The first principle of the Ordinariate is then about Christian unity. St. Basil the Great, the Church’s greatest ecumenist, literally expended his life on the work of building bridges between orthodox brethren who shared a common faith, but who had become separated from one another in a Church badly fragmented by heresy and controversy. He taught that the work of Christian unity requires deliberate and ceaseless effort...St. Basil often talked with yearning about the archaia agape, the ancient love of the apostolic community, so rarely seen in the Church of his day. This love, he taught, is a visible sign that the Holy Spirit is indeed present and active, and it is absolutely essential for the health of the Church.

- Msgr. Jeffrey Steenson, Homily on the Occasion of his Formal Institution as Ordinary

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Fr. Hawks Answers the Archbishop of Canterbury's Vision of Ecumenism ... in 1935

In 1908, several of the members of an American Anglican order of priests known as the Congregation of the Comanions of the Holy Saviour (C.S.S.S.) made their corporate submission to the Holy See after the General Convention of the Episcopal Church approved Open Pulpit Canon, which allowed ministers of Protestant denominations to preach in Episcopal parishes. In what today seems an innocuous ecumenical gesture, they saw a provision that they believed would be the beginning of the end of their particular vision of catholic Anglicanism...

Read the rest, including a very interesting link on other Anglican Religious communities that entered the Catholic Church, on Brother Stephen's blog Sub Tuum
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