Journey Home - 2019-01-29 - Fr. Edward Meeks

[Music] [Music] well good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi and once again I have this wonderful privilege to sit with you and hear a story of how the Holy Spirit opens someone heart not only to the the beauty of our Lord Jesus Christ but the beauty of his church and our guest tonight is father Ed Meeks former Anglican priest and when you when the camera turns on him you'll notice that he's still got a collar on so he's got a long story to talk about father Edie wonderful to have you on the program great to be with you Marcus thank you I'm trying to do the last time I met did you have that caller honor you I can't remember where you're at your transition I did not it was at the formation retreat in Houston in January of 2012 when when we were just transitioning into the ordinary oh yeah I mean that's such a historic thing in the history of the church the whole Ordinariate process and you've been there from the beginning right and all through it so right we'll get to that but let's let me back up and invite you if you would to let's hear your journey from the beginning well the journey is kind of long and and circuitous I often tell people that the The Reader's Digest version of my story is that in the confusion of the 1960s I left the seminary and in the chaos of the 1970s I left the church but God in His mercy and Pope Benedict the sixteenth in his great generosity allowed me to come back as a Catholic priest I was I am a cradle Catholic and so therefore people would would call me a revert yeah I was born and raised in Trenton New Jersey into a very devout Catholic family my mother ethnic heritage was Italian my dad's ethnic heritage was Irish and Welsh and so we were Catholics going back many many generations I belonged to a very large parish in the Trenton area and all of life in those days centered around the parish church the in fact it's it was kind of like the air that you breathe in my neighborhood was Catholic air those were the days when when you referred to the area in which you didn't talk about your neighborhood you talked about your parish we had always a large staff of priests at any given time five six seven priests of course those were the days when when there was no shortage of priests in the in the church we had 25 to 30 faithful Franciscan nuns in the convent and they taught the K through eighth grade school that that I attended I was an altar boy and so I spent a lot of time around those priests and they really became my boyhood heroes my recollection of them was that that in in most ways they were real role models for what it meant to be a holy manly priest there was all the first few years would have been in the Latin Mass that's correct right that's correct this was in the 1950s of course which in many ways was arguably kind of the high-water mark of the church in in America there was an incident that took place in my boyhood also when I was an altar boy growing up in the church that in many ways helped to cement my desire to become a priest I I looked at these priests in my parish I wanted to be like them and eventually wanted to be one of them in 1956 there was a tragic fire in the cathedral in downtown Trenton Saint Mary's Cathedral and the rector of the cathedral whose name was Monsignor Richard crane the the fire broke out in the middle of the night when he became aware of it he was awakened he ran from the rectory into the Cathedral to retrieve the Blessed Sacrament out of the fire well and he was killed well you talk about a story that has an impact on a kid who was thinking about the possibility of becoming a priest and so I I finally applied in the eighth grade for entrance into the minor seminary and at the ripe old age of 13 years and 11 months I began my studies for the priesthood in in Baltimore a minor seminary in in Baltimore I was there for six years then two more years in in the major seminary and I'm eternally grateful for what was imparted to me there both in terms of spirituality spirituality and an academic formation but but something happened in the seminary this would have been in the 60s I'm wondering what time that was yeah yeah in the in the post conciliar years it was there was a point in time and I I could probably mark the year 1967 where it was like throwing a switch and the model for the priesthood that was portrayed at least in my experience changed dramatically and precipitously the model of holiness and of separation from the world and and prayerfulness and that type of thing took a turn and the image of priesthood of the priest as minister of the sacraments preacher of the word of God Shepherd of the flock became the priest as liturgical innovator pop psychologists and agent of social action and in that effect where many of us was utter confusion I remember finding an old article written by then I think father rat singer yeah young in 1970 and it was about the crisis of the priesthood mm-hmm I mean they were addressing it back then I mean look at what's going on right now but I mean we're talking back in it at that time period and so when you're in school and you're getting the left foot of fellowship if you will in the midst of this difficult time yeah yeah yeah it was very very confusing very difficult and and of course those were those were the days and the years when the seminaries began to empty out as did as did the convents I left the seminary in 1969 and when I left my assumption and my intention was to remain faithful to the church for the rest of my life as a layman probably start a career in business get married raise a family and I did all of the above fine started a career in business I met my wonderful wife we were married in 1970 ended up having four wonderful children who are of course all now adults we now have 17 grandchildren and we both of us had as I said had come from devout Catholic homes and and both of us were very dedicated to the church remained faithful to the church and in the course of time we began to to work with Catholic Charities as foster parents this is this is a kind of an intricate part of this story because it was really my introduction back into into full-time ministry we began taking in pre-adoptive foster infants and in our home they would stay with us for usually about 60 days before being placed in an adoptive home eventually we became aware of the need for housing for the mothers of these children mostly unmarried pregnant teenage girls so we served again with Catholic Charities as a foster home for for the girls we take in one at a time and what they did was it kind of created a kind of a seed of vision within a vision within both of us for the creation of a Christian maternity home which we eventually did I'll get back to that in a moment in the late 70s both my wife Jan and I had a profound conversion experience in the context of the Catholic Charismatic renewal what many of our evangelical brethren would call a born-again experience although we know that the born-again experiences baptism but it was the conversion of heart where I took all of this knowledge that I had in my head and made what someone has once called the 18 inch decision brought it into my heart it was life-changing for both of us and we considered we continued within the church we started and led a charismatic prayer group but it was the 70s and the 70s of course both in in the culture and in the church were kind of a time of great chaos you know everything was up in the air there was no catechism in use in the church the old Baltimore Catechism had had kind of gone by the wayside the new catechism of the Catholic Church and not yet been promulgated so within the midst of this this chaos of you know seeing liturgical innovations and a lot of the aberrations that that became prevalent throughout the church in those days we desperately began seeking a place of refuge within the church eventually despaired that we ever would find one in the midst of all of the what an again was heterodoxy in in most cases and so we began to kind of reluctantly drift toward conservative Protestant churches landed in a large Assemblies of God Church in the area the the pastor and the board of that church were very sympathetic to the vision that we had for establishing the maternity home that I talked about a moment ago and so they enabled that they they helped us to to establish that and in fact what they did I was I was in a career in business at the time I was working in the human resources field for a number of large companies in the Baltimore area they offered me a position on the pastoral staff of that church given my seminary background and they they invited me to become the the administrator kind of the number two guy in this in this mega church I did that and remained in that position for approximately ten years and toward the end of the ten years there was a stirring in in my heart and in my soul that that I knew related - my original call to be a priest I didn't know at the time exactly what it meant what it would look like what I was supposed to do with it so I simply prayed about it but but I was reminded at the time by what I felt in my and my spirit was God was calling me to plant a church and I knew kind of intuitively it was not going to be in the Assemblies of God because one of the things that I that I really was hungry for was the Eucharist at the time I knew you know I'd walked away from something wonderful something life-giving and needed to find my way back I was reminded at the time of Paul's words in Romans 11:29 where he says the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable so I left left via the position in the Assemblies of God and I actually went back for a brief hiatus back into the corporate world and then I became aware of a particular Protestant denomination known as the charismatic Episcopal Church the CEC met the the local bishop he and I had a lengthy conversation and we seemed to have a kind of a common vision and he invited me to plant a parish plant a CEC parish in my area and he would ordain me first to the diaconate and then to the priesthood might be good just briefly let the audience know what the the charismatic Episcopal Church is because it's not Episcopalian right and it's charismatic but it's a unique it was a unique and denomination of its own yeah it was founded out of a vision to combine the kind of the three of the historic streams of Christianity liturgical evangelical and charismatic streams into one expression they always referred to it as a bridge Church and I always used to have in the back of my mind yeah but nobody lives on a bridge you know so so at any rate in 1996 I founded Christ the King Church in towson maryland and we began attracting a really eclectic combination of Episcopalians and Anglicans and Lutheran's and evangelicals of every stripe and Pentecostals and many of them former Catholics so and I really felt that my call at that time was to introduce these folks to the sacramental life of the church and to the liturgical worship of the church I began feeding voraciously on the writings of st. John Paul the second of John Henry Newman of some contemporary light writers like Benedict Groeschel father Richard John Newhouse Peter Kreeft I became an e WT n junkie and I knew I know I came to a point in time where I knew in retrospect that that was really the point in time where the Holy Spirit placed my feet back on the trail to Holy Mother Church even then even in those early days I just sense that somehow some some way I was going to have a reconciliation of personal reconciliation with the church didn't know what that could look like yeah because you were at cradle Catholic right our guest is father Edward Meeks you were ordained charismatic Episcopal priest and and the the the uniqueness of it I think your orders are through a South the more thing for the South America that's right I suppose so the orders wasn't I we're valid right valid but elicit valid elicit but there you were you know but at this point what you're talking your love and EWTN know that are you thinking yet about the journey or just starting - oh very much so okay very much so even even in those early days again as I said I knew that ultimately somehow God was calling me back to the church I didn't know what that could possibly look like one of the things I did not want to do was to abandon my parish abandon my flock along the way we we actually changed our affiliation to the Anglican Church in America the the American province of the traditional Anglican Communion and we did so specifically because of the long-standing and serious dialogue that the the TAC had had with the Holy See toward the possibility of a full communion and so we became an Anglican Church and continued on this journey became more and more convinced that that God was somehow calling me back back to the Catholic Church lo and behold in November of 2009 pope benedict xvi issued his apostolic constitution known as anglican Oram che Debus in which he provided for a way for entire Anglican parishes even with their married clergy to come into full communion in the end the Catholic Church and of course what what he established as a structure for that was is what's known as the personal Ordinariate s' in the United States the personal Ordinariate of the chair of st. Peter in the United Kingdom the personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham and in Australia the personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross and so I jumped on that immediately I was one of the among the very first wave of applicants to seek candidacy within within the ordinary for ordination in the Catholic Church the word went out that whoever was interested in being considered for possible ordination within the church in the context of the Ordinariate needed to send a dossier to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by the end of May 2011 which I did my dossier was greeted by eight months of utter silence excruciating silence I'd go to the mailbox every day looking for a letter and nothing nothing nothing nothing happened and and the specific letter that I was looking for was was called NOLA hasta meaning no impediments because I was the poster boy for canonical impediments at the time you know I can't help but think about the the humor of that silence you know Cardinal Sarah wrote a book about silent right you know but there's a whole other silence that an awful lot of people has experienced in your case people waiting for annulment I mean this is a unique silence it's just waiting for somebody from Rome that's right to answer anything that's right sweet right and of course eight months would be warp speed for Rome but it still it seemed right seemed like an eternity at the time the I remember when part of what I had to send in and in my dossier was a form that was entitled impediments to ordination and there were nine questions on there and I had to answer yes to four of them yes I had this impediment because I had left the church I had left the seminary I had become a Protestant minister and so forth and so and I was married and so I knew that that when I sent the dossier in that it would have been very easy for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to give me an automatic no and I was prepared for that because I was so convinced that this is what God was calling the God was calling me back to the church that I was prepared if necessary to become a Catholic layman for the rest of my life but also at the same time praying that that God would make a way and so interestingly in early in January not early in January of 2012 which was the month that the Ordinariate was actually established in the United States I was attending a prayer prayer service at a local parish the night before the March for Life and the vicar general the newly assigned vicar general for the Ordinariate was at that prayer service and I said to him father it's been it's been eight months and I've not heard a word I said many of the guys that sent their dossiers in at the same time I've already heard they know what you know what the disposition is is there anything you can tell me he said well I can tell you this the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has been struggling mightily with your dossier because of your impediments because of your whole background of having left the church and so forth he said however we are expecting a letter this week because there was a meeting of the CDF last week where they reviewed a number of the candidates your name was on that agenda and he said we will be receiving a letter this week either granting you or denying you the nola hasta as soon as I hear anything I'll let you know I said thank you please do so the next day was Monday the march for life then Tuesday then Wednesday the following Wednesday I was sitting in my office in in the parish phone rang and it was the vicar general he said to me are you sitting down I said yes he said I received a letter from on your behalf from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith let me read it to you he started off dear mr. Meeks now I was an Anglican priest at the time but it said dear mr. Meeks and I thought immediately it's over it's not going to happen pursuant to your application to be considered as a candidate for the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church you are hereby dispensed from the sin of sysm and I put my head down and I cried cried like a baby I cried like a baby then he said can you be in Houston on Friday for the formation retreat and of course you were there at that you were one of the speakers at that that formation that first formation retreat in January of 2012 that was followed by a rather intense of what I call crash and burn course in in Catholic theology to kind of bring bringing all of us up to speed who had only Anglican theology and are in our backgrounds we went through a rather intense a 15 week period of online training that was was actually administered by the the faculty at st. Mary's Cemetery in Houston at the end of that I was still had to wait for what's known as a Reese crypt which is a specific permission from the Holy Father himself for a married man to be ordained a Catholic priest I received that Reese crypt in June and so I was scheduled for an already scheduled ordination service on June the 23rd but they first had to scramble to get me an ordained to the transitional Teac in it had to get me a dispensation because canon law says a man has to be a transitional Deacon for six months before he can be ordained a priest I was a transitional Deacon for one week before being ordained to the priesthood and then my ordination took place on June 23rd 2012 and the next day Sunday June the 24th Monsignor Steenson who was then the ordinary of the Ordinariate came to my parish and received the entire parish into the church one of the most glorious days of my life this is a number of stories here including your whole parish that's called - they're often I've it's been explained in the program that faithful Anglicans often are - ilk s-- either they and both of whom consider themselves already Catholic right and so there are some they've only small see right but so there's some that think they're already in Catholic and so but they never think they need to come home but there is some that are already Catholic but they understand that their trajectory is to the church right where was your congregation and of that ilk I would have to say in one sense all over the lot except that I had been I had been preaching very Catholic homilies for years and there were there were a couple of things that that that really motivated me sort of bellwether issues that brought me to the certitude that God was calling me back into the Catholic Church and some of them related to well actually all of them related to to scriptural issues one of course was I could no longer preach around Matthew 16:18 jesus said to Peter I say to you you are Peter upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it I will give you Peter you singular the keys of the kingdom of heaven whatsoever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven whatsoever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven so that issue of authority by what authority was loomed very very large in in my heart and in my mind another one was John 17 jesus high priestly prayer for unity in the church and I looked around at the landscape of the church world the denomination of the the naam denominational world and I said is this what Jesus had in mind when he prayed for what you need and I looked and I looked at our own little congregation and for that at that point we had already been under two separate Protestant jurisdictions and you know where do we go I I likened to my in a homily to my congregation I likened that this was in the process of introducing them to the whole rationale for becoming Catholic I like in the world of denominations to lifeboats I said you have all these little lifeboats out here in the open sea everybody kind of bobbing around on a lifeboat and we're on our own little lifeboat and along comes an aircraft carrier and invites us on board I said what are we going to do are we going to stay in this little lifeboat are we going to jump out and swim try to swim to another lifeboat or are we going to climb aboard the aircraft carrier into outer safety and security I said now keep in mind if you're going to climb one onto an aircraft carrier it takes a lot of work climbing up that height involves some work it's quite a bit of a week so in actually in September of 2010 even before after after Pope Benedict had promulgated the stall a constitution but before the ordinary it was actually established but was was coming I began to on a Sunday morning to lay out to the congregation the rationale for becoming Catholic and the very first thing that I talked about was history because as we repeat him so many times Blessed John Henry Newman said to go deep into history is to cease to be Protestant and I knew from experience and talking to people from such a wide range of denominational backgrounds that most non Catholic Christians don't have a good grasp of church history I used to joke with my Pentecostal friends that when someone says to you church history what you conjure up what's what goes on in your mind is the book of Acts the day of Pentecost Azusa Street and today yeah that's church history you know and so there's a there was a real gap I think in most most Protestants understanding of church history I also tell people that if you if you're intellectually honest and you begin to read the writings of the church fathers you have inevitably set your feet upon a path from which there is no return and so it doesn't say and even your little seer cares make Episcopal Church didn't have a long history oh no and you're not an honor to church we need to pause your father will come back I apologize for interrupting you there they want me to take a break so let's take just a pause here we'll come back just a moment with the rest of father and story [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host and our guest is father Ed Meeks before we get back to is during I just want to remind you if as you're hearing father's story if you were raised in the Catholic Church for example and you've wandered away and may be listening the story or other things on EWTN you're being drawn back and you're wondered not only is the Lord calling you home but maybe you got a call to the priesthood well we'd love to have you contact the coming on network because that's what we'd love to do is help you discern God's call on your life at CH network.org so please contact us alright father let me allow you back into the story because well you mentioned that maybe there was another incident before you heard back from Rome that you wanted to talk this actually took place in that short timeframe between what the vicar general said to me and when he called me back to tell me that I had received a no-loss I went into the into the church my church that afternoon the church was empty and even as an Anglican Church we had front and center altar Tabernacle crucifix I lay prostrate in front of the altar for probably the better part of a half hour crying out to God and I stood up and I remember putting my hands on the altar looking up at the crucifix and saying Jesus this has never been my priesthood no one owns his priesthood this is your priesthood so if you choose to restore it to me as a Catholic priest I will serve you for the rest of my life as a Catholic priest if you choose to take it away from me I will serve you for the rest of my life as a Catholic layman but please just speak your perfect will to me through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and that's it was just you know shortly thereafter when when I got the word that they had had approved my application I wanted to to tell you a little bit about the the process that we that I went through to to kind of bring my parish into into the church on that very first Sunday in September of 2010 I to do a little bit of a church history lesson with the parish on as my Sunday morning sermon and I wheeled out a big whiteboard I'm kind of a low low tech guy so I'm 71 years old so instead of a PowerPoint presentation was a whiteboard and I drew drew a line on the whiteboard representing church history 30 ad 2010 ad this is the history of the church for the past 2000 years and I said for the first 1,000 years of church history every Christian considered himself to be a Catholic and I said that did not change until 1054 in the separation of East and West and I drew a little vertical line at about halfway through this big big line and I said five hundred years later we have the Protestant Reformation another little vertical line in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg door and I and so I turned around I asked a question I said can anybody tell me how long it took for the first split to occur within Protestantism and the answer is 12 years you know after a thousand years 500 years now Protestantism is a force in the church 12 years you have this this event known as the Marburg colloquy where Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli the founder of this Swiss anabaptists decided to debate one another for the for the purpose of unifying Protestantism because they had some theological differences of opinion and halfway through that colloquy they mutually excommunicated one another called each other heretic and went their separate ways and then I just started drawing more vertical lines and I said and that type of thing has been going on on virtually a weekly basis ever since to the point point where there are tens of thousands of identifiable Protestant denominations in the world and I said where does that end and where does it end more personally for us we we you know we're a church at that time in 2010 we had been in existence for 14 years as a parish I said we've already been under two separate Protestant denominations and that's when I went into the into the lifeboat analogy and so I took the rest of that fall and Advent season in 2010 and every Sunday I would would preach a sermon on one of the difficult doctrines of Catholicism the ones that so many Protestants have have difficulty in accepting all the Marian doctrines purgatory the infallibility of the Pope and so forth and and an interesting thing began to take place one of the interesting things which was painful was we started hemorrhaging members of course but the but the interesting thing to me was I had always thought of Protestantism as being but particularly evangelicalism as being very cerebral but one of the things I discovered that is that it's more visceral particularly the the anti-catholic strain that exists within within Protestantism it's more visceral than cerebral the way I learned that was people would come up to me every week along the way and say I've heard everything that you've been teaching about the Catholic Church and honestly I don't really have any issues with the doctrines but I just don't want to be Catholic so I'm leaving you know so we lost over over the course of time we lost about 30% of of the congregation who chose for one reason or another not to become Catholic so out of we were a parish of about 200 people and we got whittled down to about 140 by the time that we were finally received into the church but as I said on that wonderful wonderful Sunday morning in in June of 2012 140 former Protestants made the decision to become Catholic I had said to them the week before one week before that that event I said it's been my privilege to lead you all to the door of the Catholic Church but I can't carry you in you need every one of you needs to make an individual decision to accept the claims of Catholicism you know I was thinking as you're describing that statement by Joshua right right as for me and my family we will serve when that's the approach you had to take to your people right yeah this is what you are planning to do and your family but whether they followed you and I was there free decision right what about the building we were very fortunate bring that up that's often it so it is unlike Episcopal parishes our property was not owned by the diocese in in the Anglican Church and at least in the United States most Anglican churches own their own property so we were very fortunate in that regard when when I founded the parish in 1996 we formed a religious corporation and the religious corporation owned all the all of the land and buildings that formed our parish so that was never became an issue and and the other the other wonderful little sidelight was my anglican bishop was one of those who who actually came into the church through the ordinary Tazewell bishop boot camp is whom you know well he was such a blessing bishop campus if you're listening a great shout out to you god bless you my brother well did and some of the viewers might be wondering how you got away from your pulpit preaching Catholicism in your denomination was it because of his openness that or were you or did you have the freedom of the pulpit anyway I had the freedom I had a lot of freedom even in the CEC I had a bishop who was very very Catholic minded you know there was there was a there was a an element within the CEC of which we were a part that were very Catholic minded in terms of liturgy in terms of theology and so had a lot of freedom with that and my bishop was one of them as well what you're you come in that came into the Catholic Church in 2012 okay and so you came in 2000 and ordained to the priest then when was then that was June the 23rd 2012 okay so well and then the very next day the parish was received okay no that was just six years ago right that was actually part of the first wave I was one of the first rights men to be ordained into into the ordinary I'm thinking a lot of Anglicans and others one of the reasons they come in well one of the reasons is because the goodness the Catholic Church the history all the positives but sometimes it's also the negatives of worthwhile you've left right okay the stuff that's going on and you bring all these people in were they happy with what they found yes however with the with the great challenges that the church faces today I mean I've often had to field questions from from some who were pure converts to the faith I mean pure converts as opposed to reverts in particular with all of the issues with the sex abuse crisis and some of the confusing things that we're hearing from many of the bishops people will come to me from time to time and say you know I came into the Catholic Church looking for a firm place to stand but now it doesn't look quite as firm as I imagined it to be and I remind them of a couple of things number one the longevity of the church this is still the church Jesus made out of that long line that's right though this is still the church that Jesus founded 2,000 years ago there have been challenges there have been all kinds of issues throughout the history of the church and yet she still stands we have Jesus rock-solid promise that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the church we have Our Lady of Fatima's promise that in the end her Immaculate Heart will triumph so I heard a sermon not too long ago by a young Catholic priest in India Indiana whose name escapes me right now who was likening the position of of the faithful laity and faithful clergy in the church today to the position of first responders on 911 and he said our job is to run to the fire and to save as many people as we can and and I really take that to heart I think that's a very very important concept for our day yeah well our Lord consistently in his presentation of the gospel was always an urgency about it right all the New Testament writers there was an urgency about it right and after that long line that you drew in the board we can lose the urgency yes talk about that in the midst of this how did it in a wait is this crisis a wake-up call to the urgency yeah and I think it's part of the part of the whole question of of Jesus return you know how how does the church continue faithfully waiting and anticipating something that the church has been waiting for for 2,000 years you know do we stick and wait how can we stay faithful to that and I think that's that's really the crux of the matter because every every generation of Catholics I think has faced their own challenges when I think back on this the church has been in crisis particularly in the in the United States for all of my adult life I think back again I talked about the confusion of the 1960s when when things were happening like father Charles Curran calling a press conference on the steps of Catholic University in Washington in the aftermath of st. Paul the sixth issuing Humana vitae and saying Hume on TV ta is optional for Catholics well that was it that was a big enough problem but the bigger problem was that he did it with impunity you know there was there was no there was no pushback there was nothing happened you know and so that was a that was a very important event that opened the door to dissent within the church and so even going back to that that point in time the church has been I think in in a kind of crisis mode in many ways that's we're reaping now 50 years later yes a particular dissent that's undercut many many things right you know I've often thought I'd talk about the urgency of that you know we got that long line you drill you know there's the church history yeah the problem with that long line is we take the wonderful word of Scripture and that was Witten way back there at that at the end the line I know it does it apply to us your 2000 years today well the church teaches that there's a literal understanding of that scripture but there's an a spiritual side and I love to interpret it as the litter was written 2,000 years but the spiritual side means it was written yesterday right for us today right the living word because tomorrow we face our Lord yeah I mean that's the way we're called to live in that urgency that's right that's right yeah and and the urgency is growing all the more urgent everyday as we see the world around us kind of spiraling out of control yeah you know the church and it's unfortunate because just at the time when the world seems to need the church the most the church is limping and and so it's it's incumbent on all of us who consider ourselves faithful Catholics to do our part to to uphold the mission and the and the vision of the church you know that to have the full complete expression of your journey there should be another person sitting right here you would tell us about her journey my wife Jan as I mentioned also came from a devout Catholic family we were married in in 1970 in the Catholic Church in our Catholic parish and she is her her primary calling today I believe is as a faithful grandmother to our seventeen seventeen seventy God we love being grandparents of course this is a this is a whole new paradigm for many Catholics to have a have a priest and and his wife together who who have both children and grandchildren you know but it's it that that whole aspect of it has been received very well most of the parishioners of my parish today are actually our cradle Catholics we've experienced tremendous growth since coming into the church and much of that growth I would say most of that growth has come from people who who are cradle Catholics who have had to get used to the idea of having having a married priest as their pastor and and his wife at his side and that I know having dealt with many former non Catholic clergy who come in and have pursued the journey that one of the hardest things is that the church kind of knows what to do with with men as priests even married men but they don't know what to tell a wife right what her role is gonna be when she becomes the wife not re our tradition yeah that's true what what have you found okay you've been an anglican priest and a catholic priest what would you say is uniquely descriptive of a catholic priest versus your non Catholic priesthood mm-hmm yeah it's an interesting question I think among all of the things that that it is is that looking at kind of the what we know is the transcend all transcendental characteristics of God and therefore the of the church truth Beauty goodness the the church the Catholic Church reflects all of those things and so I believe that as Catholic priests we are to be personal reflections of all of those things as well of course the Anglican Church has as its history a rather shady past based on the the sysm of Henry the eighth who of course who left the church because he wanted to dump Catherine of Aragon and Mary Anne Boleyn what a what a shaky reason for starting your own church but the the rock bed of authority the rock bed of truth that have existed in the church for from her founding are very comforting and it it helps me to know that anytime I I'm preaching and I'm you know preaching the Catholic faith I know that the church has my back you know that there's no one's going to pull the rug out from under me and at any given time on on anything that I preached that that lines up with with the depositor for the faith I remember when when I as a former prime Protestant minister I also could have considered priesthood and that's a whole other story and decided that that was not where the Lord was calling me but I do remember one of the issues that I looked I tried to anticipate and I could not and myself doing and that was the confessional because I had none of that in my presbyterian background pray I didn't know if you had any of that as an Episcopal priest but but how about that transition for you as a priest well we we actually had the sacrament of confession as Anglican and even in the CEC we heard individual confessions okay and of course the the big thing the big thing for me the thing that the overarching factor that that was the sort of the scene a qua non of coming into the church was the Eucharist I thought you know I talked about the authority and the issue of authority and truth and unity and all that but the Eucharist and and introducing people to the Eucharistic life of the church you know it's the the the Second Vatican Council of course called it the source and summit of our faith and and so it is you know and I can't imagine I during those years that I was away from it particularly in in my my years in the in the Pentecostal church it's hard for me to think back now on that time on how I justified in my own mind being away from the Eucharist for all those years you know but it's it's easy to talk yourself in and out of things oh and you know when you're trying to rationalize it well what about that that charismatic background have you brought that with you and you see that as a place in the church yeah to some extent I mean it's the the Holy Spirit is probably one of the the least appreciated aspects of our life and the Trinity I think most people you know it's it's an interesting dichotomy that we carry the Holy Spirit within us we carry the very life of the Blessed Trinity within us and the person of the Holy Spirit and yet how often do we even think about that you know we can go through the course of an entire day and not realize it and and what I often find myself saying to people especially in in the confessional is that you know a life of virtue is not something that you need to conjure up it's not something you need to manufacture because you already have the raw material for that within you because the Holy Spirit brings with him everything that he is that he has of course including all of his fruit love joy peace patience kindness goodness gentleness faithfulness self-control I said if you think about that that's the raw material for a virtuous life so it's already within you now it may be dormant you know if you're confessing to me that you know you have a problem with patience you don't have to manufacture patience ask the Holy Spirit to - and Kindle within you that fruit of patience and and I believe that's a prayer that's very close to the heart of God and that he'll answer very readily you and I have been around a little while we've seen the change we've seen Christianity change in our lifetime drastically along with the rise of the media and all that craziness right but I do remember when I was in the 50s most non Catholic Christians were of some Reformation trajectory even the Pentecostals had some connection with Reformation trajectory but we've come now to the point where there's this rise of totally independent Christianity right you talked about planting your own church well every five days there's a new church planted somewhere in America without any historical connection talk about that experience how do we help Catholics understand and also non Catholics the beauty and necessity of the church one of the questions that ultimately I think people have to come to grips with in in the life of the church is as I said by what authority by what authority does this particular church or denomination exist and and ultimately you always trace it back to a person there's there was some man historically somewhere along the line who decided to start either his own church or his own denomination and it typically was based on on the notion of Sola scriptura you know which which most Protestant denominations hold to and most independent evangelicals hold to and yet you have all of these disparate groups out there all holding to Sola scriptura but all interpreting this to at least a somewhat different extent and therefore creating a separation between themselves and all the others who hold to Sola scriptura and dividing and dividing and dividing yeah yeah yeah there's a couple denominations that I think of that their whole raison d'etre was to form a unity group we want to that's their goal why you started from scratch and I formed this unifying group then they split it five years later there's there's a church not far from us that recently split off it's a it's an independent of angelical Church that split off from another independent evangelical church and if you go and if you go on the website of this new split the byline under the title of the church is that all maybe one and I thought to myself now these are intelligent people did did anybody in the leadership of that group consider the irony of that statement and they put that together as their as their their model a good couple minutes just just a few at one issue that I wanted you to talk to is and as a small group out there I'm non Catholic clergy not be wondering whether to make this and also those that are drawn to the church and wonder do I do I come home and do I stay yeah talk about that a little bit cuz I know you struggled a little bit with that I did and of course everyone has to has to make to form an answer to that that question through the dictates of his own conscience but what I would say to them is Jesus is calling you home you know the same Jesus that you worship the same Jesus that you preach every Sunday is that Jesus who is calling you home to the Catholic Church the church that he founded I once had someone say to me when I was teaching on one of the Marian doctrines and the motherhood of Mary how she is our spiritual mother he came up to me he said look I don't I don't need or want a spirit mother I have Jesus and I said to him Jesus is the one that gave you a spiritual mother and who wants you to have a spiritual mother so are you going to give Jesus what he wants or aren't you yeah you know when I think about this call to follow our Lord sometimes it's I know guys that say Lord please drop some stone tablets down so I know what your will is yeah how do you discern that when it's it's tough maybe one last word of encouragement to discerning the will of God in terms of following him yeah I think it all boils down to peace you know what is ultimately going to give you the peace of God in your heart with dr. Paul says transcends understanding you know in in human terms for many people it makes no sense to leave where they are you know they they have a career there or they have security there they have a following there they have whatever makes no sense in human terms but but the peace of God transcends that understanding and it's that peace of God that will ultimately guide you and give you the discernment to do what Jesus is calling you to do alright father as we close could we have your blessing love till the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord the blessing of God Almighty the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit be upon you this day and remain with you forever amen thank you very much for joining us on on the journey home and for your willingness to follow the Lord wherever and blessings on you and your your family thank you Marcus you as well thank you so much anxious to hear how you and the other Ordinariate pastors continue with this new project right um it's a it's a wonderful thing thank you very much thanks again and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home again if you're a Catholic and you want to hear more stories about conversion as our as Mother thought about the purpose of the journey home was to help Catholics appreciate this great faith which we sometimes take for granted we'd like to know more about those on the journey please contact the coming on network at CH Network or compost for [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: EWTN

Views: 65,084

Keywords: ytsync-en, jht, jht01642

Id: NiSE3CzgVkE

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019