Making their Roman obedience

It is an excercise in patience and humility, as well as a joy (not always unmixed with sadness), for an established Anglican clergyman to give up his Anglican orders, cast off his vestments, swim the Tiber, and submit to the new Roman obedience leading to ordination within the Catholic Church.

Dwight Longenecker, former Anglican priest, was ordained as a deacon in the Catholic church this past Wednesday. He will be ordinaed to the priesthood later this month. He shares his story in the National Catholic Register. Al Kimel, of the Pontifications blog, also solicits your prayers as he prepares for ordination to the sacred priesthood of the Catholic Church on Sunday, December 3rd, at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in South Orange, New Jersey. Please keep him in your prayers.

(Rev. John Jay Hughes, a former Anglican now serving as a Catholic priest, reflects on some of the ambivalences involved in this journey in "The Joy of Priesthood" in the current issue of Crisis magazine, which should be available online soon. I'm not sure whether any of you subscribe to Crisis. If so, I would be interested in your thoughts on that article. I remember having mixed feelings about what struck me as a number of ineluctable ambiguities in the article vis-à-vis the state of the Church in crisis.)