Bishop Mercer speaks to the news media

UPDATE:

Bishop Robert Mercer CR has asked that the following be clarified with regard to the ENI news article released on the 14th January 2011.

Bishop Robert Mercer CR has not said at any time that he will be ordained at the same time as Edwin Barnes in Portsmouth on the 5th March 2011 as reported in the London (ENInews) news article released by Trevor Grundy 14th January. No decision has as yet taken place with regards to his ordination in the ‘Ordianariate of Our Lady of Walsingham’.

*****************

Finally, Bishop Robert Mercer is mentioned in the British media. And my oh my does the mild-mannered monk give unpolitically correct copy. You got to love him. My bolds:

Shortly afterwards, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the spiritual head of the 77 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion, said that the pope’s offer to disaffected Anglicans had put him into an "awkward position." Just before Christmas last year he said he was "very taken aback that this large step was put before us (the Church of England) without any real consultation."

However, Robert Mercer, the former Bishop of Matabeleland (Zimbabwe) and former bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church in Canada, said he sees the pope's move as a step toward reconciliation.

"I’m a great enthusiast for what is going to happen on Saturday ... Off and on over 400 years, the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches have talked in a pretty desultory way about reconciliation. Now it is happening. I will cross to Rome as soon as I hear from the Vatican. No one can say how many Anglicans will do likewise but this is the start," Mercer told ENInews in an interview.

"The present pope ... is a revolutionary and this is a revolutionary thing he is doing," Mercer added. "It’s the logical outcome of the 19th century’s Oxford Movement." The movement stated that Anglicanism along with Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism form three branches of the one Catholic church.

Mercer said the pope is expected to appoint a leader of the new ordinariate later this month.

He said that in recent years Anglicans had pursued a path that had made reconciliation with Rome difficult. He included support from the “liberal wing” of the Church of England for gay marriages, the ordination of women as priests and what he called "extreme feminism that turns God into a mother figure and Jesus as a daughter. In other words, what they have been doing is a revolt against the universal Christian tradition."

Earlier this month, the Catholic Church in England and Wales issued a statement saying that the three former Anglican bishops – Broadhurst, Burnham and Newton – had been received with some members of their families into full communion with the Catholic Church during Mass at Westminster Cathedral on New Year’s Eve. Three former Anglican religious sisters were also received.

Two more Anglicans, Edwin Barnes, former Bishop of Richborough and David Silk, former Bishop of Ballarat in Australia, are expected to be ordained as Catholic priests either this month or in February. Mercer said he expects he will be ordained at the same time as Barnes. {I guess not}