Easing back into this, still standing with full-leg casts at the raised PC, I couldn’t resist this item about a latter-day John Henry Newman heading to Rome from the Episcopal Church.  He is Rev. Alvin F. Kimel Jr., rector of St. Mark’s Church, Pittsburgh, who gave the news to his 200 parishioners in a letter.

“In the name of an ideology of radical inclusivity, the Episcopal Church has moved significantly away from the apostolic and catholic faith of Jesus Christ,” his letter read.

“With the decision made by General Convention two summers ago to approve the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals and the blessing of same-sex unions, it has, in my judgment, become heretical,” he continued.

“I cannot in conscience represent the Episcopal Church to the world, nor can I in conscience summon sinners into its fellowship,” he stated.

He’s the 80th Episcopal priest to take the path to Rome since 1980, when Pope John Paul II gave the go-ahead for married Episcopal priests to become married Catholic priests.  He will have to find a bishop to sponsor him, do an 18–month training (decompression?) program, and acquire his personal papal OK.

In my opinion, Roman Catholics should be pleased but should greet the news with sobriety.  It’s first of all a personal story, as was Newman’s, but of course with ecclesiastical ramifications of the first water.  The tradition-oriented Episcopal priest comes with wife and (four, presumably grown) children to take up duties as a Catholic priest, thus fulfilling a liberal Catholic’s dream.

With sobriety, I say, because Episcopalians are in an unhappy time these days, with the waves of antinomianism lapping at their foundations.  Bloody Queen Bess she may have been, though Belloc tends to give her a pass as caught in a political bind not of her making, but many Episcopalian faithful are holding on for dear life to the church of their fathers.

Cardinal Mahony of LA was attacked in front of church last summer but never told police and does not now intend to file a report:

Cardinal Mahoney told the police by telephone that he had been dressed in a sports shirt and slacks on an evening in July when a man walked toward him outside Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral downtown, asking in a threatening tone if he was the cardinal. Cardinal Mahony, 71, told the police that the man pushed him to the ground and kicked him before running away.

Only in October, at a priests’ meeting, did he announce it publicly, even though he had been

so badly beaten that he was hospitalized and it took him several weeks to recover.

I definitely question his reticence in the matter.  The law was broken, and he kept it to himself?

The Mary McCarthy-Flannery O’Connor exchange is worth remembering, in which the sophisticated McC, lapsed as to her Catholicity, tells O’C, a believer, that the sacramental host is great symbolism, to which O’C., quiet as a church mouse toward the end of a long evening’s conversation, made her “most famous” remark, “an economical swipe at the reductive, liberalizing view of religion,” wrote Paul Elie, senior editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux and author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003). 

O’Connor told a friend about it: 

We went at eight, and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing in such company for me to say.  . . . .  Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward the morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most ‘portable’ person of the Trinity.  Now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.

I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘”Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”  That was all the defense I was capable of. 

While we stop with Flannery O’Connor, let us consider her comment about her mother and naming a dog Spot:

[She] once told a friend, “I always thought that if [my mother] had a dog she’d name him Spot — without irony. If I had a dog I’d name him Spot, with irony. But for all practical purposes no one would know the difference.”

“By its nature, irony is the most ephemeral of literary devices, and the wit, or malice, or affection it encrypts is inherently fugitive,” continues Paul Mankowski, S.J., in First Things (March 2003).