Episcopal parish in Maryland made headlines by converting en masse to Roman Catholicism. Does it matter?

• Opposition to the transition from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer to a much more thoroughly modernized 1979 revision was the warm-up fight for traditionalist Episcopalians who would later rail against the ordination of women, the full inclusion of lesbians and gays in the church and its ordained ministries, and the election of women and gay bishops. Which is to say that the line in the sands of time falls for Anglicans like those at the 100-member St. Luke’s parish just shy of a century ago, in the brief period of recovery after World War I and just before the Great Depression—perhaps the last era in which Episcopalians held great cultural and political sway over against evangelical revivalists and, well, Catholics.

  Quick! When was the last time an American president headlined the General Convention of the Episcopal Church? Look it up: 1928, Calvin Coolidge, Washington National Cathedral.

  Could it be that the congregational conversion of St. Luke’s and perhaps a handful of other Episcopal churches functions less to “bridge and heal a wound that has existed between Rome and Anglicanism for nearly five hundred years” than as a salve for the sting of change that continues apace in every religious institution—the Roman Catholic Church included? Is the fantasy at work in the Maryland congregation’s appeal to the magisterial authority of the Roman Church is that changing churches can somehow stop the church from changing?

• SEE: Mass Conversion: Changing Churches to Stop the Church From Changing
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