Fr Allan Hawkins, until fairly recently a Parish Priest in Texas and now retired (much as I am retired, that is seldom saying Mass more than six times a week) has returned to blogging. You can find him at http://www.salveteatquevalete.wordpress.com/ and he is well worth reading - his latest piece concerns clerical marriage, and as a son of an Anglican cleric he understands more than most the pressures of life in a parsonage. Do read him and, if you will, respond. He and I were seminarians together at a long- vanished institution called Cuddesdon - there is some sort of establishment occupying the old buildings and calling itself "Ripon College Cuddesdon" - it is the heir of the liberal Protestant place formerly on Boar's Hill (Ripon Hall). Back in the 1950s Cuddesdon was properly monastic; I had to get special permission to allow my mother to see the Common Room. I am told that now it more resembles a branch of a ladies' sewing bee. O Tempora, O Mores!
On a more local note, we welcomed the local Catenian Circle at Mass today, and very jolly it was, with some great singing. Usually our Ordinariate Mass is a rather intimate gathering with no more than thirty or forty in Church, so it was lovely to have the place almost full today. Some have said they would like to return when we are using the Ordinariate form for the Mass. That will begin again on the first Sunday in Lent..
At the time of the merger I suggested the appropriate sobriquet was the College of St Peter and St Thomas on the grounds that Peter denied and Thomas doubted.
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