De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

Michael James Nazir-Ali ( Urdu : مائیکل نذیر علی‎; born 19 August 1949) is a former Anglican bishop who was the 106th Bishop of Rochester in the Church of England from 1994 to 2009. He is now director of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue, and was Visiting Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina , in the United States, from 2010. Today, Dr. Jules Gomes of Church Militant (himself a former Anglican minister) broke the news that this intellectual giant and highly competent theologian is to be received into the Catholic Church and ordained priest later this month. Nazir-Ali, who holds a master of letters from Cambridge University, an earned doctorate from the Australian College of Theology, and six honorary doctorates from universities around the world, was one of the final two candidates for archbishop of Canterbury in 2000. He was pipped to the post because of his authentic Christianity & failure to adhere to the zeitgeist. Opening the Synoda...

This blog is subtitled: “It is written,  ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.” We had a beautiful Corpus Christi procession on Sunday in Leigh-on-Sea, Deo gratias! The Church was fairly full, but really one would hope that the whole Parish family would turn out to this event. Indeed, Father Kevin has expressed his own sadness that this is not the case in his homilies leading up to the feast. As my wife expressed it, a large part of the congregation is made up of the First Holy Communion families as the children take part in the procession, the rest are the stalwart parishioners. So why is this? The institution of Corpus Christi as a feast resulted from approximately forty years of work on the part of Juliana of Liège, a 13th-century Norbertine canoness, also known as Juliana de Cornillon, born in 1191 or 1192 in Liège, Belgium, a city where there were groups of women d...

As we start 2018 and Dioceses all over the UK (and beyond) are developing plans for the future (such as my own here ) we are being asked to discuss and consider a way forward as communities of believers as vocations dwindle and practising Catholics disappear even more rapidly. This has been discussed in numerous places with great clarity, perhaps most familiarly by Sherry Weddell in her book Forming Intentional Disciples , and most recently by Professor Stephen Bullivant in the Catholic Herald . Bullivant's article is concise and packed with valuable detail for anyone discerning the future direction of the Church. Key points are: There are more priestly retirements (or deaths) each year than ordinations.  A number of our seminaries have closed, the ones we still have are practically empty. Priest numbers fell between 1970 and 2014 by 48 per cent. Sunday worshippers fell by 55 per cent over the same period. In short, priest-to-worshipper numbers were better in 2014 ...

I've had a really busy old week this week. On Wednesday night, I was most pleased to attend the Ordination of a good friend to the Diaconate for the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Bishop Alan Williams attended St. John Fisher in Southend along with Mgsr Keith Newton, the Ordinary of the Ordinariate. The atmosphere around Bishop Alan is so different to that surrounding the previous incumbent. The more I see of Bishop Alan, the more I like him. It is a man at ease in his own skin and so naturally mixes with people. Thank God for him! Mgsr Keith is also very easy to talk to and very personable. He is also someone I seem to bump into in all the best places ( see here for further details ). St. John Fisher Michael is just approaching the viva for his PhD, the thesis for which centres around an examination of the neo-platonic philosophical influences behind Tolkein's writings. He is currently head of RE at the outstanding Grammar School, Westcliff High School for Boys...

This is the address given by Mgr Mark Langham to the Ordinariate Clergy Plenary on Thursday 12th February. The Catholic Chaplain to Cambridge University said that the Ordinariate is "a model of realised unity" and urged the personal ordinariates for former Anglicans to continue in their exemplary witness to "prophetic" and "truthful" ecumenism. It strikes me as a quite remarkable and positive explanation of the ecumenical importance of the Apostolic Constitution particularly from a former official at the Anglican and Methodist Dialogues at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Describing the current rifts within Anglicanism, in which some Anglican bishops "refuse to accept the authority of [other] Anglican bishops... and declare themselves out of communion with them", Mgr Langham said that both "consistency" and "communion" are "essential qualities of ecumenism." They are concepts that "....