Eideard

When the Vatican announced last week that it would welcome groups of traditionalist Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church, leaders of one Episcopal parish celebrated as if a ship had arrived to rescue them from a drifting ice floe.

“We’d been praying for this daily for two years,” said Bishop David L. Moyer, who leads the Church of the Good Shepherd, a parish in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia that is battling to keep its historic property. “When I heard the news I was speechless, then the joy came and the tears.”

This parish could be one of the first in the United States to convert en masse after the Vatican completes plans for a new structure to allow Anglicans to become Catholic while retaining many of their spiritual traditions, like the Book of Common Prayer and married priests.

They will share the ideology they have in common: misogyny, homophobia, fear of science and reality, no divorce, oppose birth control, choice…

The arrangement is tailor-made for an “Anglo-Catholic” parish like this one, which has strenuously opposed the Episcopal Church over decisions like allowing women and gay people to become priests and bishops. Mass here is celebrated in the “high church” style reminiscent of traditional Catholic churches, with incense, elaborate vestments and a choir that may sing in Latin…

The Church of the Good Shepherd has long been at loggerheads with the Episcopal Church, the American branch in the global Anglican Communion. This year, the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania sued to take over the church’s building, a magnificent stone replica of a 14th-century English country parish that was built in 1894. The church’s property is estimated by its accounting warden to be worth $7 million…

Bishop Moyer acknowledged that some of his parish’s 400 members would choose to leave rather than become Catholic. Some are former Catholics who may not want to go back. Others feel loyalty to the Episcopal Church, despite the conflict…

Bishop Moyer lives in a rectory on the church’s property. He said he hopes to resolve the church’s “legal quagmire” over the building before they decide to jump to the Catholic Church.

But, then, if you decide to waste a certain portion of your life studying Catholic history, you’ll learn priests used to be married – as were Popes – and the core of the conflicts that split apart the Catholic Church was property. The more things change, the more they stay the same.