RIP: Fr. Conrad Kimbrough

During those three decades in Wisconsin, Father Kimbrough mastered the art of drawing back the veil between God and man through the celebration of the sacred liturgy, the preaching of the Gospel, and the guidance of the lost. Father Kimbrough was heir to the renovation of Anglicanism initiated by the 19th century Oxford Movement, led by the brilliant English scholar and Anglican priest Blessed John Henry Newman, but like Newman, who later left the Church of England and became a Catholic priest, Conrad Kimbrough was increasingly beset by doubts about the reality of the ancient Church, of Catholic faith and order, in a Christian community formed by schism during the 16th century Protestant Reformation...

Father Kimbrough’s Catholic friends introduced him to the foreign cardinal, with whom he had a conversation about Anglicanism and his doubts, and Father Kimbrough was delighted that this Catholic bishop from a far country knew so much about Anglicanism and was so sympathetic to his situation. Although he could not receive Holy Communion at the cardinal’s Mass, Father Kimbrough stayed until the end, and to avoid being in anyone’s way, he sat high up on the last bleacher of the gymnasium. As the procession passed by far beneath on the gym floor, the visiting cardinal stopped and gestured for Father Kimbrough to come down. He was deeply moved and ever after said that he felt like sinful Zacchaeus being called down from the sycamore tree. He knelt down to receive the cardinal’s blessing, and that very night Conrad Kimbrough decided to be received into the Catholic Church. Less than one year later, the entire world was introduced to that same cardinal from a far country as Pope John Paul II...

Bishop Michael Begley of Charlotte received Father Kimbrough with great generosity and respect for his twenty-five years of service as an Anglican minister, and on 11 February 1978, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, Conrad Kimbrough was ordained to the priesthood of Jesus Christ. He was 50 years old and just beginning the work of his life in the Catholic Church...

Read the entire post on the blog of Fr. Scott Newman Ecclesia Semper Reformanda.