I was in our community chapel, just before Mass, when I received a message that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had died. My immediate reaction was a whispered “thank you” to him, for we have so much to be grateful to him for. Without him and without Anglicanorum Coetibus, his Apostolic Constitution that made it possible for groups of Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Holy See, we might not be here at all.
We are now the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but the community of which most of us were originally part was the Community of St Mary the Virgin. Founded at Wantage, then in Berkshire, in 1848, it is one of the oldest Anglican communities in the world. It was born out of the Oxford Movement: a movement of High Church Anglicans who sought to reclaim the Church of England’s Catholic inheritance.
