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.
the popes judged it right to tolerate this custom, which flourished among Greeks and Orientals, rather than to forbid it by their apostolic authority, to avoid giving them a pretext to abandon unity.
In other words, the Popes tolerate the abuse rather than give the Easterns a false reason to schism.
The Latin rite priests hold the line by which all others are measured.(even in this abysmal day) Just as the Protestants of the early 20th Century looked far more "Catholic" in order to look legitimate when measured against the Catholic Church. Now, when Vatican II came along and the Churchmen wanted to join the world, everything went to pot in the Church and without. As the Catholic Church goes, so goes the world.
The whole point of homosexuals being in the preisthood and encouraged, IS to remove the celibate priesthood.
I thought the whole point was to legitimize homosexuality. That's the whole point of everything else they do.
The modernists will not be content with the Latins having equivalent married priesthoods to the Easterns
As I noted in several earlier posts, the issues are not linked. Celibate priesthood is a matter of changeable church discipline; sodomy and female priests are contrary to Divine law and can never be legitimized.
and the Easterns have their own liberals with nothing to restrain them
Franky Schaeffer, the son of a famous Evangelical author who rejected his father's path and converted to Orthodox, explained that he joined the Orthodox church because it has no liberal wing. That alone almost made me sign up.
And take down that damned medal in the Vatican celebrating the murder of the Huguenots, while you're at it.
Maybe, when they apologize and convert.
It's the Papacy, not the descendants of Huguenots, who owes an apology. As for converting -- stop all Catholic practice that contradicts Holy Scripture -- including celebrating the murder of people who dared READ the Holy Scripture, such as, for example, the Huguenots -- and I'll GLADLY convert... or rather, convert BACK... and my 100% Irish mother, who had me baptized as a Catholic, will be very pleased. Dad (the Scottish/Huguenot side) is dead and won't care.
Note post 238 especially.
Rytwyng, thanks for the ping.
Sionnsar - FYI.
Too tired to make any comments tonight - and may never. Celibacy isn't an issue for me; homoerotics are. I'm still struggling to stay in my Church and fight for it. I pray that the Liberals haven't so thorougly polluted us as to be permanently entrenched.
Don't know whether it's my Welsh, Heugenot, or Scottish blood that refuses to yield MY Church.
Back to bed, perhaps to sleep. Later.
Luckily, you don't have the authority to much such decisions.
Actually, maybe you should blame the French Monarchy.
That would seem to be a violation of scripture for a married man to withhold himself from his wife. They can do so for a time, upon agreement, but scripture instructs them to come back together.
Ah, well. I guess tradition trumps scripture for some.
You said.."Maybe, when they apologize and convert."
Are we feeling a little Muslim-like today? Next you will say the Huguenots deserved to die because they were not Catholic...BAHAHAHA!!!!
Thanks for the ping. Me thinks some here are just a little ignorant.. to say the least... about Protestants..eh?
Tnanks for the ping. Believe I had posted this earlier on the Religion board.
That's called an 'end-run.'
GP: Maybe, when they apologize and convert.
EDW: Next you will say the Huguenots deserved to die because they were not Catholic
Until VERY recently, I had no problem with Catholics. I have Catholic ancestors (Irish) who were persecuted by Protestants as well as Protestant ancestors (Huguenot, Scotch-Irish) who were persecuted by Catholics. I ended up in the Evangelical camp because I read the Bible myself and found numerous variances between Scripture and present Catholic practice, but I respected the Catholic church for their moral stands. For instance, the Catholics were the first ones to raise a ruckus about abortion, before the Evangelicals realized what was going on -- and Catholics deserve credit for this.
I certainly never feared Catholics -- my mom's side of the family is Irish, after all. How could I be afraid of my own mother and cousins? And so I never understood the howling anti-Catholic paranoia and conspiracy theories that one sometimes encounters in the more hardcore segments of Evangelicalism.
In fact, I assumed that both Catholics and Protestants (everywhere but Ulster, at least), have finally figured out that peaceful persuasion and Christian tolerance ("Do unto others...", "Romans 14", etc) is the correct Christian way to handle doctrinal differences -- provided that public morality is upheld, of course. William Penn's noble experiment in religious tolerance, and the First Amendment forbidding a state church, seemed to have worked. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the America he observed was such a great place, in large part because although Americans differed on our opinions regarding our duties to God himself, we were unified in our opinions regarding our duties to our fellow man. To put it another way, we had a strong Christian public morality that all denoniminations agreed on, and we handled our theological differences by peaceful discussion and persuasion instead of launching "jihads' against heretics as was the case back in Old Europe.
De Tocqueville, a Catholic, thought this was laudable and so do I. In fact, I thought that EVERY Christian, by this point in history, understood that this a better way, and I was perfectly content to work for a shared public morality with people with whom I respectfully disagreed. But in the last year, here at FreeRepublic I have heard Catholics justify or excuse some of the horrible persecutions of the past. Someone actually quoted Aquinas' justification of killing heretics a few months ago. Although he backed off from saying that HE would personally burn me, once gets the feeling that he'd prefer to. It's absolutely chilling. All of the sudden, the wild paranoia of militant, persecutory, conspiratorial, inquisitional Catholicism, that I used to recoil at, now seems to have a grain of truth. I'll never look at Catholicism so trustingly again.
Praise God for the Second Amendment.
Also, listening to St Joseph Catholic radio, a very conservative outfit, I do get the impression these folks are much more upset about the existence of Protestants than about the existence of atheists or Jews or Muslims who don't accept Christ. Show after show on this radio network is aimed at trying to convert (or subtly condemn) Protestants. Very little, if any, "witness" is directed toward people who don't believe in God, or in Christ, in the first place. Seems to me there's definitely a strain of Catholicism that finds it infuriating that there are Christians who don't accept the Roman Catholic version of Christianity -- and this troubles them more than the millions of folks who haven't accepted Christ at all.
ping
He says it's not contrary to Divine Law. How then is it an abuse?
47. Notwithstanding all this, We do not wish that what We said in commendation of clerical celibacy should be interpreted as though it were Our mind in any way to blame, or, as it were, disapprove the different discipline legitimately prevailing in the Oriental Church. What We have said has been meant solely to exalt in the Lord something We consider one of the purest glories of the Catholic priesthood; something which seems to us to correspond better to the desires of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to His purposes in regard to priestly souls. (Pius XI, Ad Catholici Sacerdotii)
This is a statement that I could have made also, word for word. (Mother's line goes back to southern Ireland..all Catholic) Are we related? Tee Hee.
"In fact, I assumed that both Catholics and Protestants (everywhere but Ulster, at least), have finally figured out that peaceful persuasion and Christian tolerance..."
Ditto that too.
"But in the last year, here at FreeRepublic I have heard Catholics justify or excuse some of the horrible persecutions of the past. . Someone actually quoted Aquinas' justification of killing heretics a few months ago. Although he backed off from saying that HE would personally burn me, once gets the feeling that he'd prefer to. It's absolutely chilling. All of the sudden, the wild paranoia of militant, persecutory, conspiratorial, inquisitional Catholicism, that I used to recoil at, now seems to have a grain of truth. I'll never look at Catholicism so trustingly again."
I have made this sad observation just recently myself. Stunning. Oddly, seeing both Catholics and Protestants up close and personal I see very little difference in the average person's practice of faith (not including the difference between Priests and Ministers) but I do see more "slams" if you will, directed at Protestants coming from the direction of the average Catholic. Sad. Christians should not throw bible bricks at each other and definitely should not insinuate that one or the other's ancestors deserved to die.
That good will is starting to crumble. See post 252.
Rest easy. We're much more concerned with burning the heretics within the Church, and by the time we get done with them we'll have run out of wood and matches. ;^)
But what exactly is your point? Did you even read post 174 that quoted Fr. Martin? Is there anything in that post that would make it more or less credible if any one fact was true or false about Fr. Martin?
Read the post (174) on what he says about celibacy, then provide me with an intelligent analysis of where you think he went wrong. If you actually read it you would see that it is a very eloquent well thought out and thoroughly Catholic explanation. As are all of Fr. Martin's explanations of the faith.
I don't see anything particularly wrong in 174. I just don't think that "admission" should be waved around as if it were proof that Martin had a celebret from the Pope, or as anything other than the fact that Martin wasn't dispensed from his vow of celibacy. That doesn't prove anything - as the "admission" states, laicized priests at that time were not dispensed from the vow of celibacy.
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