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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Your Abbeys Are Belong to Us

Lifted from Fr. Z's blog, the picture here is of Pope Benedict XVI sitting in Westminster Abbey in London, England. Benedict, I believe, is the first pope to have ever visited the abbey, which was a Catholic edifice until the advent of the English Reformation.

See the red stole the pope is wearing? That originally belonged to Pope Leo XIII, who in the encyclical Apostolicae Curae declared all Anglican Church ordinations, orders and priests to be invalid. It's almost certain Benedict knew this, and chose to wear Leo's stole in Westminster Abbey and elsewhere in England to subtly convey a specific message. Probably not the silly subject title of this post, but maybe something along the lines of letting everyone know that there's only one Christian Church, and it aint the one founded by King Henry VIII.

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