Posted on 01/04/2005 2:34:33 PM PST by churchillbuff
ROMAN CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF SCRANTON TO RECEIVE FIRST ECUSA PRIEST
By David W. Virtue
SCRANTON, PA (1/4/2005)--For the first time in the 137-year history of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Scranton, Bishop Joseph F. Martino will receive a married former Scranton Episcopal priest and father into the priesthood from the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem.
The Rev. Eric Bergman, an Anglo-Catholic priest at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Scranton's Green Ridge section in the liberal ECUSA diocese, renounced his orders effective December 31st and left the Episcopal Church over the church's acceptance of homosexuality and the consecration of an avowed homoerotic bishop to the episcopacy in the person of V. Gene Robinson.
In a phone call to VirtueOnline Fr. Bergman, 34, and the father of three children said, "I think that the ordination of Robinson is the logical conclusion of the contraceptive mentality. When Lambeth approved contraception for married couples in 1930 they set the stage for the Robinson consecration in 2003. You remove the marital act from its purpose and we bless sterile intercourse. It is not a big jump to bless then sterile homosexual intercourse."
Some 60 parishioners at Good Shepherd will follow the priest and become Roman Catholics. About 275 will remain in the Episcopal parish. The group leaving the Episcopal parish also includes a small group from St. Stephen's parish in Whitehall, the former parish of Fr. William Ilgenfritz, who recently left that parish for a parish in the Diocese of Pittsburgh.
In an open letter to the congregation Fr. Bergman wrote, "The events that have unfolded within the Episcopal Church USA and across the worldwide Anglican Communion can certainly be understood to be a catalyst that precipitated action on my part. That is, the election of an unmarried and unchaste man to the office of bishop demands a response from the faithful, particularly when the institutional response on the part of the Anglican Communion to this innovation has been so feeble. Nevertheless, I now view the incidents of General Convention 2003 as the logical outcome of a flawed orientation that betrays the Anglican Communion’s ability to proclaim the Good News, especially that truth that life comes to us through sacrifice. It is this orientation, ensconced in the teachings of the Anglican Communion for the past 74 years that finally led me to renounce my orders."
Episcopal Bishop Paul Marshall knew I was going to Rome and asked me to write this letter to the congregation on why I was leaving and renouncing my orders, Bergman told VirtueOnline.
Fr. Bergman, a Bethlehem native, will be received into the Roman Catholic Church through a process known as the "Pastoral Provision Decision," and will result in the conversion, priestly formation and potential ordination of Mr. Eric Bergman, a former priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem, as a member of the clergy of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Scranton, said a press statement from the Roman Catholic diocese. Bergman and his wife, Kristina, are the parents of three children, Clara, Eric and Julia, all of whom who will become Catholic.
The Pastoral Provision Decision, rendered in 1980 by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, came in response to a request from the North American Province of the Society of the Holy Cross, a secular institute of Anglican priests, whose married members wished to offer themselves for priestly ministry in the Roman Catholic Church, as well as lay Episcopalians who wished to enter the Catholic Church with a common spiritual and liturgical identity.
In its acceptance of former married Episcopalian clergy as clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pastoral Provision Decision grants a special exception to the Roman Catholic Church's rule of mandatory priestly celibacy. However, the Decision stressed that this particular exclusion "should not be understood as implying any change in the Church's conviction of the value of priestly celibacy, which will remain the rule for future candidates for the priesthood from this group."
"I warmly welcome Mr. Bergman, his family and members of his former lay community on their new faith journey to become Roman Catholic," said Bishop Martino. "We assure them all of our prayers and complete cooperation as they take the initial steps toward full communion with the Roman Catholic Church in the Diocese of Scranton," the bishop stated.
Bishop Martino said that the Diocese of Scranton and Mr. Bergman have taken initial steps to begin the conversion/ordination process established through the Pastoral Provision Decision. The steps include preparation and submission of a dossier, or report, containing required documents which will accompany Mr. Bergman's petition to the Holy See for priesthood and incardination, or service to the Diocese of Scranton.
Fr. Bergman told VirtueOnline that his new congregation will use the Book of Divine Worship published in 2003 in which elements of the Book of Common Prayer are revised and adapted according to the Roman Rite for use by Roman Catholics coming from the Anglican tradition.
On January 2, Bishop Martino announced that Mr. Bergman will become Executive Director of the newly-formed St. Thomas More Society of St. Clare's Church in the Green Ridge section of Scranton. Members of the St. Thomas More Society of St. Clare's Church will provide for the temporal needs of Mr. Bergman and study with him in preparation to enter the Catholic Church. Mr. Bergman said that membership in the St. Thomas More Society is open to all former Anglicans or Episcopalians.
To date, the Holy See has permitted the ordination of a number of former Anglican or Episcopal priests who have become Catholic in the U.S., Canada and Great Britain.
Episcopal Bishop Paul Marshall was in Africa and could not be reached for comment.
on a lighter note...many years ago ( 70's)I had the good fortune to attend a holiday party where Cardinal DSpellman, then the RC Archbishop of NY was also prsent..he was a long time friend of the family..so this was a low-key evening..and it was unusual for me to see the cardinal in a more personal aspect. At the time there had been several articles in the paper about whether or not RC priests should be allowed to marry..the Cardinal was asked the question..what did he think?..I'll never forget..he took a sip of brandy, put down his snifter, and his cigarette, and said , in a fake brogue.."But what would I do when they want to get divorced?"
Married men can become deacons in the Catholic Church, and I think it would be great to see more men who retire at 65, with 20 or 30 years ahead of them, become active deacons.
Allowing priests to marry won't make one bit of difference in the molestation numbers because men who want to molest children or teenagers would do it even if they were married.
I think that celibacy is a gift in the Church precisely BECAUSE our society is so sex obsessed.
Uhhh...they are molesting people of the same sex. Marrying women won't help that.
Thanks for posting this. My Priest, and a group of families entered corporately into the RC Church over 20 years ago via the Pastoral Provision.
We also use Rite One of the Book of Divine Worship at our Masses. My Parish, Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio was the first Anglican Use Roman Catholic Parish.
http://www.atonementonline.com
On the other hand, if a priest finds out later in his career that he is called to marriage and not celibacy, he should be allowed to stay in the priesthood.
Again, it should be a minority, not the majority. As St. Paul said, celibate men tend to devote more time to the Lord than married men. Nevertheless, in certain issues, I can relate better to a married priest than to a celibate one. Having a married priest out of the 3 or 4 serving in my parish will be a blessing.
Marriage and the priesthood are not theologically, intellectually, or practically exclusive. Lay Catholics, by and large, no longer value celibacy in their priests the way they once did, especially when they see married men performing clerical duties.
They can certainly work for the Church in their married state, there is no need to be a priest to make this a better world.
This is certainly true. However, it's a shame that the Church has to "settle" for men who's first decision must be whether they can live a single life, not whether they are called to a life of service in the priesthood.
Oldironsides reaction is the reaction of every other Catholic I've ever had this discussion with.
A married convert from the Episcopal or Lutheran Church can be a priest, but not a married man who's been a lifelong Catholic.
Mandatory celibacy may continue in the Latin Rite, but it is becoming more and more indefensible.
Dear patent,
Good to see you.
Hope you had great holydays.
sitetest
For the record, Spellman died in December of 1967.
I believe your story, however. John Lindsey was flying back to New York in the 60s, and had the good fortune to sit next to Bishop Fulton Sheen.
When Sheen remarked about a stunning flight attendant, Lindsey was surprised.
Sheen retorted "Well, just because I'm on a diet doesn't mean I can't look at the menu."
There are child molesters and homosexuals who are also married to women. Some cover their sexual crimes through the disguise of being married. It's not a matter of achieving orgasm that a homosexual or molester attacks human prey. Rather, it's the sinful vice of lust. This sin is no different in disobedience than rage, gluttony, sloth, vanity, envy, or greed.
Thus, a married man (or priest) who engages in lust has no protection from lust by merely being married. That man has lost his will to sin and it's the sin that binds him from being chaste in celibacy.
Furthermore, the mission of Holy Orders is so demanding a life that it takes an entire life's commitment to fulfill the daily vows of priesthood for men and being a nun for women. But I'm sure you know Catholic response to Holy Orders.
Very few, sadly. One of the reasons why Christians have become so lukewarm in the past few generations.
Really? Then why has the Vatican allowed over 400 converts from Anglicanism and Lutheranism, 98% of them married with children, be ordained?
The discipline of celibacy was originally adopted as a response to a sex obsessed Western society - the Roman Empire.
Celibacy was a discipline which had zero appeal to the worldly attitudes of the ancient Mediterranean.
The difference today is that those who vowed celibacy in the 1st century on the whole lived it heroically, dynamically and unapologetically.
Only a minority of modern priestly celibates live up to their standard.
Well thanks..the story IS true,,and it was a typo on my part..it was Christmas 65 or 66...at a house in Mamaroneck, NY
You are badly mistaken.
Priests were never allowed to marry. Men who were already married were allowed to become priests, but no one who was unmarried when he was ordained was ever allowed to marry after his ordination.
This is true even among the Eastern Orthodox, the vast majority of whose clergy is married.
The Roman discipline of selecting only unmarried men for the priesthood was formalized as a law in the year 303 at the Council of Elvira - and the practice in Latin Christianity at that time was already one in which married men who received ordination lived in complete chastity after their ordination.
Bad priests often continued to surreptitiously take concubines, but this practice was always contrary to Church law.
Lust for power over a more vulnerable person, usually.
This kind of thinking makes zero sense.
If the priests who committed these horrible crimes had ever wanted to be normal, married men, they would be having affairs with adult women - not molesting teenage boys or visiting male prostitutes.
The reasons why these deviants are in the priesthood are (1) because molesters gravitate toward jobs that give them access to children and (2) in the 1950s Western seminaries began replacing the old novitiate programs with psychological screenings.
In other words, there are no longer any gatekeepers, thanks to the meddling of leftist "reformers".
Why does the Catholic Church accept non-Catholics (and even keeps some former non-Catholic priests bound to their marriage vows)? For the same reason that Satan possesses and tortures a child.
A soul is a soul.
Many priestly converts have already finished raising children. Thus, they can cowboy up some souls for Christ and focus on this most important mission. Not all Protestant clergy converts are married priests. Furthermore, not all Catholics who help minister Grace are Priests. Perhaps statistics for Eucharistic ministers and Deacons should be examined. They don't say Mass, but they participate in a vital function for the Church. How have their numbers been in the last 100 to 200 years?
400 hundred sounds like big number at first. But how many converts to the Catholic Faith have their been in recent living history?
Agreed. I guess it's a possession thing, and a very evil thing, too.
I think you lost me when you compared the Anglican Dispensation to Satan torturing children.
Wanna try again?
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