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Roman Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paray-le-Monial and cloister. View from the Bourbince River, 2023. / Credit: Sanctuaire du Sacré-Cœur/www.sacrecoeur-paray.org

Paris, France, Jul 18, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
For 18 months — beginning Dec. 27… […]

Shrewsbury, England, Dec 17, 2019 / 02:06 pm (CNA).- Gavin Ashenden, a former Honorary Chaplain to the Queen in the Church of England who was consecrated a bishop in a Continuing Anglican ecclesial community, will be received into the Catholic Church on Sunday.

He will receive confirmation Dec. 22 during a Mass at Shrewsbury Cathedral from Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury.

His wife, Helen, became a Catholic about two years ago in the Diocese of Shrewsbury.

“Having come to believe that the claims and expression of the Catholic faith are the most profound and potent expression of apostolic and patristic belief, and to accept the primacy of the Petrine tradition, I am grateful to the Bishop of Shrewsbury and the Catholic community in his diocese for the opportunity to mend 500 years of fractured history and be reconciled to the Church that gave birth to my earlier tradition,” Ashenden has said.

“I am especially grateful for the example and the prayers of St John Henry Newman. He did his best to remain a faithful Anglican and renew his mother Church with the vigour and integrity of the Catholic tradition,” he added. “Now, as then, however, his experience informs ours that the Church of England is inclined to be rooted in secularised culture rather than the integrity and insight of biblical, apostolic and patristic values.”

Ashenden added that St. John Henry Newman’s experience “also inspires ours, and charts the way to our proper ecclesial home which is the rock that is the Petrine charism of faith and witness in our struggle for salvation and heaven.”

Ashenden was raised in London and Kent, and studied Law at Bristol University. He studied for priesthood in the Church of England at Oak Hill College, and received orders in 1980.

He served 10 years as a parish priest, and taught 23 years at the University of Sussex, lecturing in literature and pyschology of religion. He also earned a doctorate writing on Charles Williams, a writer and member of the Inklings. He was a member of the Church of England’s General Synod for 20 years.

Ashenden was appointed an Honoray Chaplain to the Queen in 2008.

He was consecrated a bishop in the Christian Episcopal Church, a Continuing Anglican ecclesial community, in 2013, while remaining an Honorary Chaplain to the Queen, Christian Today reported in 2017.

In 2017 he resigned from the Royal Household and relinquished his Church of England orders after a passage from the Quran denying Christ’s divinity was read at the Glaswegian cathedral of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

“It should not happen in the holy Eucharist and particularly a Eucharist whose main intention is to celebrate Christ the word made flesh come into the world,” he told BBC at the time.

Later that year, Ashenden left the Church of England, “convinced that the consecration of women to the episcopate represented the replacement of apostolic and biblical patterns with the competing culture of the values of Cultural Marxism, and dissenting from the increasing accommodation of the Church of England to radical secular views on gender.”

His episcopal consecration was announced in 2017.

When a Church of England bishop delivered a sermon while sliding down an amusement park ride built inside of Norwich Cathedral in August, Ashenden told the BBC that the event was a “mistake” that misjudged “what a cathedral is good for.”

“For such a place, steeped in mystery and marvel to buy in to sensory pleasure and distraction, is to poison the very medicine it offers the human soul,” he said.

Ashenden has said that praying the rosary and researching Eucharistic miracles helped lead him to the Catholic Church.

Bishop Davies commented that “it is very humbling to be able to receive a bishop of the Anglican tradition into full communion in the year of canonisation of St John Henry Newman.”

“I am conscious of the witness which Gavin Ashenden has given in the public square to the historic faith and values on which our society has been built. I pray that this witness will continue to be an encouragement to many,” he added.

Ashenden wrote in the Catholic Herald that “I watched as Anglicanism suffered a collapse of inner integrity as it swallowed wholesale secular society’s descent into a post-Christian culture.”

“I came to realise (too long after both Newman and Chesterton had already explained why) that only the Catholic Church, with the weight of the Magisterium, had the ecclesial integrity, theological maturity and spiritual potency to defend the Faith, renew society and save souls in the fullness of faith,” he said.

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Muenster, Germany, May 14, 2018 / 02:28 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The unresolved debate over a proposal to allow Protestant spouses of Catholics to receive communion in German dioceses under some limited circumstances has gathered steam after the country’s president waded into the debate at the major national Catholic conference in the town of Münster.

The planned proposal has been championed by  Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising, president of the German bishops’ conference, who announced in February that the conference would publish a pastoral handout for married couples that allows Protestant spouses of Catholics “in individual cases” and “under certain conditions” to receive Holy Communion, provided they “affirm the Catholic faith in the Eucharist”.

Subsequently, seven German bishops, led by Cardinal Rainer Woelki of Cologne, ask the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for clarification, asking whether the question of Holy Communion for Protestant spouses in interdenominational marriages can be decided on the level of a national bishops’ conference, or if rather, “a decision of the Universal Church” is required in the matter.

Speaking in an interview with EWTN this week, Cardinal Woelki reaffirmed his position, calling for all parties to “consider and recognize that the Eucharist is ordered to the unity of the creed”.

The Katholikentag event drew several tens of thousands of Catholics from German-speaking Europe to Münster May 9-11, and saw not only politicians and Cardinals Marx and Woelki restating and clarifying their respective positions, but provided a stage to Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, saying, in the keynote speech that opened the event: “Let us seek ways of expressing the common Christian faith by sharing in the Last Supper and Communion. I am sure: Thousands of Christians in interdenominational marriages are hoping for this”.

Similarly, Cardinal Marx stated that he hoped there soon would be a solution to the Communion debate, declaring May 9: “When someone is hungry and has faith, they must have access to the Eucharist. That must be our passion, and I will not let up on this.”

A peculiarly polemical form of this “hunger” caused something of a public scandal shortly after, when an official panel discussion played host to one celebrity’s demand to be “handed that wafer [the Most Blessed Sacrament]” since he pays for it with his Church tax.

Speaking on stage with Cardinal Woelki, the comedian and TV personality Eckart von Hirschhausen sharply criticised the Catholic Church’s teaching – to applause from the predominantly Catholic audience – saying, “I don’t see the point of a public debate about wafers” since climate change, on his view, was a “far more serious” issue.

Since he, as a Protestant spouse to a Catholic, pays Church tax and thus considered himself “a major sponsor”, the Church had “better happily hand out a wafer for it, or give me back my money!”, demanded von Hirschhausen, to an applauding crowd.

The crowd’s mood notwithstanding, Cardinal Woelki politely but firmly disagreed. “As a Catholic, I would never speak of a wafer. Using this concept alone demonstrates that we have a very different understanding” of what the Archbishop of Cologne then reminded the audience “is the Most Blessed Sacrament”, in which “Catholics encounter Christ Himself”.

With CNA’s German edition, CNA Deutsch, covering the diatribe, Catholics on social media quickly reacted with outrage to Hirschhausen’s pronouncements, triggering an apology on the following day, which in turn was widely discussed.

In an interview with EWTN’s German edition, Cardinal Woelki noted “he ecclesiological import of the Eucharist: “The Eucharist constitutes the ecclesial community of the Church. The Eucharist and the Church’s community are very, very close to one another.”

“Now, of course I understand that this constitutes a certain challenge, and that people may experience it as a form of suffering, in particular in the case of interdenominational marriages, that they may not be able to receive the Eucharist together.”

At the same time, the Archbishop of Cologne said, “it is of vital importance for us to recognize that whoever says ‘yes’ to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, acknowledging that Christ is indeed really present, thereby naturally also says ‘yes’ to the Papacy, and the hierarchical structure of the Church, and the veneration of the saints and much, much more”.

Any solution found in Germany could also not constitute some form of exceptionalism, but would have to be fully compatible with the universal Church, Woelki told EWTN’s Christina Link-Blumrath, again making an ecclesiological point: “As the Catholic Church, we also have to point out that we are a part and parcel of the universal Church. There can be no German exceptionalism.”

Just before these latest developments, on May 3, seven German bishops attended an inconclusive meeting at the Vatican to discuss prospective guidelines allowing non-Catholic spouses of Catholics to receive the Eucharist in certain “limited circumstances”, with the Vatican sending the Germans back, saying Pope Francis wants the bishops to come to an agreement among themselves.

Rudolf Gehrig contributed to this report.

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