My Patronal Feast

Today, June 22, is the Feast of St. Thomas More, my patron saint, and St. John Fisher, the only English bishop martyred under Henry VIII, and there is much more to celebrate now than there was when I wrote my first blog entry on the subject in 2008.  That was more than a year before Anglicanorum coetibus.  The fault lines in the Anglican Communion were especially apparent at the time, and the evangelical response, the first GAFCON meeting, seemed to me well-intentioned but ultimately unworkable.

Speaking of the proposals floating among GAFCON participants, I concluded the article as follows:

There is another way, and I don't mean forming a separate Anglican entity. I mean returning home--to the Church that was and still is the one established by Christ and entrusted to his Apostles. And by  "the Church," I mean the Church that St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher gave their lives for. It will continue to happen, but not primarily, I think, on an institutional level--with the possible exception of parishes that might seek reconciliation with the Catholic Church through the Pastoral Provision. It will continue, I hope and pray, at the individual level.

How much has changed since then!  Now the Holy Father has, essentially, expanded the Pastoral Provision so that this reconciliation can also happen at an institutional as well as an individual level, and it is happening already in England and Wales, where the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham has been established and a whole new crop of priests were ordained recently.

As we await the establishment of our own American Ordinariate--in the fall, according to Cardinal Wuerl's announcement at the USCCB Spring General Assembly last week--let's ask the continued prayers of these two great English saints.

St. Thomas More & St. John Fisher,
Pray for us.