More On The Married Former Lutherans Ordained As Catholic Priests

Regarding yesterday's post, a visitor comments,

As I recall, it was German Lutheran pastors, not Swedish ones, I think in the late 1940s, just after the war. I don't know if it was an indult, and I can't recall how many (although it was more than a handful) of them became Catholics (including the noted German Lutheran academic Scripture scholar Henirich Schlier - but I don't think Schlier was ordained in the Catholic Church). Later on, from the 1970s onwards, a number of Swedish Lutheran married clergy became Catholic, and were ordained, including the noted historian Magnus Nyman, who has tried to apply the "revisionist" English Reformation historical work of historians like Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh to the Swedish Reformation process.

Elsewhere I wrote,

By November 1997 some 240 former clergy of the Church of England had been received into the Roman Church (not including those who became Catholic after their retirement), but some 50 have become Orthodox.

Within the last 5 years I read somewhere that "nearly 500" Church of England clergy (including retired ones) have become Catholic since 1992, of whom "about two dozen" subsequently returned to the Church of England (IIRC, after being ordained in the Catholic Church). I can't recall where I got those figures, though, not how trustworthy they are.

I've begun reading Longenecker's The Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men, from which I get the impression that he is a careful writer with an acute scholarly historical sense. I decided that, rather than pursue these matters as questions after his presentations, I will try e-mailing him and perhaps give him a picture of my overall project here, so that he might be able to help me clarify some of these, and perhaps other, points. This could also possibly help me with discerning where I'm headed with this whole effort, turn it into something bigger or drop it, as I'm reaching a decision point.

One point he's raised several times is that the Catholic Church is a treasure house with millennia of spiritual resources. Yes, the Church of England is 500 years old, but as soon as you cross onto the Continent, you immediately add another 1000 years, and once you reach Rome and Jerusalem, you've gone back to the start. In that context, the Anglican precious treasures start to fade (although Fr Longenecker didn't say this).

Bl John Henry Newman is one thing, the Doctors of the Church are quite another. I'm not sure how many of the rag-tag members of the OCSP have been brought to understand this.