By Ricky, on April 7th, 2014 Rev’d John Barker outside Christ Church, Vienna following his ordination as priest © Ricky Yates
On the evening of Sunday 30th March, I had the privilege of attending and participating in the ordination as priest, of my friend and ministerial colleague, John Barker. The ordination service took place at Christ Church, Vienna and meant that for the first time in my life, I was part of two services, on the same Sunday, in two different countries.
John was originally a licensed Reader in the Diocese of Durham and since his work for the European Commission brought him to continental Europe, he has helped in the Anglican Chaplaincies of Warsaw and Bucharest. I first met John in September 2008, at the Eastern Archdeaconry Synod meeting in Corfu which I attended, a week before moving from Oxfordshire to Prague. At that point, John had just moved from Bucharest to Skopje . . . → Read More: Ordination in Vienna
By Ricky, on February 20th, 2012
Bechyne Church © Ricky Yates
At the end of my recent post about the Ecumenical Service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, I mentioned the Pfarrer Initiative in Austria, that calls for radical reform within the Roman Catholic Church. I did promise a future blog post about it. So here it is!
The Pfarrer Initiative is an open call to disobedience by nearly 400 Roman Catholic priests and deacons in Austria. As such, they constitute roughly 10% of the Austrian Roman Catholic clergy. You can read their original ‘Appeal to Disobedience’ in English, by following this link. However inevitably, most other online material about this radical reform movement is only available in German.
This initiative arises out of two major issues that increasingly face Roman Catholic priests across Europe and North America. How to offer the . . . → Read More: The Austrian Pfarrer Initiative/Priests’ Initiative – a call for honesty
By Ricky, on November 15th, 2010
The railway station in the village of Babylon © Ricky Yates
We spent the final long weekend of our October holiday in the far west of Bohemia, close to the German border, staying in the little village with the somewhat surprising name of Babylon. To get there from Slavonice, we spent a good part of Friday 8th October driving, firstly through parts of northern Austria before passing back into the Czech Republic. Our journey then took us through Šumava, a highly attractive area of mountains, forests and lakes, parallel to the German border. Having now driven through Šumava, this area has been added to my ‘must re-visit and explore more’ list of places in the Czech Republic.
Babylon is where Jack, an Irish member of our St. Clement’s congregation, has a house that dates from the first decade of the twentieth century, which he has spent the . . . → Read More: Babylon and Pasecnice
By Ricky, on November 11th, 2010
Besídka Restaurant & Hotel, Slavonice © Ricky Yates
Less than 30 km south of Telc lies the little town of Slavonice. On the morning of Thursday 7th October, we drove from Telc to Slavonice, stopping off to briefly explore the intervening town of Decice en-route.
Slavonice has some of the best examples of buildings with sgraffito decoration in the whole of the Czech Republic. The reason that so many of these architectural gems have survived is because of the town’s somewhat unfortunate history. A prosperous town in the latter part of the sixteenth century from which period, many of the town’s historic buildings date, it lost much of its prosperity during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and suffered a further economic downturn when the main road between Prague and Vienna was re-routed in the eighteenth century.
In the twentieth century, two further events . . . → Read More: Slavonice
By Ricky, on September 27th, 2010
Christ Church, Vienna © Ricky Yates
On Thursday 16th September, only a week after our previous trip, we once more drove the length of the Prague – Brno motorway. This time we then headed further south over the border into Austria and travelled onwards to Vienna in order to attend the annual meeting of our Eastern Archdeaconry Synod.
As I’ve blogged previously, St. Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church, Prague is part of the Church of England’s forty fourth diocese, the Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe. As with the other 43 dioceses that make up the Church of England, the Diocese in Europe is divided into Archdeaconries – in our case, into seven Archdeaconries. Even the smallest of these, the Archdeaconry of Switzerland, covers the whole of one country. And Prague belongs to the largest of the seven, the Eastern Archdeaconry, which consists of . . . → Read More: The Eastern Archdeaconry Synod in Vienna
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