Posted on 11/30/2012 4:34:51 PM PST by marshmallow
The Rev. Larry Gipson, who was dean of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham from 1982-94 and rector at the largest Episcopal church in the nation from 1994-2008, has become a Roman Catholic.
Gipson retired in 2008 from the 8,000-member St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, where his parishioners included former President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara.
Last month, Gipson was accepted as a Catholic into the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a structure set up by Pope Benedict XVI to accept former Anglicans into the Catholic Church.
"The nature of authority in the Catholic Church is what attracted me to it," Gipson said in a telephone interview from his home in Houston. "After I retired, I was concerned and had been for many years about the Episcopal Church's authority structure."
Gipson will be among 69 candidates for Catholic priesthood attending a Formation Retreat this weekend in Houston, where the headquarters for the Ordinariate is based.
Among those leading seminars at the Formation Retreat in Houston will be the Rev. Jon Chalmers, who was ordained a Catholic priest in June, the second former Episcopal priest to be accepted as a priest under the Ordinariate. Chalmers served as curate, associate priest and interim rector at Canterbury Chapel in Tuscaloosa from 2007-2009.
His wife, Margaret Chalmers, former canon lawyer for the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham and now chancellor of the Ordinariate, will also be a presenter at the weekend retreat that runs Friday night through Sunday, Dec. 2.
"It's a really big deal," she said. "Larry Gipson, who was the priest of the largest Episcopal Church in America, is now a Catholic."
(Excerpt) Read more at al.com ...
Half will merge with the Catholic Church, half with Wiccans.
Is he giving back the Episcopal retirement fund?
St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston is the most unfriendly church I have ever attended. In the early 1990s I was an airline pilot on a Sunday layover, and asked the hotel front desk “where’s the closest Episcopal or Catholic church?” It was a short walk away. On entry and exit, no one spoke to me, and during the peace, everyone avoided me.
I was so upset that when I got home I cancelled the $50 check I had written them. Jerks.
Or perhaps they are trojan horses.
Well, God bless him. I imagine it wasn’t an easy decision.
Welcome home, Larry Gipson.
welcome home where you belong....
For what reason should he give it back? He worked those years, he's due his retirement pension, regardless of where he now choses to worship or work.
Maybe you think he signed a non-compete clause? Or there's some Episcopal secret protected by a non-disclosure agreement?
Has the COE reimbursed the Church for all the property they destroyed and stole after Henry VIIIs temper tantrum?
Like the one John Henry Newman turned out to be?
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