Anglicanorum Coetibus Society President's Annual Report

The Anglicanorum Coetibus Society held its Annual General Meeting Sept. 13. Following the AGM, the Board of Directors unanimously elected Clara Chung, who previously served as vice president for the past three years. Please join us in welcoming and supporting Clara in her new role. Here is president-emerita Deborah Gyapong's final report as president on the Society's activities the past year.

In the past year, the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society (ACS) has accomplished a great deal and is well-positioned to carry out its mission to promote Anglican patrimony in the Catholic Church for the purposes of bringing souls to Christ, making disciples and the glory of God.  Here are some highlights:

• The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith invited the ACS to help with registration and publicity for the 10th Anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus Symposium 2019  it held Oct. 15 last year at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in conjunction with the Canon Law faculty there.  About 150 attendees including ordinariate clergy and lay people from around the world attended.  Deborah Gyapong as president and Joseph DeCaria, our former webmaster, went to Rome to assist in preparing the conference materials, registering attendees and providing them with their kits. CDF gave us permission to include information about the ACS in the packet.  This gave us an opportunity to spread the word about the Society and connect in person with the ordinaries, CDF personnel and others.  The CDF is publishing the talks in book form which should be available in a few months.
• The ACS mounted its Anglican Tradition in the Catholic Church conference in Toronto last November 15-16.  Organized by Board Directors Christopher Mahon and Clara Chung, ACS member Catharine Kavanagh and a team of volunteers, this event featured three beautiful patrimonial liturgies with music by professional choirs in St. Michael’s Cathedral, the heart of the Archdiocese of Toronto.  Cardinal Thomas Collins attended the opening Thanksgiving Mass and sent his greetings, as did Canada’s Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Luigi Bonazzi. Bishop Steven Lopes gave the keynote address in the adjacent choir school where the conference featured a total of four talks.  Videographer David LeRoss recorded and edited the liturgies and the talks in magnificent videos now on our website.  The videos are here.
• At last year’s AGM, members agreed in principle to examine the fee structure and look at resuming print subscriptions to Shared Treasure: the journal of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society. We have begun to publish the journal with the help of Amazon.com publishing so anyone who desires a hard copy or a kindle edition of the last issue or subsequent issues can order it directory from Amazon for a nominal price.  All members will still recevie an electronic version with their annual subscription or life membership.
• On Aug. 22, we officially launched a brand-new website that now includes the blog, news on its front page.  It has facility to host prominently many videos, not only of our conference but also various Masses and Choral Evensong’s of ordinariate communities.  The fresh, integrated website helps us focus on our mission to evangelize and grow the ordinariates while at the same time cherishing the Anglican patrimony approved by the Church.  The Anglicanorumcoetibussociety.blog will remain up as an archive of our more than 500 posts until we are able to move them gradually to our new site.
• The ACS produced a number of new podcasts in the past year, including one with Msgr. Carl Reid, the new ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross; one with Sr. Thomas Aquinas, director of the high school project at Our Lady of Walsingham Cathedral for an overview on Bishop Lopes‘ vision of Catholic education and how it’s being implement; one with Catalina Brand, director of Holy House Acadmey at the Cathedral about their home school enrichment program; one with Lisa Nicholas and her plans to republish old classics in the English Catholic and Anglo-Catholic tradition; and finally a two part series with David Torkington, an expert on Christian mysticism on the role the Ordinariates can play in reviving the English Catholic mystical tradition.
• Jackson Perry from the Connecticut Pre-Ordinariate Fellowship launched a weekly Ordinariate Newsletter that the ACS publishes every Sunday on our website. It offers parish profiles, sermon excerpts, and the ordo for the week for the Mattins and Evensong, among its features. This is a great initiative and I hope the ACS can find many others to help in generating material for the newsletter.  The newsletter encourages parishes to print it off for distribution and urges small donations to the seminarian fund of the POCSP.
• This will be my last year as president of the ACS.  I will be stepping aside after more than 3 years service, though I will continue as a director for another two years until my term is up.  Joe Blake, our founding president and most recently our treasurer in recent years, has retired from the board altogether as of this summer. He incorporated the Anglican Use Society (AUS) as a non-profit and held various leadership roles since that time.  The AUS remains our legal name though as of 2016 we operate under the name Anglicanorum Coetibus Society.
• We welcome aboard David Lewis, who succeeds Joe as treasurer.  David, a member of St. Luke’s Catholic Church, an ordinariate parish in the Washington, D.C. area, brings a wealth of experience with non-profit associations and church development.  We also welcome Peter Smith, a journalist and member of St. Alban’s Catholic Church in Rochester, N.Y. . He serves as webmaster and oversaw the new website design with all its bells and whistles, for which we are most grateful.  Early this year, the board of directors appointed William Tighe as editor in chief of Shared Treasure: the journal of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society. Bill is a long time director of the Society, an Eastern Catholic as well as an historian with a keen interest in the ins and outs of Anglican history.