When Father Patrick Allen lay prostrate before the bishop for his diaconate ordination on June 29, Allen’s son, Henry, ran up to join his dad.
Posted on 07/20/2013 1:45:48 PM PDT by NYer
It was barely a week into Father Patrick Allen’s new ministry when, in the course of taking his two children to activities in his nonreligious clothes, at least five people asked:
So, what do you do for a living?
Allen smiles graciously, sometimes bringing his hand to his chest in a humble gesture, one that coincidentally shows his wedding band.
“This might begin a long conversation,” the James Island father says.
“I’m a Catholic priest.”
When his daughter, Lucy, goes to Charleston Catholic School next year, she will be the only student whose father comes not only for parent conferences and class parties, but also to celebrate Mass.
Ordained a Catholic priest July 7, Allen joins a small but growing group of former Episcopalians embarking on a new journey, one they hope marks a critical step down the long path to Christian unity.
They have embraced a new option in Catholicism that allows Anglicans to become fully Roman Catholic yet retain elements of their liturgical and theological traditions.
Allen is the second Episcopal priest in South Carolina to join the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, often dubbed the “Anglican ordinariate.”
Pope Benedict XVI created the ordinariate, a non-geographic diocese within the Catholic Church, for groups of American Anglicans who wanted to enter full communion with the Vatican.
The result: Two weeks ago, Allen lay prostrate before the Most Rev. Robert Guglielmone, bishop of Charleston.
Those on hand for his ordination included his closest Anglican mentor and friend, the priest who heads the ordinariate and the once-Episcopalian families joining him to create a new Catholic community.
None asked, What do you do?
Circular paths
What he does today, fresh into his Catholic ministry, completes a circular life’s path.
Allen was raised Catholic in a Florida parish until he was 11. Then, his parents began attending an evangelical Presbyterian church.
Ever fascinated by history, he went to college unsure but with an eye toward teaching history.
He attended a Presbyterian seminary college working on his master’s in divinity, though not seriously considering the ministry, much less the Anglican priesthood. Meanwhile, a friend in Charleston invited him to work at Camp St. Christopher.
Allen served as head counselor and then assistant director of the summer camp for nine years, time that proved pivotal to virtually every front of his life.
He confirmed his desire to teach and mentor.
He fell in love with a young woman named Ashley Duckett, who also worked on the camp’s summer staff.
And he met future mentors such as the Rev. M. Dow Sanderson, a deeply intellectual priest who adhered to an Anglo-Catholic tradition that appealed to Allen.
Allen also discovered the Book of Common Prayer.
“I fell in love with it,” he recalls.
He felt drawn to the sacramental nature of Anglicanism and studied people including John Henry Newman, Anglican priest-turned-Catholic cardinal. Newman famously once said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”
Allen also met the Very Rev. Craige Borrett, rector of Christ St. Paul’s on Yonge’s Island who encouraged the young man to consider becoming an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion’s American province.
“I had successfully avoided the idea up to that point,” Allen says with a grin.
The weight of it
At the University of the South (Sewanee) in Tennessee, Allen was immersed in Anglican studies. He hung a picture of Pope John Paul II on his wall.
Looking back, it seems a prophetic choice.
While delivering the benediction at his ordination in 2001, Allen looked out over the masses kneeling before him.
“The weight of it came to me,” he recalls.
A naturally introverted man, Allen put his studies into action.
“Nothing prepares you for getting involved in people’s lives in such very personal and important ways,” he recalls.
Then-Bishop Edward Salmon assigned him to a tiny parish in Calhoun County.
It was the ultimate gift, Allen later realized.
He was near the parish Sanderson led at the time. While some other Episcopal churches were booming with contemporary services, Sanderson adhered to high Anglicanism.
Meanwhile, Duckett, the young woman he’d been dating, went to medical school at MUSC.
They married in 2003. She did her residency at Vanderbilt University. He moved to a parish nearby.
In time, they returned to her hometown Charleston where she joined MUSC’s faculty.
And Sanderson, then rector of Church of the Holy Communion in downtown Charleston, made a place for Allen.
“Holy Communion has a very unique role in the diocese here,” Allen says.
The parish adheres to the tradition of the Oxford Movement, which asserts Anglicanism’s Catholic continuity with the earlier, pre-Reformation church.
It was, in some ways, an oasis in the storm, a like-minded sanctuary to contemplate and teach even as the Episcopal Church faced growing divisions.
New paths
Cracks of schism were widening nationwide over the Episcopal Church’s ordination of an openly gay bishop and other theological issues. Local Bishop Mark Lawrence and many clergy in town supported a more traditional reading of Scripture.
Ultimately, even Holy Communion could not avoid the question.
When Lawrence and most local parishes disassociated from the Episcopal Church last fall, each parish’s leaders had to decide whether to stay with the national church or go with Lawrence’s group.
Yet, for Allen and many at Holy Communion, the choice was a uniquely different one.
Remain Episcopalian, or pursue a larger reunion of Anglicans and Catholics? Pope Benedict XVI had just created the new ordinariate.
“I already knew I would wind up in the Catholic Church,” says Allen, who by then had two young children.
He had settled into a realization that the Catholic Church was what it claimed to be: the church founded by Christ.
At first, he hoped the entire parish would convert.
“But leaving the church they grew up in was not a possibility” for many, he recalls.
Holy Communion remained with the Episcopal Church.
About two dozen members decided on their own to convert to Catholicism. So did Allen.
In a letter to his parish, he wrote: “Mine is a move forward to the Catholic Church, and I am nothing but grateful for my years in the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of South Carolina.”
Still, it concerns him that the timing could be suspect.
“I didn’t want the fact or appearance of dividing the church and leading people out of there,” Allen says. “Instead, it was a fulfillment of the faith we held.”
At the end of last year, he relinquished his Episcopalian orders and no longer went by “father,” not in the religious sense anyway.
God’s design
Six months later, at his Catholic diaconate ordination, Allen lay prostrate before Bishop Guglielmone. Allen’s 2-year-old son, Henry, ran up to lie down beside his dad.
Someone snapped a photo of the moment.
The picture is, in some ways, a reflection of Allen’s life now. Catholic priest. Father of two. Husband.
“It has worked out the way God designed,” Allen says.
He describes both his former bishop Lawrence and current bishop Guglielmone as gracious and supportive of his move.
He, along with his wife and 19 former Holy Communion members he calls “pilgrims,” were confirmed together last month. They have formed the Corpus Christi Catholic Community, which meets in St. Mary of the Annunciation in downtown Charleston.
When Allen was ordained to the priesthood, Monsignor Jeffrey N. Steenson, head of the American ordinariate, was on hand.
Sanderson and his wife were, too.
“We were so very proud of him as he began this new chapter in his call to serve God,” Sanderson says. “He and I share the same theological core values, and we will always remain close friends.”
Today, Allen is learning the finer points of celebrating Mass and assisting Monsignor Steven Brovey, rector of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. He’s also building Corpus Christi from scratch using a fully Catholic Mass with elements recognizable to any Anglican.
“All things that are good and pure and true in the Anglican church have a home in the Catholic Church,” Allen says.
Pope Benedict compared the ordinariate to building a house and including a room for cherished items from one’s former home.
There’s also a missionary aspect to building Corpus Christi that appeals to Allen.
“It is a seed,” he says. “And my somewhat unique status brings on those questions.”
So, what do you do for a living?
That is absolutely adorable.
Good points. I stand informed. Admittedly, I’ve not thought the issue through and do not know Church history very well. My remarks are largely off the cuff. I suppose I should just shut up and study up on the subject if I wish to comment intelligently on it.
Huckfillary
Does anyone else care to take this up? Half my family came home from Mass, and we're babysitting two extra infants.
Any scandals would at least involve consensual adults rather than innocent children.
Are you unaware of the experience of public school students with their married teachers, or the involvement of married non-Catholic ministers with children?
DO you know any truly holy entrepreneurs?
No problem. So are mine ;-)
Thanks to everyone for their answer.
I’ll keep checking the thread.
I love all the photos. Especially the ones with the children.
Yes, I do. Again, I admit I have not thought through this
this complex issue, and I am not going to comment anymore on it. I apologize for pretending to know things I don’t about and I am just going to shut up and learn from all of you.
Huckfillary
Since the Catholics believe that Peter was the first pope - scriptures teach us that Peter WAS married. His mother-in-law is referenced in Matthew 8:14, 15:
Jesus Heals at Peter’s House
14And when Jesus was come into Peter’s house, he saw his wife’s mother laid, and sick of a fever. 15And he touched her hand, and the fever left her: and she arose, and ministered to them. 16When the even was come, they brought to him many that were possessed with devils: and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick:
I was going to post this, but thank you. We are not to worship men nor kneel at their feet, let alone lie prostrate in front of them.
I don’t find it adorable.
I raised 4 boys, and I have 3 darling grandsons under the age of 5, but there are certain observations and rituals that should be treated with that are solemnity, and children need to be taught that they need to be respectful. What in the heck was this guy’s wife doing at that time?
I haven’t read anything in the Bible indicating that Jesus or the apostles were celibate or not. Perhaps tradition has favored that they were celibate, but I believe that developed years after their earthly lives v
should be treated with that are solemnity =
should be treated with solemnity
I think it was otherwise in the past. There was a really deplorable situation in the late 1800's when Eastern (Ukrainian-Byzantine) Catholic immigrants were coming over to the US with their married priests, and some U.S. Catholic Bishops refused to accept them as priests in their dioceses.
In one particularly lamentable case, the Catholic Archbishop of St. Paul, MN --- a brusque, rash, and unfortunately influential cleric named John Ireland --- insulted a Ukrainian priest named Fr. Alexis Toth, simply because Fr Toth had been married (he was a widower). Oh, it makes wince-worthy reading.
The upshot was that Fr. Toth stormed out of the Catholic church, taking 20,000 Ukrainian Catholics with him, and shepherded them all into the Orthodox Church.
Sometimes clerics are ignorant jerks. Painful, but it happens.
The big creative surge in the past 30 or so years is to have married deacons. In the Catholic Church, deacons are also clergy: they receive Holy Orders just as priests doe.) The US Catholic Church now has more married deacons (15,000) than it has priests in religious orders like the Franciscans and Jesuits (14,000.)
So you could say we've got lots of marries clergy, just not married priests.
Our parish has 2 priests and 3 deacons. I love those guys. And their wives!
The evaluation of prostration depends on what is meant by it in each case. There is a LOT of prostration of human being to other humans, and to angels, in the Bible. In none of these cases is it meant to be adoration of a mere human or angelic creature: if it were, it would be idolatry. But that is not what was meant:
Genesis 19:1
Lot prostrates to two angels
Genesis 33:3
Jacob prostrates to Esau
Ruth 2:10
Ruth prostrates to Boaz
1 Samuel 20:41
David prostrates to Jonathan
1 Samuel 25:23
Abigail prostrates to David
2 Samuel 14:33
Joab prostrates to David
2 Samuel 24:20
Araunah prostrates to David
1 Kings 1:23
Nathan prostrates to David
2 Kings 2:15
the sons of the prophets prostrate to Elisha
2 Kings 4:37
the Shunammite widow prostrates to Elisha
.
As for Fr. Allen's testimony of Christ: this is not an essay by Fr Allen about his faith, but an article by Jennifer Berry Hawes, a staff writer in a secular paper. Presumably she based some of it on an interview with Fr Allen, but she did not retain a question-and-answer format. Apparently she omitted quite a bit (this always happens in newspaper articles) and chose to make it in the form of a human interest feature.
Fr. Allen would have had no control over the formatting and editing, the pictures, the headline, the focus, the length, or any other journalistic aspect of the article.
The bottom line is: either she didn't ask him about his coming to faith in Jesus Christ, or she just omitted to put this part in the article.
If you're interested in this aspect, you might want to ask Fr. Allen?
None of us put complete statements concerning our Faith in Jesus Christ our Savior, in every post. I don't. Neither do you, iscool.
Seriously.
Thank you so much. All clear now.
Although the article says “Allen lay prostrate before Bishop Guglielmone,” the priest is actually prostrate before God. The gesture signifies, in this case, total gift of self TO GOD.
All that you say about prostration makes complete sense to me and is also common in my tradition, with the same inner meaning.
+{{{:o)
Papal Smiley
Revelation 3:
9" I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not, but are lying—I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will learn that I have loved you"
We can not put God in box.
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