Steve Weatherbee writes about Fr. Wilkinson for the National Catholic Register

Steve kindly sent me some photos, which I will upload when I have time.  Meanwhile here’s an excerpt of his great and lengthy report in the National Catholic Register.

 

VICTORIA, B.C. — When Peter Wilkinson returned to his home town of Victoria, British Columbia, 42 years ago, with five years of service in the Anglican Church in England under his belt, he was deemed too “Catholic” by the local bishop and never got an Anglican parish of his own.

But as an Anglican-Catholic member of a world-wide communion of dissenters from liberal trends in Anglicanism, he rose swiftly to bishop and then to Metropolitan for Canada — before giving that all up earlier this year to be received as a simple layman into the Catholic Church.

On Dec. 8, at the ripe age of 72, he was ordained a Catholic priest and immediately assumed his duties as priest and pastor of St. Columba of Iona Church. Father Wilkinson’s flock comprises 22 former Anglican Catholics who with him were received into the Catholic Church early this year, and at the same time into the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.

-snip-

“I’m loving it,” Father Wilkinson told the National Catholic Register when asked about his membership in the Catholic Church. “I haven’t regretted this for a moment.”

As for his demotion in ecclesial rank, he laughingly commented, “It isn’t about me. I simply want to be a holy priest and serve out my remaining years in that capacity.”

Anglican Catholics like Father Wilkinson are part of a spiritual revival that was initiated in the English Anglican Church, whose leaders included Blessed John Henry Newman before his conversion to Catholicism in 1845. It looked to the restoration of pre-Reformation liturgy, celebration of the full range of sacraments, devotion to Mary, communal religious life, and, for some, ultimate reunion with Rome.

Read the rest here.

 

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