Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• All Saints of Russia and other respective countries. As a beautiful fruit of the sowing of thy salvation, the land of Russia offers to thee, O Lord, all the saints that have shone in it. By their prayers keep the church and our land in deep peace, through the Mother of God, O most merciful One. Again on venerating the other side’s saints.
• The devotion to the Sacred Heart, which in its symbolical meaning and as representing the love and tenderness of the Saviour towards His children, had found its way into the hymns and prayers of almost every private form of devotion, and commends itself to the more enthusiastic of every communion, as the most touching of all those exercises of piety which cluster around the suffering life of Jesus ... The Heart of Christ, whether to Puritan devotee, to the member of the High Church in England, or to those who had outwardly separated themselves from the communion of both, was the temple of a common worship — the home of common love. From The Devotion of the Sacred Heart, the Religious Tract Society, London, probably printed around 1876, pp. 8-9.
• Jeffrey Steel: It was my decision that it was not about me building my own church. It was not about a party within a church. The Church is the Church of Christ, his body. Everything in my mind with regards to ecclesiology came to see that I had to personally do all to avoid any sort of attachment that would obstruct communio. I was not lying but seeking the prayer for unity of Jesus. BTW until only a few months ago I didn’t know he was American or that his time in Anglo-Catholicism was so relatively short. Understandably I thought he was an English Anglo-Papalist. As an Anglo-Catholic, I sincerely bought into the ecclesial idea of the Catholic structure of a priest in union with his local bishop. That is very important in Catholic ecclesiology and there is a bit of an issue that I began questioning with regards to my not being in communion with the diocesan but a provisional one due to issues of sacramental priesthood. At the start, this structure brings up many Catholic questions about ecclesiology but I saw the necessity of it due to difficult circumstances in a broad church. So, I embraced the ecclesial oddity.
• He did it (he’s guilty), I understand the logic and rules (if a bishop acts as one in a church you’re out of communion with, he’s out — the Catholic churches say the same) and the diocese’s new arrangements in the long run are as untenable as the old ones. That said, Bishop MacBurney, one of his former church’s last Catholic diocesans, ought to frame this and put it on his wall.
• Bishop Fellay speaks.