The Deacon's Bench

The Deacon's Bench

Going the other way: from Catholic to Anglican

posted by jmcgee | 6:36am Friday October 30, 2009

Here’s a curious tidbit from Maryland, about an Episcopal bishop who wants to remind people that the conversion door swings both ways:

Lost in talk of the splintering of the Anglican Communion, Bishop Eugene Taylor Sutton says, is the appeal that the 45,000-member Episcopal Diocese of Maryland has held for former Roman Catholics and others looking for a big-tent church. 

While attention focused on the conversion en masse last month of a Catonsville-based order of Episcopal nuns to the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland has received three former Roman Catholic clergy in the past couple of months, Sutton says. 

“We just want to remind people that this switching from Anglicans becoming Roman Catholics goes both ways,” Sutton said. “Many, many laypeople in our churches came from the Roman Catholic Church. We get many clergy.” 

 [snip] 

Sutton says the two churches enjoy good relations here. He says he consults with his counterparts at the archdiocese when a Catholic priest wants to join the Episcopal diocese, and vice-versa. 

“We actually get several inquiries a year,” he said. “We know we can call up the archbishop or [Auxiliary] Bishop [Denis J.] Madden and say, ‘Give us the lowdown on that person.’ Now, we have a few from our side who go there, and they’ll call on us. We don’t want to give each other bad apples.”

There’s much more at the Sun link.



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Mr Flapatap

posted October 30, 2009 at 2:19 pm


Fr. Cutie comes to mind. It also reminded me of a friend of mine, a priest, who was approached by an Episcopalian bishop who tried to convince him to switch with promises of marriage and family. His response included words not appropriate for a priest. What made me wonder about this is that they allow priests to marry whereas tradition dictates that it should be the other way around: allowing married men to become ordained.



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