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

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Fr Christopher Phillips: BDW – a Catholic claim to Anglican patrimony

Fr Christopher Phillips, a Pastoral Provision priest in the United States, first delivered this paper at the recent International Symposium: “Council and Continuity” which took place in Phoenix, Arizona. It contains some of his own observations about the place of The Book of Divine Worship as a foundational document in any future Ordinariate liturgy. It was published on the Anglo-Catholic.

The Book of Divine Worship is one of the results of the implementation of the Pastoral Provision of Blessed John Paul II, which he approved in 1980, and which opened the way for Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church while maintaining worthy elements of their Anglican heritage. In this brief presentation, we are looking particularly at the Book of Divine Worship as it contains many of those elements, and as part of the Church’s response to requests which had come from various corners of Anglicanism, but most especially from some Episcopal clergy in the United States...

Read the rest at The Ordinariate Portal.

Hat tip to Dr. William Tighe

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