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Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity Church, testified at a House hearing on March 8, 2012 against a bill that would make it a federal crime to transport minor girls without parental consent across state lines to get an abortion. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr) (CNSNews.com) – Were Congress to outlaw the transporting of a minor without her parents’ permission across state lines to get an abortion, an abortion- and gay-rights activist testifying on Capitol Hill Thursday she would break the law to continue to help girls end their pregnancies.Appearing as a Democratic Party witness at a...

Were Congress to outlaw the transporting of a minor without her parents’ permission across state lines to get an abortion, an abortion- and gay-rights activist testifying on Capitol Hill Thursday she would break the law to continue to help girls end their pregnancies. Appearing as a Democratic Party witness at a hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. recalled the time she took a 15-year-old girl she had never met before to get an abortion. “Although New Hampshire was closer to that girl’s...

So much talk amongst right wing Catholics of the erosion of religious liberty, the collapse of all things and the coming persecution. Talk of government detention centers and priests being shot like Bl. Miguel Pro. I don't think they get it. That's not what it will be like. America is different. We're into image big time. We thought the Soviets were into brainwashing and propaganda. We put them in the shade. America is all about healthy, lusty, good looking guys and gals who are clean cut, successful and smiling. We're into the good life. We're into being good and...

The season of Lent begins not only for millions of Catholics by having placed a sign of the cross on their foreheads with ash on Wednesday, but with many Christians in and outside of denominations vowing to mark the season with acts of faith.Though Lent is often seen as part of the Catholic tradition of fasting for 40 days (calculated sometimes to exclude the weekends in the days leading to Easter), many Christians view this time as serving as a reminder to the importance of getting closer to God.Christine Smith, founder of the online site Womens Bible Cafe, wrote on...

The Episcopal Church: The fruit of building with Satan's blueprints... "That if gold rust, what shall iron do?/ For if a priest be foul, in whom we trust,/ No wonder is a lewd man to rust." - Geoffrey Chaucer. Remember V. Gene Robinson, New Hampshire's Episcopal "Bishop" who said that the Vatican's ban on ordaining men with a homosexual inclination was "vile" and represented an "act of violence"? As I noted back in 2009, Mr. Robinson once opined that "the Episcopal Church and its proclamation of God's inclusive love" was something which appealed to young people who want to be...

A prophet is not necessarily someone who has a supernatural vision of the future. He may simply be a person who can see certain trends in the present, understand the underlying issues and therefore attempt to predict how things may go in the future. Here are some trends I see in the American Church and how I see the future developing. The first thing is the disintegration of denominationalism. It used to be that the different Protestant groups were distinct in their theology and their style of worship. There were boundaries. You pretty much knew what to expect in a...

February 6 Roy Schoeman- Jewish ConvertMark Shea- Former Baptist, Dr. Scott Hahn- Former Presbyterian, Fr. Ray Ryland- Former Episcopalian

Over at the National catholic Fishwrap, which sports the word “Catholic” in their title despite having been explicitly told not to by the local bishop, has an amusingly flaky piece by Sr. Maureen Fiedler, whom we have seen several times in these electronic pages. Sr. Fiedler is worked up over the new Personal Ordinariate for Anglicans/Episcopalians in the USA.Why? Because we should not welcome anyone into our Church who are against human equality!These new Anglican Catholics are fleeing from a welcoming, inclusive, non-homophobic community into one which denies that women and the abnormal sex acronym crowd can be ordained. Get...

More than 400 people, including a U.S. senator, witnessed the first same-sex civil union in Delaware on New Year's Day. Lawyers Lisa Goodman and Drewry Fennell were joined in the union by the Rev. Patricia Downing, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Wilmington, where the Sunday afternoon ceremony took place. Goodman and Fennell have been partners for 14 years. Goodman is a lawyer who led the advocacy group Equality Delaware's fight for the civil union law. Fennell heads the state Criminal Justice Council and formerly led the ACLU's Delaware chapter. U.S. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., delivered the sermon and Lt....

Twenty-six months since Anglicanorum coetibus laid the groundwork for groups of Anglicans to cross the Tiber whilst maintaining elements of their liturgical, spiritual, theological and canonical patrimony, the top-shelf papal project has taken a sizable leap this New Year's morning, with as the establishment of the venture's Stateside jurisdiction by the Holy See. In an unprecedented Sunday announcement -- a significant sign of Rome's degree of seriousness about the effort -- the Vatican's press bulletin gave official word of the erection of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, encompassing the territory of the United States. The...

(StAgustine.com) New Year’s Day ushers in a new era for Roman Catholics and members of the Anglican Church who will have the opportunity to enter into “corporate reunion” with the Holy See.An apostolic constitution, Anglicanorum coetibus, issued by Pope Benedict XVI, will lead to the creation of “personal ordinariates,” geographic regions similar to dioceses but typically national in scope.Parishes in these ordinariates are to be Catholic yet retain elements of the Anglican heritage and liturgical practices. They are to be led by an “ordinary” who will have a role similar to a bishop, but who may be either a...

At least 20 clergy and several hundred of their parishioners are already lined up to join the Ordinariate, the new structure set up by the Pope a year ago that allows them to remain some of their Anglican heritage while entering into full communion with the Holy See. But many more members of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England are likely to defect following a critical meeting of its governing body, the General Synod, if traditionalists who cannot accept the ordination of women are denied special provision. The head of the Ordinariate, Mgr Keith Newton, told The Daily...

Rome will formally announce appointment on New Year's DayFormer Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande, Jeffrey Steenson, is to be named the Ordinary when the Anglican Ordinariate is erected on January 1, 2012, sources tell VOL. Word seeped out from the Vatican late last week that Steenson -- who left The Episcopal Church in 2007 over TEC's polity - has been tapped for the new post as the Ordinariate gets its first foothold in the United States. The former Episcopal House of Bishops' member has been deeply concerned with the continued fracturing of Anglicanism. The Episcopal Church's insistence on autonomy...

Bishop Kevin W. Vann of Fort Worth Baltimore, Md., Nov 17, 2011 / 11:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Bishop Kevin W. Vann of Fort Worth will be in charge of welcoming and forming Episcopal priests who wish to become Catholic priests under the recently announced U.S. Anglican ordinariate.The appointment, which was made by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was announced on Nov. 15 by Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl of Washington at the U.S. bishops’ fall general assembly in Baltimore. Cardinal Wuerl also announced that an Anglican ordinariate will be established in the U.S. on Jan. 1,...

BALTIMORE (EWTN News)—A group of religious sisters in Maryland is believed to be the first U.S. Episcopal order to become a Catholic religious community. On Nov. 1, the All Saints Sisters of the Poor professed their perpetual vows at the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore. Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, received the sisters into a newly erected diocesan priory at a special Mass on the feast of All Saints. The 10 sisters had been part of a religious community within the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. After seven years...

WASHINGTON -- Once a flagship denomination of American mainline Protestantism, the U.S.-based Episcopal Church has for the first time in decades reported membership below two million.Self-reported statistics provided by the denomination this month show that the church has dropped from 2,006,343 members in 2009 to 1,951,907 in 2010, the most recent reporting year. The loss of 54,436 members increases the annual rate of decline from 2 percent to 3 percent, outpacing the most recently reported declines in most other mainline churches. The church's 10-year change in active members has dropped 16 percent.A branch of the otherwise fast-growing 80 million member worldwide...

... the guidelines established for the Anglican ordinariate by Pope Benedict XVI's in his 2009 apostolic constitution, Anglicanorum coetibus his 2007 Apostolic Letter "Summorum Pontificum" is St. Luke’s, in Maryland:“This truly is a historic moment,” said Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl, the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, who led Sunday’s conversion Mass, which he called “a joyful moment of completion.”Fifty-eight of St. Luke’s roughly 100 parishioners were confirmed at the applause-filled Mass, during which they were anointed by Wuerl — one by one, old and young, white and black.Osita Okafor, a 56-year-old Nigerian immigrant, found himself first in...

When the Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, N.Y., left the Episcopal Church over disagreements about what the Bible says about sexuality, the congregation offered to pay for the building in which it worshiped. In return the Episcopal Church sued to seize the building, then sold it for a fraction of the price to someone who turned it into a mosque.

The Washington National Cathedral, in its commemoration of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, has deliberately and carefully excluded evangelicals from their multi-religious commemoration. The service includes Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims, but not evangelical Christians. Mind you, I am opposed to interfaith services in any shape or form and that is why, in a previous blog, I stated that I was relieved that the mayor of New York spared us the agony of watching the One, True God of the Bible “worshipped” alongside false gods. National Cathedral (Washington, DC)The National Cathedral is a member of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation. Having...

“[We must] talk of hard financial issues and church decline and growth, to address elephants in the room, and to speak truth to one another in love." Executive Council of the Episcopal Church A month long investigation by Virtueonline into the numerical state of The Episcopal Church reveals that more than one third of all 6825 Episcopal parishes in the U.S. have an average Sunday attendance (ASA) of 40 or less. VOL believes that the figure of 2.3 million Episcopalians, regularly stated by TEC leaders and officials, does not reveal the true state of church attendance. More than two-thirds of...