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One of Canada’s best known Catholics has become an Anglican, saying he could no longer worship with integrity in the Catholic Church.
Broadcaster and author Michael Coren, whose books include “Why Catholics are Right”, was formally welcomed into the Anglican Church of Canada in Toronto recently.
Mr Coren had been worshipping privately in an Anglican church for a year.
He told the National Post he had not been able to embrace some of the Catholic Church’s social and moral teaching for more than a year.
“I could not remain in a church that effectively excluded gay people,” Mr Coren said.
“That’s only one of the reasons, but for someone who had taken the Catholic position on same-sex marriage for so long, I’d never been comfortable with that even though I suppose I was regarded as being a stalwart in that position.
“I felt a hypocrite being part of a church that described homosexual relations as being disordered and sinful.”
” . . . I felt that the circle of love had to be broadened, not reduced,” he concluded.
Mr Coren is married to a Catholic wife and they have four Catholic children.
The uproar over his move to Anglicanism cost him several speeches to conservative American Catholic groups and his regular column in the Catholic Register was pulled.
Mr Coren said his conversion has “brought out the worst in the Catholic right”.
“The Catholic right is very frightened and very aggressive right now, because they have a pope who they no longer think is one of theirs, and so they’re feeling very defensive,” Mr Coren said.
He was received into the Catholic Church in 1985, when he was 26.
Mr Coren worshipped in evangelical and Anglican churches for three years in the 1990s, in the wake of a battle with the late Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic over a magazine article.
It was the pull of the Eucharist that drew him back to the Catholic Church.
But now he feels he can be spiritually fed in the Anglican Church.
Sources
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