Married Episcopal priest will become priest in Roman Catholic Diocese of Scanton

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.

I'm surprised at how many people are willing to "chuck" something that they really don't understand. The arrogance of neo-Catholics (and Protestants) who don't comprehend the wisdom of the Church through the ages will never cease to amaze me.

This will help:

Excerpt from the taped interview of Fr. Malachi Martin by Bernard Janzen :The Eternal War: the Priesthood in Crisis:
(transcription by me)

"...the idea is to do away with the priesthood. The thing that really militates against the popular taste today about priesthood is celibacy. They regard nowadays, in the society in which we live, the expression of sexuality whether within marriage...outside of marriage whether by yourself or with somebody of the same sex, or with an animal is regarded as quite normal.... If you don't "frighten the horses" so to speak. Provided you don't violate any "rule of decent living".

The idea that men, young men of twenty say,..take a vow of celibacy. That they will never get married. And that they can keep that without getting twisted and psychologically moronic and finally ending up in pedophilia or sadism or in some twisted psychology. That is the normal attitude towards priests today. So the idea of Roman Catholic celibacy is something that is utterly alien to the mind.

Why? Because the idea of priesthood is. And this is where the great lack in teaching in seminaries and in the Catholic populace lies.

You see...a priest..Christ was once asked, (they pointed out a eunuch to him... a eunuch was somebody who accidentally or for some reason or another couldn't have sex. His genitals were destroyed or something.)
And somebody said to him, "Lord what do you think of the eunuch? And he said,"There are three kinds of eunuchs. There's the man who's born like that from nature." ( Deficient in other words, he hasn't got the where-with-all). "There's the one who men made a eunuch." (Because they used to castrate people to make them eunuchs because eunuchs are very useful in palaces. 'cause they wouldn't touch the women and they were very good guards. And eunuchs always developed a very great cruelty. I suppose in reaction to their mutilation. And also if you did that, the voice remained high-pitched and beautiful through teenage years. And then he said, "There is a third kind of eunuch who does it to himself for the sake of the kingdom of God. He said, very mysteriously, "whoever understands, let him understand," [Fr. Martin then quotes the phrase aloud in Latin]....meaning there is a very deep mystery.

The mystery is this: I can look on my celibacy if I am a priest, as a chastity belt. And the Church has locked it and thrown away the key. In that case then, I'm just somebody deprived of what I should have a right to by a greater force that's thrown away the key.

That's not celibacy at all. That is enforced continence.

I can look on celibacy then as something acceptable to the Church but a pain in the neck or a pain somewhere else. I still am very far from it.

The celibate is somebody who says to himself or herself (a nun), "My greatest power of love is in reproduction and in living with another human being. And in having children and in exchanging our love and warmth and friendship and confidence. And giving each other the intimacy of our very being, soul and body, which a true marriage does.

But, I will give that up because..when I become a priest, Christ puts a seal on my soul. The seal of his priesthood. And that seal cordons me off for a higher destiny. And the destiny is to have a very, very particular union with God, with Christ.

And that union is the union of somebody who is going to hold God's body in his hands at Mass. And is going to be a special emissary bringing blessing and shriving people from their sins and healing their souls. That's what true celibacy is. It's a segregation of your soul from all the lovely things in life that human love can bring and marriage can bring.

By the way, Look. It also has its ills and its difficulties but in general, it's regarded as a great benefit to be married. Or to live with somebody as we do nowadays. [sarcasm from Fr. Martin]

But to cut that off deliberately and to do it lovingly and to make it a positive contribution, and to devote all the energies that nature has given us for human love... to devote them to Christ. And to concentrate all that on..the Sacrifice of Christ and the preaching of his Gospel and the transmission of his message of love and salvation to souls and healing them and shriving them and helping them supporting them guiding them and welcoming them to the truth. That is the highest vocation a man can have.

Similarly with a nun who takes a vow of chastity. The same thing, She says to herself, "I'm going to imitate Our Lady, who is a virgin. who is the Mother of God. I'm going to have spiritual children and most of Our Lady's children are spiritual. (She had only one child of her own who was called Jesus.) But, I'm going to have those children by my prayers and by my identity with the great mother: The Mother of God.

And I'm going to do all that by renouncing this: Not because it's ill or bad. It's not bad, It's good. God made it. It's good, he said, 'Increase and multiply, love each other, be one flesh. It's a sacrament in the New Covenant. But I'm going to renounce that because I'm going to have a greater identification with Our Lady because God is calling me to that. And all the love and sympathy and empathy and the perceptiveness of love, I'm going to transfer that to Our Lady and Our Lord. And I'm going to make that my special sacrifice."

And in the beginning it is a sacrifice. And then, with the passage of time and fidelity, suddenly...this flower blooms in their souls.
And they achieve this marvelous tranquility and this marvelous warmth that people always saw in the traditional priest. This amazing power to get inside you. This light, this feeling that they were there for you. They weren't riven in their sympathies. And they were there for you because Christ was their man, Christ was their King, Christ was their High Priest. That idea of priesthood....you won't find that anywhere today in Catholic manuals or preached in sermons or anything like that. Celibacy is regarded as...like Fish on Friday , a law we want to change and do away with."

I don't know whether Fr. Neuhaus has ever married but I know that there is a Fr. Lockwood in the St. Louis Archdiocese who is a married father of many children who was a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor and was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church and ordained a priest. He is not alone.

Another consideration favoring the admission to the priesthood of those non-Catholic clergy who are married upon conversion to Catholicism is that it would be quite unjust to the clergyman's wife to suggest that divorce should be his path to the Catholic priesthood but not at all unjust to require him not to remarry if she should die (which also is a requirement of the permanent diaconate, is it not?). I suspect that the RCC would similarly admit Orthodox married clergy. Perhaps, the provision should extend to those of other Christian religions. Marcus Grodi, Gerry Matatics (at least years ago when my wife and I were acquainted with him), and some of the other converts from Presbyterianism would probably make first class priests. Obviously we are not going to admit women clergy from any of those Churches, as Pope John Paul II has definitively ruled.

The world ought conform to us and not vice versa.

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