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

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Attacks on traditional Anglicans prove pope's point

Thursday, Oct. 29 2009
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

The possibility that the Catholic Church's commitment to defending traditional
marriage and the tradition of an all-male priesthood stems from anything other
than bias, and that those Anglicans attracted by that commitment could be
anything other than narrow-minded, cold-hearted simpletons, never seems to have
occurred to many who pronounced publicly on this development. As in so many
other public debates over these hot-button issues, those making the most noise
about "tolerance" and "openness" proved themselves more eager to personally
attack their opponents as sexists and homophobes than to engage in substantive
debate.

There is nothing new about this dynamic, of course. In today's dictatorship of
relativism, such ad hominem attacks increasingly take the place of reasoned
argument. And the blowback can be vicious for anyone targeted by the
self-appointed tolerance police, whether it's a beauty queen who answers
honestly about her definition of marriage, a scientist who publicly objects to
experiments on human embryos or an Anglican attracted to the very Catholic
teachings on sex and marriage that our chattering classes so abhor...

Read the whole article in The St. Louis Dispatch.

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