The gingerbread house-part 5

Continuing my series on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018).

(Adrian Vermeule) I was baptized and raised as an Episcopalian/Anglican; my first school was run by Anglican nuns and I later attended an historically Episcopalian boarding  school. I  fell away from the Episcopal Church in college, and when I returned in later life, it was a different place. There are many "small-O" orthodox Christians remaining within it, including dear friends, but they have lost control of the institution to heterodox forces (58-59).

(Oberg) Going to the Episcopal Church near Harvard pushed me over the edge. In Holland, I had a brilliant, passionate Anglican priest, who reminded me of C. S. Lewis. He was prolife, which upset many, and I suspected he had been exiled from a diocese in England because of this. With him as my shepherd, I felt no urgency to convert [to Catholicism]. That changed when I returned to America. People at the Episcopal Church I attended were very nice, but it became clear that it was not my spiritual home. There was dissonance between the Nicene Creed they recited and what was actually believed that I could not comprehend (117). 

(Fuller) …part of what led to [my conversion] was the belief that if you're strongly committed to ecumenical reunion, the greater desire for that reunion lay with the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics. 

One of the things that did bother me was that the Episcopal Church became an advocate of things like abortion, having begun by merely tolerating it…While the drift of the Episcopal Church, and of the worldwide Anglican communion of which it is a part, continued apace... (162, 165).

i) The irony is that the Catholic church is following the same trajectory as the Episcopal church. While this has accelerated under Pope Francis, modernism has been infiltrating the Catholic church at the highest levels since Pope Pius XII. So these converts are abandoning one sinking ship to board another sinking ship.

ii) I'm not committed to ecumenical reunion. 

iii) To my knowledge, the Anglican communion in general is not adrift. The Anglican communion has three wings: progressive, evangelical, and Anglo-Catholic. There's a very sizable and vibrant evangelical wing of the Anglican communion–unlike the dying progressive wing. The Catholic church has no counterpart to the evangelical wing of the Anglican communion. Moreover, there's an ongoing realignment to exclude representatives of the progressive wing, like the ECUSA. So for all its faults, Anglicanism is far healthier than Roman Catholicism.