I will take the risk of asking someone directly for something I want.

To Attract Youth Bishops Must Admit Vulnerabilities

The following is an article written by Jamie Manson of New York who is tackling the question of young people in the Catholic Church today. I must admit that she hits some points dead on and her point can easily be made for our own bishops here in Canada.

Manson writes:

"It’s not like we’re in a crisis; it’s not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives,” Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York declared during his acceptance speech following his stunning election as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 

The archbishop was thanking God for the work of his soon-to-be predecessor, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, whose strict opposition to health care reform -- because it might expand financing for abortion -- and gay marriage Dolan promised to uphold.

But just days later Dolan gave an interview to The New York Times admitting his concern that only half of young Catholics marry in the church and that weekly Mass attendance has dropped to about 35 percent -- down from its peak of 78 percent in the 1960s. 

He lamented that the throngs of people on Fifth Avenue are not waiting to get into New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but rather, the neighboring Abercrombie and Fitch store. 

“Wow,” Dolan sighed, “there’s no line of people waiting to get into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the treasure in there is of eternal value. What can I do to help our great people appreciate that tradition?”

I wonder how often the archbishop and his fellow hierarchs stop to ask what it is about the tradition that makes it great. What aspects of it would speak to the hearts of young adults?

Is it the continued shaming of gays and lesbians? Or is it the mandate to feed, clothe, shelter, and comfort the poor? 

Is it the legacy of fighting for a just wage and adequate health benefits for all laborers?

Is it the fixation on contraception (which has driven more than one couple away from the Pre-Cana process)? Or is it the life-giving, mystical tradition of meditation and prayer?

Is it the rigid, unjustifiable exclusion of women from ordained leadership? Or is it the sacramental tradition that says that all finite things in nature are capable of revealing transcendent, eternal meanings?

Archbishop Timothy Dolan

Does the archbishop really not recognize that church attendance was at its peak when the institution made its greatest effort to engage with spiritual needs and moral dilemmas of the modern world? Does he really not see the failing relationship between young adults and Catholicism as a crisis?

In the photo accompanying his interview Dolan dons his full cassock, seated in a well-appointed parlor of his residence located on the poshest stretch of Madison Avenue. 

Mahogany doors highlight the backdrop and a priceless Persian rug lines the floor. Dolan seems to be comfortable surrounded by many of the same the luxuries sought by many of those frantically shopping in the street below. 

For younger generations, image communicates everything. If they see a religious leader living a detached life on the elite East Side of Manhattan, where is the motivation for them to stop storing up treasures on Fifth Avenue and seek instead the treasures in Catholic doctrine?

Young Catholics’ knowledge of their faith may be waning, but their images of Jesus are likely clear and consistent. 

To them, Jesus was born in a stable and was probably poor for most of his adult life. He fed the hungry and healed the sick. He showed compassion to outcasts and asked us to love one another as God loves us. These are the ideals that young adults expect religious leaders to try to honor.

On their way to Abercrombie, most young Catholics surely passed dozens of homeless men and women -- many of them mentally ill or addicted -- huddled on sidewalks or napping in the corner of subway cars. Were these young folks to have seen Dolan stopping to chat with a panhandler or hand out sandwiches to someone resting on the sidewalk, he might have done the nearly impossible: he might have captured the undivided attention of young, frenzied shoppers. He also would have embodied one of the eternal treasures of the tradition. 

But young people trust the images they see. If the institutional church identifies itself regularly with being anti-gay, anti-woman, and anti-sex, how many young people will enter a cathedral expecting to have their questions and worries heard by a compassionate, humble minister? How many will feel genuinely welcome in the cathedral without the dread of feeling judged and shamed? 

The archbishop is right. There is nothing of eternal value in any retail store. But without spiritual leadership that is willing to engage them in their reality, where else should they turn for support? At least Abercrombie helps them feel better about themselves. Though it won’t last an eternity, looking good can offer a brief escape from the sufferings and worries that wrack our minds and hearts. 

Perhaps Dolan and the Abercrombie set have more in common than they realize. Both are mastering the art of avoiding reality. Dolan strives to create an image of a well-ordered, vigorous institution that masks its fears of losing power and influence. The Abercrombie kids strive to create an image of sexiness that covers up fears of being fragile, unlovable, and alienated. 

For the archbishop, Abercrombie symbolizes the death of young adults’ interest in the treasures of the church. For young adults, Abercrombie symbolizes the power of style and hipness that numb us from our existential anxieties of suffering, loss, and death. 

The season of Advent celebrates the risk that God took to engage human beings. We find hope in God’s strikingly vulnerable act of entering human flesh and experiencing life in all of its joy, sorrow, absurdity, and uncertainty. It is the time of year when we should try to emulate this divine act by engaging more deeply with other human beings in the hope that these encounters will help us to know God more fully. 

Instead we have a hierarchy that is too afraid of admitting its vulnerability as an ailing institution among the young, and we have young people too afraid of their vulnerability as finite human beings to be able to contemplate questions of an ultimate meaning. 

Church leaders who are unwilling to admit their own vulnerabilities cannot truly be present to the vulnerabilities of the young people they seek to guide. Young people will only listen to religious leaders who practice their own teachings and admit their own vulnerability, limitations, and sinfulness.

If the archbishop and the men he leads wish to have young people enter their cathedrals, they should take the risk of going into the streets and meeting them not as authoritarians but as humble servants. 

They should begin by admitting that they are in crisis and ask young Catholics what new initiatives are needed to breathe new life into expiring church institutions. 

Only then will the Archbishop have a chance to compete with Abercrombie. 

(Jamie L. Manson received her Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School where she studied Catholic theology and sexual ethics.)

Church Needs a Voice in the Media: Pope

Benedict XVI is underlining the need to give a voice to the Church in the realm of social communications and the media.

The Pope stated this yesterday upon receiving in audience the Filipino bishops who are in Rome for their five-yearly "ad limina" visit.

"A specific area in which the Church must always find its proper voice comes in the field of social communications and the media," the Pontiff stated.

He continued, "The task set before the whole Catholic community is to convey a hope-filled vision of faith and virtue so that Filipinos may find encouragement and guidance on their path to a full life in Christ."

"A unified and positive voice needs to be presented to the public in forms of media both old and new," the Holy Father urged, "so that the Gospel message may have an ever more powerful impact on the people of the nation."

"It is important that the Catholic laity proficient in social communications take their proper place in proposing the Christian message in a convincing and attractive way," he said.

"If the Gospel of Christ is to be a leaven in Filipino society, then the entire Catholic community must be attentive to the force of the truth proclaimed with love," Benedict XVI stated.

Witness

"The Church must always seek to find its proper voice," he affirmed, "because it is by proclamation that the Gospel brings about its life-changing fruits."

The Pope continued: "This voice expresses itself in the moral and spiritual witness of the lives of believers.

"It also expresses itself in the public witness offered by the bishops, as the Church's primary teachers, and by all who have a role in teaching the faith to others."

He added, "Thanks to the Gospel's clear presentation of the truth about God and man, generations of zealous Filipino clergymen, religious and laity have promoted an ever more just social order."

The Pontiff commended "the Church in the Philippines for seeking to play its part in support of human life from conception until natural death, and in defense of the integrity of marriage and the family."

"In these areas you are promoting truths about the human person and about society which arise not only from divine revelation but also from the natural law, an order which is accessible to human reason and thus provides a basis for dialogue and deeper discernment on the part of all people of good will," he affirmed.

The Holy Father particularly noted "with appreciation the Church's work to abolish the death penalty in your country."

Pope Makes An Appeal for the Church in China

Following his catechesis in yesterday's general audience, Benedict XVI made some remarks concerning the situation of the Church in China.

  "To your prayers", he told the faithful gathered in the Paul VI Hall, "and to those of Catholics all over the world, I entrust the Church in China which, as you know, is experiencing particularly difficult moments. Let us ask the Blessed Virgin Mary, Help of Christians, to support all Chinese bishops, who are so dear to me, that they may bear courageous witness to their faith, placing all their hope in the Saviour Whom we await. Let us also entrust to the Virgin all the Catholics of that beloved country so that, through her intercession, they may live a truly Christian existence in communion with the universal Church, thus also contributing to the harmony and common good of their noble people".

Mid-week Fervor

Good Morning Church - sorry for the slow posts but it has been a busy week and I am still nursing my wounds over the Riders' defeat on Sunday.

I have been pondering the latest in some scheduling mishaps and am realizing that our Church is changing far more quickly than even I can appreciate at times.

In trying to juggle the schedules of the 5 parishes I am becoming increasingly aware that I am fighting the flow more and more. I need to let go a little and remember that this is God's Church and I can only do what I can do when I can do it.

A senior pastor told me once, when I first started out, that he used to fear the days when his calendar was free because those would be the days that God would fill in his agenda. I get frightened when God is filling in my agenda when the schedule is already full. I am reminding myself to let go of my need to do everything and accept that there are still things I cannot change.

With that, here is an "I'm sorry, Church" for not always being at my best when it comes to scheduling.

As ever...more to follow.