“Sweet, because I am excited about the opportunities that joining the ordinariate will bring: to uphold human rights and help millions of suffering Christians and others round the world. The Catholic Church is a truly united global organization, which gives it strength.”
Nazir-Ali, who is married with two children, hopes to be ordained as a Catholic priest within the ordinariate, a body created by Benedict XVI in 2011 for groups of former Anglicans seeking to preserve elements of their patrimony.
“The Catholic Church has had its share of problems, but the faith and values are those that I also hold and which I feel are being eroded in the Church of England. It might have been easier at the age of 72 to have remained where I was: to work from the inside to change the things that I feel so strongly about,” he wrote.
“Believe me, I have tried — but failed. The Church councils and synods are permeated by activists who each have a single-issue, often faddish agenda, whether it is about cultural correctness, ‘climate change,’ identity politics, multiculturalism (which actually encourages communities to live separately), or critical theory on race, religion, and gender — a neo-Marxist theory developed to create conflict by dividing people into victims and villains.”
Nazir-Ali was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1949, and attended Catholic schools. He has both a Christian and Muslim family background and holds British and Pakistani citizenship.
He was ordained as an Anglican clergyman in 1976, working in Karachi and Lahore. He became provost of Lahore Cathedral and was consecrated the first bishop of Raiwind in West Punjab.
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