My friend Albert Scharbach in the New York Times on the Pope’s Anglican Ordinariates

Taylor Marshall (left) and Al Scharbach (right)
at Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Rosemont, PA
My friend Albert Scharbach (pictured above) was also once an Anglican priest. We went to seminary together at Westminster Theological Seminary. He was recently mentioned in the New York Times and they just published his response. It’s quite good. The New York Times has received thousands of pieces of mail over the Pope’s Anglican Ordinarates article so it’s noteworthy that they published Al’s response.

Way to go Al!!!

Why Some Take the Path From Anglican to Catholic (New York Times)

Response to NY Times “For an Episcopal Parish, a Path to Catholicism” by Albert Scharbach:

I am the former curate referred to in your article about the Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont, as one who had already left the Anglican parish to become Roman Catholic.

The article describes Anglicans attracted to Rome as being against women’s and homosexual ordinations. But this does not describe the real motivation for why priests like me reconcile with the Roman Catholic Church.

The main issue is the fact that the Anglican Church has no consistent doctrinal authority and often acts independently from the historical positions of the universal church. In light of this, the ordination of women and practicing homosexuals is merely symptomatic of much more fundamental problems with Anglican ecclesiology.

Priests like me are not reacting to polemics on the theological spectrum. It is the faith once delivered that we are after, which we pursue as an imperative of conscience.

Albert Scharbach
Baltimore, Oct. 28, 2009

The writer is pastoral assistant to Bishop Denis J. Madden of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.