Gratuitous Crossing the Tiber Posting

The sound of shrieking that you did not hear over the weekend from the far northeastern part of the country was Mom being totally cool about my announcement that I had enrolled in RCIA. She's a died-in-the-wool Proddy, we've had words about Rome in the past, and I was rayther dreading springing the news on her.

Instead, she said that of course I had to do what I thought was right and that she would back me up. She also mentioned that her grandfather had constantly tried and failed to convert her when she was young, and that she supposed St. Rita had finally caught up with her, albeit a generation late.

And speaking of conversions, lots of folks have sent me the nooz that another Episcopal bishop, The Rt. Rev. Jeffrey N. Steenson, Bishop of the Rio Grande, is giving it up and going to Rome. His opinion about what is happening to TEC is similar to mine:

He called the bishops’ meeting last March “a profoundly disturbing experience for me. I was more than a little surprised when such a substantial majority declared the polity of the Episcopal Church to be primarily that of an autonomous and independent local church relating to the wider Anglican Communion by voluntary association. This is not the Anglicanism in which I was formed, inspired by the Oxford Movement and the Catholic Revival in the Church of England … honestly, I did not recognize the church that this House described on that occasion.”

Yup. The gay bishop business gets all the headlines, but I see it more as a symptom than as the underlying problem, which is that in place of orthodoxy and tradition, the church has embraced a kind of fuzzy autonomous universalism which it feels allows its leaders to believe whatever they like and to do pretty much whatever seems like a good idea at the time.

I was also amused by Bishop Steenson's experience at setting foot in the Tiber:

Regarding his move to the Roman Catholic Church, Bishop Steenson said, “I believe that the Lord now calls me in this direction. It amazes me, after all of these years, what a radical journey of faith this must necessarily be. To some it seems foolish; to others disloyal; to others an abandonment.”

Yup, again. I'm still in a state of amazement myself.