Mgr Keith Netwon (CNS)
Posted on 11/07/2017 9:56:19 AM PST by ebb tide
Mgr Keith Newton was reportedly not invited to ecumenical events commemorating the Reformation
The head of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was snubbed from last week’s ecumenical commemorations of the Reformation, a leading Ordinariate priest has said.
In a letter to the Catholic Herald, Fr Ed Tomlinson asks why Mgr Keith Newton, who serves as ordinary of the group for former Anglicans, was not invited to be “part of the numerous ‘reformation celebrations’ taking part in the ecumenical landscape this week”.
Fr Tomlinson also wants to know why Mgr Newton had not been asked “to join the ARCIC [Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission] conversations despite his obvious importance as a former bishop of the Church of England now leading a body, the ordinariate, whose entire purpose is to enable Anglicans to become Catholic while retaining a distinctly English spirituality/patrimony”.
In the six years since the creation of the ordinariate, Fr Tomlinson says, “we have been routinely undermined by those in authority over us. Not a single church has been gifted to the ordinariate despite several closing each month. Why are so many of our clergy used to plug diocesan gaps instead of being enabled to flourish within the vision to which we were called?”
Read the full letter in the November 10 issue of the Catholic Herald
I understand he is exclude from other tgings as well, bu why would he want to go to these events celebrating the reformation?
Good question.
Why would any faithful catholic wish to attend such a celebration?
“Why would any faithful catholic wish to attend such a celebration?”
In Newton’s case? Recruitment. He is a FORMER Protestant who led dozens of Protestant ministers and thousands of Protestant faithful into the Catholic Church. As mainline Protestant groups self-destruct, meeting and getting to know Newton might help bring some of those faithful into the Catholic Church. I know this because I’ve seen it happen elsewhere. It wasn’t a “Reformation” event but it was a meeting between Protestants and Anglicans who had become Catholics. It was clear those Protestants were seriously contemplating coming into the Catholic Church. What they heard at that meeting helped convince many of them.
That's two strikes against it right there. Msgr Newton never had a chance.
I have an Anglican heritage, and I find the BCW to be far superior to a typical English-language Novus Ordo mass.
That having been said, I doubt that the Ordinariate or the BCW is long for this world.
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