how an episcopalian convert
helped bring others “home to
rome”
“CROSSING
THE TIBER”
BY FR. CARLETON JONES, O.P.
A
fter I had “crossed the Tiber”
from the Episcopal Church
in 1982, and landed happily at the
House of Studies a couple of years
later, the senior friar who heard
my confessions, the late Father Pat
McGovern, warned me not to burn
my bridges. He predicted that there
would be many of my fellow Anglicans coming “home to Rome” in future years, and that I should be in a
position to help and welcome them.
This, he said, precluded breaking
up old friendships or engaging in
harsh anti-protestant polemics. My
wise old confessor was right, and he
helped me to keep the bridge that I
had crossed intact.
A number of old friends have
passed over that bridge since then,
among them the All Saints Sisters
of the Poor, for whom I now serve
as chaplain. My last engagement
as an Anglican was to preach their
community’s retreat in 1982. They
first contacted me for consultation,
along with several other convert
clergy, and were finally received
into the Catholic Church by Archbishop (now Cardinal) O’Brien of
Baltimore in 2009. Influenced by
English-speaking world who always
their example, two parishes–Mt.
thought that they were Catholic are
Calvary in Baltimore City, and St.
now either retreating into breakTimothy in nearby Catonsville–
away communities or finding their
have been
received into
the Church
as congregations of
the newly-founded
Anglican Ordinariate of
the Chair of
St. Peter. In
both cases,
I was asked
to provide
catechetical
instruction.
Fr. Carleton Jones, O.P., with Dominican
Classical
Foundation board-member Ed Sweeney
Anglicanism, committed as it was to the doc- way to that Church about which
trinal core of “mere Christianity,”
there could be no doubt.
and possessing a liturgical form of
Protestant converts are apt to feel
worship in language and with music disoriented when they find themof high quality, could once claim to selves with us, in a new home that
be a type of Catholic Christianity.
is so much bigger than the one they
That claim is no longer plausible,
left. Please help me give these pilso that Anglicans throughout the
grims a good welcome. Thank you.
FIGHTING ONLY FOR GOD: A DOMINICAN
CHAPLAIN’S MISSION IN THE CIVIL WAR
BY BR. BONAVENTURE CHAPMAN, O.P.
T
he Province of St. Joseph
has been blessed with many
military chaplains in its history,
most recently Fr. Edward Gorman,
O.P., and Fr. Joseph Scordo, O.P.,
both having served in Iraq. But the
tradition goes back to the earliest
days of the Province in the time of
the Civil War when the Province
was split between
Ohio (Union),
Kentucky (neutral),
and Tennessee
(Confederate). One