I am the Senior Warden of the Cathedral of the Incarnation (Orlando, FL) and a member of the Standing Committee of the Anglican Church in America’s Diocese of the Eastern United States.  The ACA is the American province of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC).

I enter the world of blogging only reluctantly.  Though I have followed the Anglo-Catholic and traditionalist Roman Catholic blogosphere closely for a number of years, my participation has always been limited to that of a spectator.  A lay leader in my Anglican parish and diocese, it has been helpful to keep abreast both of developments in sister jurisdictions of the so-called “Continuing Church” and ecumenical developments with other Catholic groups — but I have always been wary of entering the fray.  The pitched battles waged in the comment boxes of weblogs rarely prove productive.  The unhappy divisions in the Anglican Continuum have made for a digital minefield that has hardly seemed worth treading, and, as an Anglican, I have generally felt it presumptuous to publicly comment on Roman Catholic sites.  Moreover, my leadership role in the Church requires a certain discretion and, until now, there has never been a reason for me to complicate matters by mounting an online soapbox.

In October of 2007, the House of Bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion petitioned the Holy See for a provision which would allow the TAC — corporately — to enter full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.  Similar appeals were made by other Anglican groups, most notably Forward in Faith UK.

On November 9, 2009, the Holy Father answered the prayers of generations of Anglican Catholics with the publication of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus which provides for canonical structures allowing Anglican groups to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony.

While the response to the Holy Father’s most generous provision has been overwhelmingly positive in Anglo-Catholic circles in the UK, in the United States, where a distinctively anti-papalist brand of churchmanship developed (though one evidently unconcerned with aping virtually every aspect of Roman ritual and ceremonial), the response of many Anglican groups and personalities has been skeptical and even hostile.  Nowhere has there been more negativity — indeed lies and plain bigotry — than among the leaders and online personalities of the ACA’s sister jurisdictions in the Anglican Continuum.  These self-appointed experts in canon law, sacramental theology, and history purport to speak for a genuine, “classical” Anglicanism.  I have started this blog because the divisive, hateful rhetoric of many “Continuing Anglicans” does not speak for me — nor does it represent the views of a great many churchmen in the ACA.  This is a moment for which we have prayed and sacrificed.

The provision made by our Holy Father in the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus is the greatest development in the life of the Anglican Church since the Reformation.  After witnessing the implosion of the official structures of the Anglican Communion and struggling to maintain the Faith in the fractured and dwindling realm of the Anglican Continuum, once despondent Anglo-Catholics now look with hope to a future in which the Anglican Patrimony will live on, with renewed vigor, in communion with the Successor of St. Peter.

As the Bishop of Ebbsfleet put it at the recent FiF UK National Assembly:

“We are Western Christians, Catholics of the Latin Rite separated from the Holy See. We are invited together in a kenotic, self-emptying way, without denying who we are, and what we have been, to re-enter the fullness of unity severed by act of state five hundred years ago.”

Through this blog, I hope to give a voice to many American Anglo-Catholics — within and without the ACA — who are working and praying for the unity of Christ’s Church.  The opinions expressed will be my own.  I do not purport to speak for the Cathedral Chapter or the Diocesan Standing Committee — but I certainly hope to offer the unique perspectives of a Continuing Anglican parish and diocese as each, by the grace of God, finds safety in the Barque of Peter.  Along the way, I will offer my insights on matters of Anglican Patrimony and the life of the Catholic Church.

I place this blog under the patronage of St. Mary the Virgin, the holy Mother of God, along with SS. Thomas Becket, Thomas More, and John Fisher.