Bishop takes Anglican road to Rome

The title is directly lifted from the Times article by Ruth Gledhill. If I'm not careful my blog could simply become an homage to her - just looking at how thus far reading her work has been like a muse to me in so many bloggings... Well enough now with the brown nosing, thanks Ruth, onto the meat of the issue.

Well after reading this delightful piece on Bishop Jeffrey Steenson (see here for earlier post) we get some insight into his choice to swim the Tiber as it were and go to Rome.

For instance it confirms my earlier suspicion and blogging about the possibility that he'd become a Catholic cleric. (see Aha! about why there might not be much hinderance and he may have valid orders already)

He hopes to be ordained into the Catholic priesthood, a path to which his family need be no encumbrance, as witnessed by the dozen or more happily married former Anglican clergy now serving the Catholic Church after the Church of England voted to ordain women priests in 1992.

I didn't realize as a part of his spiritual journey that he started off in another Protestant denomination, and it was at the insistence of a catholic religious that he become and Episcopal clerk.

He has travelled far since his childhood in a Lutheran Free Church. He had never heard of The Episcopal Church until a Catholic nun from a French-Canadian order who was advising him suggested that he exercise his priestly vocation there. He went on to train at Harvard, and then did his DPhil at Christ Church, Oxford, studying the works of scholars such as Henry Chadwick.

Does it sound familiar? It should, it's a parallel path that our own Fr. Dwight Longenecker took.

The article even mentioned our neighbors to the south in Savannah, Ga. at Christ Church

The latest parish to defect into the care of the province of Uganda is one of Georgia’s oldest churches, Christ Church in Savannah, established 50 years before The Episcopal Church, in 1733, and the church where Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, was rector. The irony of this is not lost on commentators.

And no, the irony surely isn't lost...

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