Monday, February 26, 2018

A Point Of Comparison

Next week, our diocesan parish will feature a three-day Lenten conference led by Fr Dwight Longenecker. Fr Longenecker, raised an Evangelical in Pennsylvania, went to Oxford, was ordained a priest in the Church of England, left the Anglican priesthood, and became Catholic. Eventually he returned to the US and became a married Catholic priest under the Pastoral Provision in 2006.

He is currently Pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Greenville, SC. Our parish has represented him to us only as a rare example of a married priest in the Latin Rite, and it has made no mention of anything like Anglican Use. As far as I can see, he doesn't normally celebrate mass using BDW or DWM, and he doesn't seem to represent himself as anything but a down-the-line Catholic priest. A photo on his website shows him celebrating mass at St Maximillian Kolbe’s altar at his friary in Poland. Nothing's there about Our Lady of Walsingham, though.

The audience he'll be addressing at our parish is heavily Latin and Filipino, with a good additional sampling of Irish, Italian, Slavic, and Other heritage as well. My wife and I may be the only former Episcopalians.

Fr Longenecker doesn't seem ever to have appeared in the Anglo-Catholic blogosphere. Yet he's far more prominent as a blogger, writer, and speaker than any other Pastoral Provision or ordinariate priest. This is yet another confirmation for me that Anglicanorum coetibus is a detour. Becoming Catholic is always an individual decision, as it pretty clearly was for Fr Longenecker, and the Church has far more resources for people from all backgrounds than the very limited options available for those who want to characterize themselves somehow just as former Anglicans.