By Msgr. Richard C. Antall, Crisis Magazine, Jan. 8, 2024
Monsignor Antall is pastor of Holy Name Parish in the Diocese of Cleveland. He is the author of The X-Mass Files (Atmosphere Press, 2021), and The Wedding (Lambing Press, 2019).
The primary focus of Catholic worship, unlike Protestant worship, is to be directed toward God, not the people.
In 1866, the English novelist Anthony Trollope wrote a book entitled Clergymen of the Church of England. It was serialized in the Pall Mall Gazette, an important magazine of opinion, and reflected both Trollope’s religious background as a confirmed Anglican and the grandson of a clergyman and his analysis of the need for reform of the Church of England.
Trollope had already written brilliant fiction about ecclesiastical affairs in his Barchester Towers series of novels, but his nonfiction essay has many interesting insights. His comment about the discernment of bishops in the Anglican communion is particularly arresting because he said that a man needed personal dignity as much as piety and more than mental ability to be selected as a candidate. I won’t comment on any application to the discernment of bishops in our own Church and country. ….