Our Lady of Walsingham, Houston TX – Principle Church of the US Ordinariate

Here’s an excellent piece in the National Catholic Register summing up the Ordinariate’s first year:

When Father Scott Hurd, vicar general of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter — a home in the Catholic Church for former Episcopalians and Anglicans — reflects back on 2012, he points to a period of rapid and exciting growth marking its first year of existence.

On New Year’s Day 2012, Pope Benedict XVI erected the ordinariate, which allows former Anglicans to retain certain treasured traditions within the Catholic Church. It was created in accord with Anglicanorum Coetibus, the Pope’s apostolic constitution permitting former Anglicans to come into the Church corporately instead of as individuals.

On the same day, the Holy Father named Msgr. Jeffrey Steenson, a married Catholic priest and the former Episcopal bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Rio Grande, as the first ordinary.

Newspapers have since featured stories of former Episcopal churches being received into the Catholic Church as groups in beautiful Masses that included Vatican-approved prayers that they had long cherished from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, a landmark of the English language.

“The joy and blessing of all these people being received into the Church is at the end of the day what this is all about — it is about unity in Christ,” Father Hurd told the Register…

Read the whole article!