More Info On The Fellowship Of St Alban Rochester NY

As I had hoped would happen, a visitor has e-mailed me with corrections, clarifications, and updates on a posting here:

[Regarding your posting on St Alban's Rochester], [m]y own family has half a dozen members; we have as our regular members of around seven families, with several more regular visitors, and various diocesian Catholic friends. The former pastor of the ACA parish we attended before joining the Catholic Church via the Ordinariate was a Catholic priest who left the church to marry; various other events in his life excluded him from leading us on multiple counts. Needless to say, he was quite hostile to the whole idea (he is since deceased). As it turned out, bishop Marsh was also hostile to the whole idea also, the TAC oaths not withstanding, but it took a little time for us to learn that. The interested laity formed our own group, and requested a priest from the Ordinariate. Not long after the Ordinariate was formed, we learned that Fr. Cornelius (a retried Episcopal priest from the Albany diocese (most recently)), was in the area, living in the Southern Tier of New York. He was assigned to our group, and drove to say mass for us regularly the past two years or so. It is true that his recent retirement from our group was because of health problems. As for his replacement, we should have an announcement concerning that soon on our website.

As for more details about our group, I have invested a huge amount of time and energy into advertising our activities via the website, Google + and Facebook pages. Since you evidently have in interest in these matters, I invite you to have a look! We have some of the best sacred music in the area with volunteer musicians from the Eastman school, which is quite remarkable for a new group, in my view. Watch some of the videos, read some of the articles, and look at various activities we have been up to. The website is here.

I am also surprised by the description of "special events with an Anglican flavor"! We have had Evensong at fairly regular intervals, as well as had Lessons and Carols at Christmas time. Since we are currently without a priest, we are somewhat limited with what we can do as Catholics, but expect to be back up to speed when we have a new priest. Our services make as extensive use of the Ordinariate rites of the mass and office as we can.

I will say that we have a wonderful group of people that love the Ordinariate, and love the Catholic faith. We have invested a large amount of time, energy and treasure into this venture, overcoming many obstaces, and are passionate about this opportunity pope Benedict XVI gave us. I don't like to see our group disparaged, and I don't like to see the Ordinariate desparaged, which happens too often in my opinion - even from Catholics.

You have my permission to post this email on your website.

Sincerely yours in our blessed Lord,

Andrew Jordan

The best possible outcome for this blog would be a thriving Ordinariate. Any information I can post here will, I hope, contribute to that, the more complete the better. I encourage anyone with more information on a parish, mission, or group to send it along.