Are We Catholic?

Our Hermitage is a monastery of the Orthodox Catholic Church. That is the official name of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Historically, ours is the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church founded as the Risen Christ breathed the Holy Spirit into His Apostles (Jn 20:22). We are the "Catholic Church" attested by the Apostlic Fathers (e.g., St. Ignatius of Antioch, Smyraeans). The word Orthodox, meaning "right belief" and "right glory (worship)" arose during the early centuries as innovations began to appear throughout the universal Church. Certainly, the Apostolic Fathers did not use the phrase Catholic Church to refer to a schismatic jurisdiction which would emerge a thousand years later.

The Hermitage Sisters and their chaplain served the Roman Catholic Church for, collectively, nearly two centuries. The infallible teaching, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church, no salvation), has never been far from our minds. Today, we continue in our devotion to the One Church. We are humbled to call the original and ancient Church our home — arising from the Master and His Apostles, not missionaries. She is home to some 300 million souls.

Our Lady of the Angels Hermitage is a longtime community, formerly Franciscan: seeking God, praying ancient prayers, laboring with our bodies each day, and now rooted in the faith of the Apostles and their descendent flocks. We welcome all people who love the Lord Jesus Christ and who are committed to Apostolic and Catholic order, practice, belief, and worship. We give thanks that we continue to venerate and practice the traditions of the earliest gathered Christians in the West, a privilege we were not always free to exercise in the Western Church.

Life at the Hermitage is immersed in the valid Mysteries (Sacraments). We live and uphold godly morality. We give thanks that our Church's bishops vigorously safeguard both.

We are living through a most extraordinary age, when the safety we took for granted during the middle-twentieth century, which we thought to be imperishable, is perishing all around us (or has vanished altogether). Our age is one in which spiritual refugees dot the landscape. Whole parishes, dioceses, and even provinces and communions have forsaken the Christian faith proposing inventions that might placate the cruel masters of permissive society.

The Hermitage has journeyed through Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism finding safe harbor in the ancient Church (thanks be to God!), which today is known as Eastern Orthodoxy. We are steadied by solid and holy shepherds, not given to innovation and vigilant to protect the Church from the poisonous atmosphere of popular culture and secular-humanist "anti-values."