In a move described by religious scholars as unprecedented, 10 members of the Episcopal religious community All Saints Sisters of the Poor were received into the Catholic Church by Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien on Sept. 3. The community’s chaplain, Rev. Warren Tanghe, also converted with the nuns.
Members of the order had been considering conversion for seven years. “We were drifting farther apart from the more liberal road the Episcopal Church is traveling. We are now more at home in the Roman Catholic Church,” Mother Christina Christie, superior of the order, told the The Baltimore Sun. In particular, she cited the Episcopal Church’s decisions to consecrate homosexual bishops and blessing same-sex “marriage.”
Two of the community’s sisters decided not to convert. They will continue to live with the others at their convent in Catonsville, Md. The order was founded originally in England and came to Baltimore in 1872.