Keynote Address at "Becoming One" Conference in Kansas City

The Keynote Address by Bishop David Moyer of the Anglican Church in America's Patrimony of the Primate has been posted on the Anglo-Catholic blog. The "money quote" for me was the following:

For me, as someone who has the Anglican patrimony deep within my very bones, I rejoice that it can be now be safeguarded and nurtured for my children and my children’s children.

Without our accession to the role of Peter’s leadership and primacy (which is very biblical), there is the assurance for the survival and growth of what we hold dear. I truly believe that outside of arms of the Catholic Church, the Anglican patrimony will simply be a chapter in books of Church history.

And beyond this is the gift of the affirmation of the integrity of “all we do and are, all we done and have been” as Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P. stated it in his sermon at Fr. Andrew Burnham’s first mass as a Catholic priest in Oxford on January 16th. Fr. Nichols stated that day: “In the Eucharistic sacrifice, we bring ourselves – all we do and are, all we have done and have been – to be, through purification and transformation, united with the Lamb, Jesus Christ, in his self-offering to the Father. All we did and do, all we have been and are, our life and labour, we should put (as the spiritual writers advise) onto the paten, into the chalice… What is said of the life and labour of any Christian is said with special force of the apostolic life and labour of an ordained person. ‘What we did and do, what we have been and are’: all Andrew’s former ministerial activity, inevitably, is signaled in these words and so it is now taken up into union with the Lamb’s oblation of himself, taken up in a new way as the sacrificial offering of a Catholic priest in the full, unclouded, indisputable, sense of those words.”

For you and me, whether we be ordained or not, it is the giving of “what we did and do, what we have been and are” into the hands of God for our good and for the common good of the Catholic Church of which Jesus is Head and the Successor of Peter Its Vicar. It is the placing of ourselves within the Catholic Church where Christian teaching, faith, and order have a firm foundation; where through the Magisterium clear guidance is found for moral and ethical issues that confuse and confound the world, without which people wander into darkness and/or slain by it.

Visit the Anglo-Catholic blog to read this fine address in full.