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OHC Makes Covenant with Italian Order

Episcopal News Service. March 11, 1977 [77092]

WEST PARK, N. Y. -- The Anglican Order of the Holy Cross and the Roman Catholic Camaldolese order, have entered into a Covenant of prayer and fellowship for a period of at least one year.

The Covenant between the two Orders was ratified by Father Connor Lynn, OHC Superior, and Father Benedict Calati, Camaldolese Prior General, during the Octave of Unity at Camaldoli, Italy, where the Roman Catholic Order was founded by Saint Romuald in 980 A.D.

Similarities between the two communities help to make the relationship productive. They are approximately the same size and have very much the same regimen or corporate prayer and liturgy. With the recent development of Holy Saviour Priory at Pineville, South Carolina, OHC is now exploring modes of prayer, which are characteristic of the Camaldolese.

Several of the monks in Italy speak English, and some OHC members have begun lessons in Italian. The only Camaldolese House outside Italy is at Big Sur, California; this provides a place of contact with the OHC houses at Berkeley and Santa Barbara.

San Gregorio, now the Camaldolese monastery in Rome, is the site from which St. Gregory the Great sent St. Augustine to Canterbury. In fact, it is almost certain that St. Augustine, as well as the four succeeding Archbishops of Canterbury, were originally monks of the Benedictine Community, which later became Camaldolese.

According to official documents of Vatican II, the Religious Orders of the Roman and Anglican Communions have a special vocation within the work of the reunion of Christendom. In acknowledgement of that, the beginning of the new covenant was celebrated on the morning that the Anglican-Roman Catholic document on authority was published.