ANGLICANS in the United States who wish to enter the Ordinariate have held a gathering under the banner “Becoming One”.
Delegates included members of “Anglican Use” parishes, the first of which were formed 30 years ago, members of the Anglican Church in America (ACA), religious communities, and individual Anglo-Catholic parishes.
Nearly 100 clergy attended the event in Texas.
Fr Christopher Phillips, the Pastor of Our Lady of the Atonement Anglican Use Catholic Church, which called the gathering, said: “The Pope wants Anglicans, not acronyms. TAC, FIF, ACA, ACNA, AU. . . Anglicanorum Coetibus envisions none of those things continuing within an Ordinariate.
“With the implementation of the Holy Father’s Apostolic Constitution, they will have served their purpose, and as necessary as they were to get us here, they will be needed no more.
“I have thought for a long time that we, in this country, are perhaps more ready than any other. We have sizeable parishes already in full communion with the Holy See.”
Fr Phillips called for a time of prayerful waiting for those wanting to enter the Ordinariate, to allow them to pray and study, and spiritually and practically prepare for their new future.
In Canada, the people of St John’s, Calgary, are preparing for a parish vote to ratify the unanimous decision by the members of the vestry to seek entrance to the Ordinariate when it is established.
In Orlando, Florida, another gathering of Episcopalians and Anglicans, the Communion Partners conference, sought to renew the vision of the Episcopal Church. An official statement said that the conference was “designed to encourage bishops, clergy, lay women and men, and congregations to network in mission with one another and with members of the Anglican worldwide”.
The Partners describe themselves as a “fellowship of bishops, clergy and laity from The Episcopal Church who are committed to biblical orthodoxy, traditional Christian practice and the Anglican Communion”.
The Rt Revd Anthony Burton, the former Bishop of Saskatchewan in the Anglican Church of Canada, and now Rector of the Church of the Incarnation in the Episcopal Church’s diocese of Dallas, spoke of the need of American Episcopalians to develop “moral clarity” about why they have remained Episcopalian, and to get beyond the standard justification that “all the alternatives are worse”.