Fr. Bill Waun was a classmate of mine at Oral Roberts University. Most politically-correct liberals deny the bone fides of our alma mater, but ORU was a good school and it was affordable to those of us of lesser means. Furthermore, the ethos on campus was incredibly upbeat, something that so many of us needed at that vulnerable time in our young lives.I think the difficulty that my visitor had in the e-mail I shared yesterday was the basic problem that can be inferred from Bp Lopes's own remarks -- the Anglican spiritual patrimony manifests itself, at least as far as the Ordinariates are concerned, in the liturgy. It's hard to imagine how an Ordinariate group carries an identity as such if it isn't celebrating mass regularly using the BDW form.. . . . He was the somewhat rebellious son of a devout evangelical Christian father, who apparently knew the Bible as well as most pastors. In the ‘70s, when there were still many people who had memorized lengthy portions of the Holy Scriptures, that was certainly saying something.
After ORU, Bill went on to graduate studies at Princeton’s seminary and other respected schools that I can’t remember, and the list of his post-graduate academic qualifications is as long as my arm. Check with him on that. After a long hiatus, Bill and I met again in January 2000 at Yokosuka Naval Base on Tokyo Bay in Japan, where he was stationed, and was director of chaplain services.
. . . . The occasion for our meeting at Yokosuka was the invitation of my CEC bishop Richard Lipka to the disaffected remnant of the Nippon Seikokai (Anglican/Episcopal Church in Japan) to join forces with the CEC and to maintain the apostolic succession without the taint of sacerdotal meddling. The NSKK had just been screwed over —pardon my French — by the modernizing, secularizing cohorts who had won the “right” to ordain women to the presbytery, so anxious were they to keep up with the conventional Anglicanism of North America and Britain!
. . . . Bill was, by his own admission, “on the journey”, which meant that he was on his way up from evangelical Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. He had shared the stage with John Paul II for some ecumenical gathering in Rome, and was anxious to recover the ancient Faith for himself, from the midst of the ruins of Protestantism, which his erudition and his conscience had thoroughly repudiated.
From that point onward, I think that Bill went on to be promoted to Navy captain — the same rank as colonel in the other services — and I can only assume that he served with distinction until his retirement. Only Bill himself and God know how to fill in the blanks in my story here.
It appears that this humble mission that you display in the photograph is hard by Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps Base in North Carolina. Temper fi, and more power to Fr. Bill and his parish in their efforts to attract young marines and their families to the Catholic Faith.
In addition, I've got to take seriously recent posts by Fr Z that the Church will renew itself only with (among other things) reverent celebration of the Ordinary Form mass. If an Ordinariate group isn't celebrating the BDW mass and is doing the Ordinary Form mass in the conventional way with guitars and, potentially, other liturgical abuses, I'm just not sure what purpose is being served.
However, the information we have on Fr Waun and Our Lady of Good Counsel is at best second-hand and based on things like Google street view. If anyone can provide first-hand explanations of what's happening in Jacksonville, I'd be most interested to hear it.
