When Father Patrick Allen lay prostrate before the bishop for his diaconate ordination on June 29, Allen’s son, Henry, ran up to join his dad.
Posted on 07/20/2013 1:45:48 PM PDT by NYer
It was barely a week into Father Patrick Allen’s new ministry when, in the course of taking his two children to activities in his nonreligious clothes, at least five people asked:
So, what do you do for a living?
Allen smiles graciously, sometimes bringing his hand to his chest in a humble gesture, one that coincidentally shows his wedding band.
“This might begin a long conversation,” the James Island father says.
“I’m a Catholic priest.”
When his daughter, Lucy, goes to Charleston Catholic School next year, she will be the only student whose father comes not only for parent conferences and class parties, but also to celebrate Mass.
Ordained a Catholic priest July 7, Allen joins a small but growing group of former Episcopalians embarking on a new journey, one they hope marks a critical step down the long path to Christian unity.
They have embraced a new option in Catholicism that allows Anglicans to become fully Roman Catholic yet retain elements of their liturgical and theological traditions.
Allen is the second Episcopal priest in South Carolina to join the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, often dubbed the “Anglican ordinariate.”
Pope Benedict XVI created the ordinariate, a non-geographic diocese within the Catholic Church, for groups of American Anglicans who wanted to enter full communion with the Vatican.
The result: Two weeks ago, Allen lay prostrate before the Most Rev. Robert Guglielmone, bishop of Charleston.
Those on hand for his ordination included his closest Anglican mentor and friend, the priest who heads the ordinariate and the once-Episcopalian families joining him to create a new Catholic community.
None asked, What do you do?
Circular paths
What he does today, fresh into his Catholic ministry, completes a circular life’s path.
Allen was raised Catholic in a Florida parish until he was 11. Then, his parents began attending an evangelical Presbyterian church.
Ever fascinated by history, he went to college unsure but with an eye toward teaching history.
He attended a Presbyterian seminary college working on his master’s in divinity, though not seriously considering the ministry, much less the Anglican priesthood. Meanwhile, a friend in Charleston invited him to work at Camp St. Christopher.
Allen served as head counselor and then assistant director of the summer camp for nine years, time that proved pivotal to virtually every front of his life.
He confirmed his desire to teach and mentor.
He fell in love with a young woman named Ashley Duckett, who also worked on the camp’s summer staff.
And he met future mentors such as the Rev. M. Dow Sanderson, a deeply intellectual priest who adhered to an Anglo-Catholic tradition that appealed to Allen.
Allen also discovered the Book of Common Prayer.
“I fell in love with it,” he recalls.
He felt drawn to the sacramental nature of Anglicanism and studied people including John Henry Newman, Anglican priest-turned-Catholic cardinal. Newman famously once said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”
Allen also met the Very Rev. Craige Borrett, rector of Christ St. Paul’s on Yonge’s Island who encouraged the young man to consider becoming an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion’s American province.
“I had successfully avoided the idea up to that point,” Allen says with a grin.
The weight of it
At the University of the South (Sewanee) in Tennessee, Allen was immersed in Anglican studies. He hung a picture of Pope John Paul II on his wall.
Looking back, it seems a prophetic choice.
While delivering the benediction at his ordination in 2001, Allen looked out over the masses kneeling before him.
“The weight of it came to me,” he recalls.
A naturally introverted man, Allen put his studies into action.
“Nothing prepares you for getting involved in people’s lives in such very personal and important ways,” he recalls.
Then-Bishop Edward Salmon assigned him to a tiny parish in Calhoun County.
It was the ultimate gift, Allen later realized.
He was near the parish Sanderson led at the time. While some other Episcopal churches were booming with contemporary services, Sanderson adhered to high Anglicanism.
Meanwhile, Duckett, the young woman he’d been dating, went to medical school at MUSC.
They married in 2003. She did her residency at Vanderbilt University. He moved to a parish nearby.
In time, they returned to her hometown Charleston where she joined MUSC’s faculty.
And Sanderson, then rector of Church of the Holy Communion in downtown Charleston, made a place for Allen.
“Holy Communion has a very unique role in the diocese here,” Allen says.
The parish adheres to the tradition of the Oxford Movement, which asserts Anglicanism’s Catholic continuity with the earlier, pre-Reformation church.
It was, in some ways, an oasis in the storm, a like-minded sanctuary to contemplate and teach even as the Episcopal Church faced growing divisions.
New paths
Cracks of schism were widening nationwide over the Episcopal Church’s ordination of an openly gay bishop and other theological issues. Local Bishop Mark Lawrence and many clergy in town supported a more traditional reading of Scripture.
Ultimately, even Holy Communion could not avoid the question.
When Lawrence and most local parishes disassociated from the Episcopal Church last fall, each parish’s leaders had to decide whether to stay with the national church or go with Lawrence’s group.
Yet, for Allen and many at Holy Communion, the choice was a uniquely different one.
Remain Episcopalian, or pursue a larger reunion of Anglicans and Catholics? Pope Benedict XVI had just created the new ordinariate.
“I already knew I would wind up in the Catholic Church,” says Allen, who by then had two young children.
He had settled into a realization that the Catholic Church was what it claimed to be: the church founded by Christ.
At first, he hoped the entire parish would convert.
“But leaving the church they grew up in was not a possibility” for many, he recalls.
Holy Communion remained with the Episcopal Church.
About two dozen members decided on their own to convert to Catholicism. So did Allen.
In a letter to his parish, he wrote: “Mine is a move forward to the Catholic Church, and I am nothing but grateful for my years in the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of South Carolina.”
Still, it concerns him that the timing could be suspect.
“I didn’t want the fact or appearance of dividing the church and leading people out of there,” Allen says. “Instead, it was a fulfillment of the faith we held.”
At the end of last year, he relinquished his Episcopalian orders and no longer went by “father,” not in the religious sense anyway.
God’s design
Six months later, at his Catholic diaconate ordination, Allen lay prostrate before Bishop Guglielmone. Allen’s 2-year-old son, Henry, ran up to lie down beside his dad.
Someone snapped a photo of the moment.
The picture is, in some ways, a reflection of Allen’s life now. Catholic priest. Father of two. Husband.
“It has worked out the way God designed,” Allen says.
He describes both his former bishop Lawrence and current bishop Guglielmone as gracious and supportive of his move.
He, along with his wife and 19 former Holy Communion members he calls “pilgrims,” were confirmed together last month. They have formed the Corpus Christi Catholic Community, which meets in St. Mary of the Annunciation in downtown Charleston.
When Allen was ordained to the priesthood, Monsignor Jeffrey N. Steenson, head of the American ordinariate, was on hand.
Sanderson and his wife were, too.
“We were so very proud of him as he began this new chapter in his call to serve God,” Sanderson says. “He and I share the same theological core values, and we will always remain close friends.”
Today, Allen is learning the finer points of celebrating Mass and assisting Monsignor Steven Brovey, rector of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. He’s also building Corpus Christi from scratch using a fully Catholic Mass with elements recognizable to any Anglican.
“All things that are good and pure and true in the Anglican church have a home in the Catholic Church,” Allen says.
Pope Benedict compared the ordinariate to building a house and including a room for cherished items from one’s former home.
There’s also a missionary aspect to building Corpus Christi that appeals to Allen.
“It is a seed,” he says. “And my somewhat unique status brings on those questions.”
So, what do you do for a living?
"Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth."
You can read that passage in your preferred version as well -- http://biblehub.com/drb/1_timothy/4.htm -- it says the same thing.
Forbidding marriage among your leadership is, according to Scripture, demonic.
Just keeping it real.
Many of us do read what you write, Vlad, so keep up the good work.
You should know that your lack of replies will simply be assumed by others to be examples of what they are on your part. I don’t mind that. I also don’t mind pointing out your errors without rejoinder from you.
Thank you!
Seminarians are not forbidden to marry. They choose voluntarily to not marry and are then ordained as priests.
One of the many examples of how we can know that their religion is NOT the church of the bible...Their own bible that they claim they invented condemns their existence...
So if a seminarian chooses to marry, he then is still ordained as a priest...Right???
You wrote:
“So if a seminarian chooses to marry, he then is still ordained as a priest...Right???”
No, if he has chosen to marry, he has chosen not to be ordained.
The Catholic Church was around when the Bible was complied in the first place, and was the church responsible for doing so. Protestants didn't show up until the 1600s. Your argument makes no logical sense. Do you think your church got in a time machine and went back the 300s to issue the first bibles?
>> So if a seminarian chooses to marry, he then is still ordained as a priest...Right??? <<
Under certain Catholic traditions, yes. Obviously the Catholic priest in this article chose to marry and was then ordained a Catholic priest later on. There are dozens of married Catholics priests in the United States right now that are in good standing with the church and fully allowed to exercise their priesthood. People don't know about them because the Catholic Church doesn't advertise it, and clerical celibacy is the norm.
Read the post I’m responding to. The posters thesis is that a married priesthood will keep pedophiles at bay. My response is about the general population of pedophiles not the general population of married men.
**Forbidding marriage among your leadership is, according to Scripture, demonic.**
Scripture reference, please. The whole chapter not just one verse taken out of context.
Hi Sitest,
I was taught that in class some years ago. They thought they were married as a kind of smokescreen to get closer to their victims. Pedophiles were defined as the abusers of younger children, not teenagers. I’ve looked around for a proper cite but it tough finding decent information because of all the pro-homosexual propaganda. I note that a number of sites make a distinction between child molesters and pedophiles. That’s something my professors do not do. I does occur to me that the state of knowledge from that time may not apply now. (the population of married people was much higher 30 years ago). If I find that out I’ll come back to this thread and say so and take back my post.
The Child Sexual Abuser: Perceptions of College Students and Professionals1
http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/humans_web_04/deviance/Perceptions%20of%20Abuse.pdf
College students and members of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) were compared as to their beliefs and attitudes concerning perpetrators of child sexual abuse. ......
Table I. Abuser Characteristics as Perceived by.......Professionals
Marital status (%)
Single/Never married .............12.1
Divorced................................... 9.1
Married....................................78.8
This compares with the perceptions of my professors. This paper was published in 2002. In the 2000 census the total population of single/never married men was 30%.
The flaw in your argument is that no man is forced to become a priest.
If a man chooses to become a priest in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, then he is signing on for celibacy, which Christ and St. Paul commend.
Are there any celibate clergy in your church? If not, why not?
Yes I would like to see a Scripture reference as well.
You know, because every spiritual, religious belief MUST be backed by the Bible.
I agree with your findings.
This research is about what students and professional believe about the attributes of child molesters, not research that actually statistically measures the attributes of child molesters.
Interestingly, it seems that the students’ perception of the attributes of child molesters may be superior to that of the professionals, at least in some regard. Here is a quote from the paper that you cite:
“Research indicates that most CSA perpetrators are White males, in their thirties, single, fairly well educated, and employed (Abel, Becker, Cunningham-Rathner, Mittelman, & Rouleau, 1988).” [emphasis added by me]
Thus, your cited research doesn't support what you said, that, “Pedophiles are almost always married men...”
In fact, a quick perusal suggests that the research you cite doesn't directly address the question, but in passing, says precisely the opposite of what you've asserted.
sitetest
Her “findings” don't say what she says they say.
They actually say the opposite.
sitetest
Please keep pinging me. This is an interesting question.
I don't believe it...I'll bet there's lots of young men out there who be married and and Catholic priests as well if it was against the rules...
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