Sunday

• Lead, kindly light. Feast day: Oct. 9.
• Deborah Gyapong writes here: Bishop Robert Mercer, the retired bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, and Bishop David Moyer of the Anglican Church in America are present as guests of the Holy See in Birmingham, a sign of the unity to come. These are not Anglican bishops but in TAC, a denomination interested in the ordinariates. (Make the rounds confirming all and vetting, training when needed and ordaining clergy, and maybe even keep existing congregations together with their priests: National Parishes With Clout™, Pope Benedict’s new battalion on the R² front.)
• Fulton Sheen: Keep your eyes on the crucifix; for Jesus Christ without the cross is a man without a mission, and the cross without Jesus is a burden without a reliever. From here.
• Hell and God’s love according to St Isaac the Syrian.
• Intercommunion or no, another RC/Orthodox bunfight. Sacramentally they’re the same but the similarity of a one-true-church claim means no at least on paper. (Among the Syrian laity, you bet.) Like Archimandrite Anastassy I obey the rule.
• On that note, well-meaning ACNA/Reformed Episcopal Bishop Sutton doesn’t get it: If we were attempting to merge our jurisdictions it might be a different matter, but this is not the goal of our ecumenical conversations. We are seeking Eucharistic inter-communion. Newman got it. You don’t enter altar and pulpit fellowship with a Catholic church like with a denomination; you join it. But of course the REC was founded to protest such thinking.
• Some of what Newman left behind. I don’t agree with Fr Bob Hart but I don’t hate him. I respect him: a principled theology that’s not Roman Catholic, old high-church. (I see something clever but man-made, which is how he sees Rome; fair enough.) And he has no time for convertodox.
• In Greek Catholic churches the problem of imitating the Novus Ordo goes on. An example from Romania.
• A reminder: much of the RCC in Britain and Ireland is now immigrant Polish. An Irish reader once commented that they eventually go home.
• Benediction at Hyde Park: Hilary’s play-by-play.
• Fr L’s self-righteousness test: if you think someone is self-righteous, accuse him of it. If he says he is, he’s not. If he says he’s not, he is.

Labels: Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, England, humour, the Catholic faith