Former dean of Advent Cathedral in Birmingham and ex-rector of nation's largest Episcopal church jumps to Catholic Church

November 29, 2012
By Greg Garrison

The Rev. Larry Gipson, who was dean of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham from 1982-94 and rector at the largest Episcopal church in the nation from 1994-2008, has become a Roman Catholic.

Gipson retired in 2008 from the 8,000-member St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, where his parishioners included former President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara.

Last month, Gipson was accepted as a Catholic into the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a structure set up by Pope Benedict XVI to accept former Anglicans into the Catholic Church.

"The nature of authority in the Catholic Church is what attracted me to it," Gipson said in a telephone interview from his home in Houston. "After I retired, I was concerned and had been for many years about the Episcopal Church's authority structure."

Gipson will be among 69 candidates for Catholic priesthood attending a Formation Retreat this weekend in Houston, where the headquarters for the Ordinariate is based.

Among those leading seminars at the Formation Retreat in Houston will be the Rev. Jon Chalmers, who was ordained a Catholic priest in June, the second former Episcopal priest to be accepted as a priest under the Ordinariate. Chalmers served as curate, associate priest and interim rector at Canterbury Chapel in Tuscaloosa from 2007-2009.

His wife, Margaret Chalmers, former canon lawyer for the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham and now chancellor of the Ordinariate, will also be a presenter at the weekend retreat that runs Friday night through Sunday, Dec. 2...

Read the whole story in The Birmingham News.

Hat tip to Jack Grimes via Facebook