News from the Coming Together conference

Taking place at Our Lady of Atonement Anglican Use parish in San Antonio, Texas. One of our bishops, a dean and a canon from the Anglican Catholic CHurch of Canada--my church--are attending. I wish I could be there.

Here's an excerpt of report from Mary Ann Mueller:

Perhaps in three hundred years, historians and journalists will look back on a mid-November 2010 meeting on the edge of a Texas desert and realize that it was the first time the various Anglican "cousins" of the emerging Anglican Ordinariate in America met and began forging the bonds that would weave them into a united ecclesial family under the patronage of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman and in full unity with the Vicar of Christ, the successor to the Throne of Peter.

A year ago, these vastly flung Anglican "cousins" heard the words of Pope Benedict XVI when he announced the establishment of the Anglican Ordinariate in his publication of Anglicanorum Coetibus, thus throwing open wide the doors of the Catholic Church to fully embrace those various Anglicans who want to reunite with the See of Peter while retaining their own unique Anglican patrimony and thereby helping to enrich the Catholic Church in the process.

"This is historic," proclaimed the Rev. Christopher Phillips, founding pastor of Our Lady of the Atonement Anglican Use Catholic Church. "A great change was set into motion - a change so tremendous that Anglican/Catholic relations will be seen in terms of 'before Anglicanorum Coetibus' and 'after Anglicanorum Coetibus'."

Just as Rome threw its doors open wide, Fr. Phillips has thrown the doors on his church to welcome American bishops, archbishops, priests, deacons, abbots, religious, hermits and laity to his San Antonio church so that the various Anglican cousins could come together as one in united prayer, unified praise, and common Anglican fellowship.

More than 125, from all points on the map responded to Fr. Phillips open invitation to come together and begin forming a united family centered around their common desire to become one in the Catholic Church.

A wide spectrum of the Anglican alphabet soup was represented at the three-day "Becoming One" gathering in Texas. Anglicans from the Episcopal Church (TEC); the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC); and Catholic Church (RC); the Anglican Church in America (ACA); and the Federation of Anglican Churches in America (FACA) and a number of other Anglican jurisdictions.

"The Pope wants Anglicans not acronyms," Fr. Phillips explained. "TAC, FIF-NA, ACA, ACNA, AU ... Anglicanorum Coetibus envisions none of those things continuing within an Ordinariate.

"With the implementation of the Holy Father's Apostolic Constitution, they will have served their purpose," the Texas priest continued, "and as necessary as they were to get us here, they will be needed no more."

He noted that Forward in Faith and the Traditional Anglican Communion were instrumental in helping the See of Peter recognize and respond to the spiritual yearning of Anglo-Catholics committed to reunifying with the Great Latin Church of the West and to help fulfill the Lord's heartfelt pastoral prayer that "they all may be one ..." Now a new era is dawning and the next stage of development has begun.