“Becoming One” Gathering

November 17, 2010

Session III: “Just Around the Corner: the Good, the Bad and the Beautiful”

The Rev. Eric L. Bergman, Chaplain

St. Thomas More Society, Scranton, PA,

offered at

Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church

San Antonio, TX

            I’d like to begin with a prayer composed by Bishop Peter Elliot, which I have printed on the back of the prayer card I distributed on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of my reconciliation to Holy Mother Church:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen

Eternal Father, we place before you the project of forming the Personal Ordinariates for Anglicans seeking full communion with the Catholic Church.  We thank you for this initiative of Pope Benedict XVI, and we ask that, through the Holy Spirit, the Ordinariates may become families of charity, peace, and the service of the poor, centers for Christian unity and reconciliation, communities that welcome and evangelize, teaching the Faith in all its fullness, celebrating the liturgy and sacraments with prayerful reverence and maintaining a distinctive patrimony of Christian faith and culture.

This we ask through Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

First, let me thank Fr. Phillips for inviting me to address this gathering.  He and Fr. Hawkins, with whom I’ll share the lectern today, have been mentors to me these past six years, helping to harness my youthful enthusiasm, while supporting me in my progress toward ordination.  They have both demonstrated that support by coming to Scranton to encourage the St. Thomas More Society, attending the Anglican Use Conferences we hosted there in 2005 and 2006.  Fr. James Moore, one of the founding pastors of Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston, Texas, who addressed you earlier today, has also been a gift to me.  He was the first to take up a collection from his parish when news of our proposed entry into the Church became public back in January of 2005.  These men are three pillars of the Anglican Use movement, and for them I am grateful.

Fr. Phillips asked me to talk about the joys and challenges of being in the Church, and I must confess that this is the principle joy that I have discovered: from the Pope on down I have come to know shepherds who love their flocks.  I am overwhelmed by the quality of the clergy I have encountered, and I attribute this quality to four principle factors.  First, the clergy of the Catholic Church, by and large, are faithful.  Because they believe, we know what to expect from them, when, for example, we sit to hear them deliver a homily.  Second, they are men of true humility, whose low salaries attest to the reality that they have dedicated their lives not to careerism but to serving those entrusted to their care.  This leads to the third trait that has impressed me: their generosity.  The St. Thomas More Society has been sustained since our inception because the spirit of sacrifice modeled by the clergy, commended by the hierarchy, and followed by the laity. In just the first two years of our existence we received $30,000 that we had not budgeted or expected from the likes of Fr. Phillips and parishioners who followed his example.  And finally, we have in the Catholic Church priests who truly love us, men who live Mark 10:45, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many”.  Never since my entry into the Church have I been left hung out to dry – in all of our necessities we have had priests willing to make sacrifices for me and my flock, simply because of their great love for Jesus and His Church.

I have found that the observation made by Oscar Wilde well over a century ago is spot on, that fidelity to the truth and genuine love are the means to advancement in the Catholic Church, where in Anglicanism such traits actually hindered advancement.  We know that Oscar Wilde at the end of his life put his money where his mouth was and became a Catholic on his deathbed, so we can claim him as the Catholic genius he was. 

Within the context of the great quality of the clergy I will give you my first piece of advice – God desires to appoint for you an advocate: let Him.  Your advocate from the ranks of the Catholic clergy is your corporeal reminder that you are not alone.  This great truth of Catholicism, that for every spiritual truth there exists a corporeal manifestation – this will serve you well when you take up God’s offer to have a priest advocate on your behalf.

            Msgr. Bill Feldcamp, the Pastor of St. Paul Parish in Scranton, was my advocate, and he deserves the attention that I receive.  While we had to prove ourselves to him and demonstrate our dedication to the mission we had articulated, since we have he has defended us from our detractors, interceded with the chancery of the Diocese of Scranton, advocated for the importance of our ministry, trusted us enough to give us freedom to serve, and in short welcomed us into the Church when some of the Catholic laity were less than welcoming.   He even administered the Sacrament of the Sick to one of our group when she was unexpectedly stricken during the period of our catechesis.  He was our sacramental ministry as we made the transition from Anglicanism to Catholicism, and many of our parishioners made their first confession to him at the parish church where he had given us shelter after we left the Episcopal Church.  The Lord has appointed a Msgr. Feldcamp for you - please use those of us who have made the journey as a resource and advocate, because I can tell you that you will need help.

            This is a segue to the challenges and the false ideas that we had to answer, and that, for the most part, we let Msgr. Feldcamp answer for us.  I was asked this morning by one of our brothers if he should take notes, and the answer is, “Yes”.  Take notes, because I can assure you that you will at some point encounter the fallacies I will now describe.

            Falsehood number 1: Unity requires uniformity.  Cardinal Levada answered this one for us when he made the announcement in October of 2009 that the Apostolic Constitution was coming.  He said:

“It is the hope of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, that the Anglican clergy and faithful who desire union with the Catholic Church will find in this canonical structure the opportunity to preserve those Anglican traditions precious to them and consistent with the Catholic faith. Insofar as these traditions express in a distinctive way the faith that is held in common, they are a gift to be shared in the wider Church. The unity of the Church does not require a uniformity that ignores cultural diversity, as the history of Christianity shows. Moreover, the many diverse traditions present in the Catholic Church today are all rooted in the principle articulated by St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians: ‘There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism’ (4:5). Our communion is therefore strengthened by such legitimate diversity, and so we are happy that these men and women bring with them their particular contributions to our common life of faith.”

You might copy that and carry it around with you to rebut those who insist we ought not retain our Anglican patrimony, but short of that you can make clear to your interlocutors the distinction between discipline and doctrine, that our unity within the Catholic Church is not based on the form of our disciplines but in the faith as it is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  The summary of the difference between Anglicanism and Catholicism can be expressed very easily: Whereas Anglicanism encompasses many faiths all expressed through one book, The Book of Common Prayer, Catholicism has one faith, expressed through many different liturgical books, from the Sacramentary of the Melkites to that of the Maronites, to that of the Latin Church, and, of course, in the Anglican Use of the Roman Rite.  No matter how we express the Faith, we all believe the same thing, we all celebrate the same Sacraments.  There is simply a different way of manifesting corporeally the spiritual truths we profess as we move from Rite to Rite and, within the Latin Church, from Use to Use.

Falsehood number 2: Diversity is disloyalty.  We must counter the suspicion that our desire to retain our patrimony means we don’t truly want to be Catholic Christians.  The martyrs amply answer this objection for us.  Two and a half weeks ago we read with horror the accounts of the Syrian Catholics in Baghdad, Iraq, who related how Muslim terrorists slaughtered our brothers in the faith while they assisted at Holy Mass.  These Eastern Rite Catholics literally died in order to go to Mass, demonstrating that those who belong to the smaller rites of the Church are just as capable of joining their sacrifices to the sacrifice of Christ as are the thousands of saints of the Latin Church.  What sacrifice, I ask you, are we not willing to make in order to have the Holy Mass?  Our brothers in the Faith will know us by our fruits, they will see the sacrifices we will make to be Catholic, to live as Catholics.  To be Catholic today is to choose the faith.  While it is true we are not being cut down by the Muslims at Mass, the secular culture in which we live is very hostile to the choice we are making.  Just dig up the vitriol that came forth a year ago, immediately after Cardinal Levada made the announcement from which I quoted. 

Therefore, articulate your choice in terms of the reasons you now embrace the Catholic faith, not in terms of the occasion that led you to leave Anglicanism.  Make clear to people first why you are becoming Catholic and only secondarily why you are not remaining within Anglicanism.  Be able to say what it is about the Catholic Church that you love, and then tell your story.  Our loyalty to Holy Mother Church will be manifested in each of our conversion stories.  I find it incredible that our loyalty to the Church is questioned because we use a different form of the Mass, even as many of those who accuse us regularly differ publicly with Catholic teaching on faith and morals.  Get used to that paradox, because you’ll come across it often.

Falsehood number 3: Our differences in discipline are in competition with the disciplines of the majority of Catholics, rather than being a complement to them.  Again I will make reference to the sacraments and note that the Church’s teaching on marriage answers this objection for us.  The complementarity of man and woman, when they become one flesh, issues in life, whereas competition between them issues in death.  We see that in the past fifty years as the divorce rate in this country has skyrocketed, so there has been a concurrent drop in the fertility rate.  The average woman in this country now gives birth to only two children in her lifetime, where fifty years ago the fertility rate was double that – the average woman in America gave birth to four children in her lifetime.  Now we can attribute this drop to contraception, abortion, and the abdication of male responsibility, as well as divorce, but all the phenomena have one thing in common: they posit competition between the sexes instead of complementarity.  As it is with marriage, so it goes with the relationship of the minority disciplines to those of the majority.  To the degree that our gifts as Anglican Use Catholics complement those of our brothers in the Faith, our Church will become ever more beautiful, ever more compelling, and together we will build up the Body of Christ.  Through our complementary gifts we will bring to the Church the life that proceed when we don’t compete with each other, the life which is inherent to genuine marriage.

Thus, we come back to the joys.  If the devout priests who administer the Sacraments, teach us, and rule over us as servants in the Church are the principle joy we encounter, the life of grace that proceeds from the correct understanding of and fidelity to the Truth is the second joy.  In our parishes of converts to the true faith we get to see the fruits of daring to complement each other.  We reconcile Protestants that would not be reconciled otherwise.  And as we make disciples of them, disciples loyal to the Magesterium, their embrace of the Catholic faith issues in tangible fruits in the form of children.  This is something David Mills pointed out to us four years ago at the Anglican Use Conference in Scranton – he said that had he not become a Catholic and observed the teaching of the Church he and his wife would not have had their fourth child.  These children, which are ubiquitous in Catholic communities made up of converts, represent the vitality and hope for the future inherent to the Gospel of life.  This vibrancy is necessary in order for us to become the creative minorities that the Holy Father has said will renew the Church in the next millennium.  And we can see this principle in action at this beautiful school, bursting with children.

We quickly comprehend the third joy: this life that the Church brings to the world is our mission.  The Lord has given us a mission with a purpose, and those who embrace the life we offer are those whose families will not die out.  We are helping to foster and nurture families that generations from now will be able to participate in the eternal mission of the Church, the mission to which all Catholics are called but not all embrace, the mission to offer eternal salvation to those still living in darkness, and through this work to participate in the redemption of the world in which we live.

My fourth and final joy flows from the success of our mission: we are part of a hopeful institution.  A people that will not have children is a people who have lost hope.  They are victims of the predestinarian fatalism that afflicts all of secular society, as well as the liberal, or “progressive”, precincts of the Church.  Our hopefulness points to our endurance, the fulfillment of the promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the barque of Peter, the house built on rock.  Those of you who have come to Scranton have seen where we are situated, in a gorgeous neighborhood built 140 years ago by Episcopalians and Presbyterians.  They were the owners and upper and middle management that became rich by the extraction of the anthracite coal from the huge fields beneath the city.  This extraction was undertaken mostly by Catholics, who now occupy all the houses built by the wealthy of a century ago.  The Protestants aren’t there any more because they didn’t bother to have any children, which is a microcosm of the world as it will be a century from now.  The future belongs to those hopeful enough to invest in the next generation, by letting the next generation come to be.  In this we can see the future belongs to the Church.

These joys I have described do not come overnight.  They require patience to experience.  Some of the people in this room, after all, have waited 33 years for Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Constitution.  The time between your entry into the Church and your ordination, if you are clergy, may feel like forever.  I had to wait a year and a half, but Fr. Hawkins waited more than three years.  The time that your community becomes like the ones I have described, like the very one you see here, will take time, as well.  But remember that Fr. Phillips started with only 18 people, five of whom were his own family, and he has been at this over 27 years.  The patience required of you will cause you to suffer, but this too is a gift in the light of our faith, as St. Paul reminds us at the beginning of Romans, chapter 5:

“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.  More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”

 And so we return to the love with which I began – a generation from now it will be you to whom the new converts to the Faith point when they are asked to describe why being Catholic is so wonderful and what it was that sustained them when the going was tough.  They will be able to say that the love of God, and the unity He desires, was made manifest in the lives of men like Fr. Phillips, Fr. Hawkins, Fr. Moore, and Msgr. Feldcamp – and I pray that the names they use then will be yours.