Saint Peter, Caldwell Chapel, The Catholic University of America
Given for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
As we celebrated, this past week, the fifth anniversary of the canonical erection of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, and look forward to the episcopal consecration of Monsignor Steven Lopes as the first bishop-ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter in a matter of weeks, it is fortuitous that we come this week to the annual observance of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. In Monsignor Lopes’s own words, the personal ordinariates are “ecumenism in the front row,” which is to say that the entire project of Anglicanorum cœtibus is one founded on the principles of ecumenism as understood and lived by the Catholic Church. At the threshold of this particular time set aside for prayer for the unity of Christians, it is worth revisiting the ecumenical mission of the ordinariates, not simply to comprehend more fully the structural and theoretical implications of that mission, but so that each of us—who make up the clergy and lay faithful of the ordinariates—might realize our own part in that work, and be better equipped to articulate that purpose to those who, in the words of Blessed John Henry Newman, are “shivering at the gates.”
