I am grateful to the Daily Telegraph for publishing a letter from me in its edition of Saturday 27 December, in response to an article that was, I have to say, particularly irritating in its ill-warranted and self-deceiving triumphalism.
I am also grateful to the many who pointed out to me that it had indeed been published, otherwise I would have missed it on post-Christmas leave!
SIR – As one of hundreds of priests in the Church of England who was brought up Catholic, I am frustrated by the implication that the traffic is one-way (“Anglican priests are fleeing to Catholicism. Is the Church of England doomed?”, telegraph.co.uk, December 22).
Admittedly, those of us moving into Anglicanism make less noise about our conversion – often because we wish to avoid disrespect to priests, teachers and beloved family members who are still part of the Roman Catholic Church and remain our fellow Christians.
It could also be pointed out that Anglican priests in England significantly outnumber their Roman confrères; but such point-scoring between different branches of Jesus Christ’s church seems a distraction from the urgent task of re-evangelising what is now a largely faithless nation.
I am grateful to my Catholic schooling for giving a boy from a non-churchgoing family a sound grounding in Scripture and the essentials of the Christian faith. But I am very glad to be an Anglican, and very glad that we have women priests and bishops. I also very much hope that the Church of England will join a growing number of Anglican provinces, from Scotland to New Zealand, in recognising same-sex marriages.
Rev Gerry Lynch
Devizes, Wiltshire
