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Thanks for the history lesson. I was not aware of any of this.

Chuck & Jack never left the Anglicans, didn't want to leave the Anglicans, and didn't mean for their followers to leave the Anglicans. It just happened.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with two gentlemen from Jordan, after last Sunday's Mass. On learning they were from Jordan I asked if they were Maronite. They seemed perplexed and confirmed that they were Roman Catholic. That surprised me but, aware of the fact that there are a few RC parishes in Jordan, I decided to use this as a 'teaching moment' and introduced them to the 21 Eastern Catholic Churches, most of which are from their part of the world. I brought their names up at last night's Parish Council meeting and related the conversation from Sunday. Father said he recently ran into them at an event run by the Syrian Orthodox Church, along with their parents and cousins. He assumed they were Orthodox. He then explained that in the Middle East, families are so religiously mixed that many of these people no longer know into which Church they were baptized, if at all. He then proceed to relate the story behind a recent phone call from someone seeking official documents for his son, about to be married in Lebanon. He assured Father that his son had been Baptized and Chrismated in our parish, yet there are no records. The caller could not produce any witnesses either.

This simply intrigues me no end. In our parish we have a blend of Maronite, Melkite, Latin Rite and Orthodox who come together each Sunday, simply to worship God. No doubt God keeps His own records ;-)

We've been very fortunate in our part of the world that good records have been kept for many years! One of the things that is a problem for die-hard genealogists is all of the courthouse fires that have occurred across the South in the last 200 years (not the Civil War - just flammable wooden courthouses!) Multiply that by hundreds of wars and dislocations in the Middle East, and you have some idea of what the confusion must be like over there!

I had absolutely no trouble getting my husband's baptismal certificate from the North Georgia Conference of the Methodist Church when he was received into the Catholic Church (the Episcopalians had never asked for a certificate when he was received into the ECUSA! The Catholics AND the Methodists are much better record-keepers. I didn't need to bother the ECUSA bishop here, 'cause I have the original baptismal certificate in our fireproof safe . . . )