Passion to Evangelize Drives New Ordinariate Catholic Communities

NATION | SEP. 17, 2018

Passion to Evangelize Drives New Ordinariate Catholic Communities
 

Young Catholics, invigorated by the ordinariate's English-Catholic expressions of faith, are actively 'church-planting' and inviting people into their fledgling Catholic communities.

Peter Jesserer Smith

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- At 22 years old, Sarah Rodeo, a Catholic graduate student at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, is engaged in work more associated with evangelical Protestants than Catholics in the Northeast: building a new church community from the ground up.

Rodeo belongs to the Ordinariate Fellowship of Connecticut, one of the nascent groups that aspire to become an official community-in-formation for the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a diocesan structure established by Benedict XVI that reunited the Anglican patrimony to the Catholic Church.

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter is one of three established dioceses under the Holy See that reintegrate the Anglican patrimony with the Catholic Church.  In North America, the ordinariate began with a wave of Anglican and Episcopal communities that entered into full communion with the bishop of Rome.  But the ordinariate is seeing its own communities grow, and new communities develop, through active evangelization built on common prayer, fellowship, hard work and perseverance.

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