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Posted by rturner on 2008/11/14 3:19:00 (315 reads)
Diocese of Quincy Realigns With South American Province
PRESS RELEASE
The Diocese of Quincy, Peoria, IL
November 8, 2008
Contact information:
Fr. John Spencer, Media Officer
The Diocese of Quincy
qunews@mtco.com
Cell: 309-264-7489
The Annual Synod of the Diocese of Quincy’s meeting November 7-8 in Quincy, Illinois, has voted by strong margins to realign itself with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, breaking its ties with The Episcopal Church in the US. On two key votes more than ¾ of the clergy and lay deputies voted in favor of the realignment.
The move came after several years of prayer and discernment about the diocese’s relationship with The Episcopal Church. Many in the Quincy Diocese, both clergy and lay people, have been at odds with the national leadership and other dioceses over the authority of the Bible, church order and discipline, and the church’s moral standards and teaching on Christian marriage.
On the vote to disaffiliate from the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, 75% of the clergy and 82% of the lay deputies voted in favor. On the subsequent vote to realign the diocese with the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone the vote in favor was 92% in the clergy order and 87% in the lay order.
“This decision was not made lightly,” said Fr. John Spencer, press officer for the diocese. “We have talked and prayed about this for a very long time. But we take our relationship to the Anglican Communion very seriously. Since 2003, over half the Provinces of the Anglican Communion have been in a state of broken Communion with The Episcopal Church. By realigning with the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone, we are now back in full communion with the majority of over 75 million Anglicans around the world.”
Canon Ed den Blaauwen, incoming President of the Standing Committee, said the focus of the diocese will remain on mission. “Our churches and our diocese will continue in mission and ministry locally and around the world. We feel much at home under the oversight of Archbishop Gregory Venables, Primate of the Southern Cone, who has warmly welcomed us into affiliation with that Province,” den Blaauwen said. “We are once again back in full fellowship with our brother and sister Anglicans.”
Shortly after the votes were taken, Canon den Blaauwen, who acted as chairman for the Synod, read a letter from Archbishop Venables welcoming Quincy as a member of the Province of the Southern Cone.
Bishop Keith Ackerman who retired from leadership of the diocese on November 1, spoke to the gathering Friday afternoon just before the synod convened. Quoting the Epistle of Jude, he encouraged them to remain faithful to the Gospel of Christ and the historic faith of the Christian Church as they considered the momentous decisions before them.
“While the votes show there was very strong support for this decision,” Fr. Spencer said, “we realize this was not a unanimous decision.” By a separate action, the synod made provision for a nine months grace period during which a congregation or member of the clergy might consider withdrawing from the diocese in order to stay in the Episcopal Church. “It is a matter of allowing everyone to follow their consciences in these very difficult times, without recrimination,” Spencer said.
END
Contact information:
Fr. John Spencer, Media Officer
The Diocese of Quincy
qunews@mtco.com
Cell: 309-264-7489
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SCHORI EXCOMMUNICATES THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH:
The Meaning of Bob Duncan's Deposition
Commentary By Canon Gary L'Hommedieu
www.virtueonline.org
9/15/08
Here's a cartoon I either culled from memory or else fabricated out of borrowed images and stored as memory. I'm picturing Road Runner, Warner Brothers cartoon superhero, sitting alone on the branch of a great oak tree. Up climbs the stealthy Wylie Coyote with a carpenter's saw. Crouched against the trunk of the tree he proceeds to cut through the limb upon which sits Road Runner, unperturbed and aloof. Finally Wylie Coyote cuts the branch through.
Here logic takes the usual Road Runner shift. Rather than the branch dropping to the ground in obedience to the laws of gravity, it remains perfectly stationary. Meanwhile the huge trunk gradually tips to one side and plunges to the ground. As always, the haughty Road Runner gets away unscathed, while the bungling Coyote is foiled again.
I don't expect this Thursday's deposition of Bishop Robert Duncan will be anything to laugh about. I don't expect that there will be an eleventh hour reprieve or any cavalry riding to the rescue. No heroics, real or imagined, and certainly nothing funny. Still, I sense a similar irony to be at play.
Katharine Jefferts Schori is emerging as a tragic-comic character, though perhaps a bit more like Darth Vader than Wylie Coyote. Remember the menacing ridicule by Princess Leia: "The more you tighten your grip, Darth, the more star systems will slip through your fingers!"
The lady primate is caught in an unenviable position. The more she tightens her grip on dissenting clerics, parishes and dioceses, the more she loses her grip, not only on the American Province and the Anglican Communion, but even on sanity.
She is hell-bent to depose Robert Duncan on a charge of abandoning the communion of the Episcopal Church.
There is a grain of truth in her charge. Duncan and his Pittsburgh Diocese are poised to depart the Episcopal Church, pending a final vote by diocesan convention in a few weeks. Call this "abandonment", if you will, and argue the merits of the Pittsburgh secession whichever way you choose.
Schori does not have such an open and shut case. She is pursuing it in such haste that she is willfully and knowingly violating canons. She is about to convene a kangaroo court where the House of Bishops will depose a standing bishop without a trial, and without all members of the House voting.
So far this is just good old-fashioned strong-arm politics. The fact that it is so blatant is a little surprising, and it is a bit unsettling that she can move forward with so flimsy a program without fear of resistance. The House of Bishops is not only utterly corrupt but utterly docile.
In her haste she is creating a precedent that will stand over time as an act of excommunication, but not Bob Duncan's or the Diocese of Pittsburgh's.
In order to topple Duncan she is forcing her own province, the Episcopal Church, to declare itself out of communion with the majority of the Anglican Communion. This has been pointed out countless times, but the irony has not sunk in.
Duncan and his diocese will depart the American Province of the Anglican Communion to align with another province of the Anglican Communion, the Southern Cone. Meanwhile the American primate, in her zeal to chalk up a victory in the ecclesiastical culture war, will strong-arm her bishops to declare the two provinces to be out of communion with each other.
The only other alternative is that the word "communion" loses all meaning.
Aristotle's law of non-contradiction, the cornerstone of logic, suggests the following: It is not possible to be simultaneously in communion with the Anglican Communion and out of communion with the Anglican Communion. And yet that is the promulgation about to arise from the American House of Bishops.
The Diocese of Pittsburgh, together with its bishop, will elect to change its constitution and, in turn, will be received as a constituent member of the Province of the Southern Cone, a [part] of the Anglican Communion. Whatever TEC might do in response, it cannot declare either the Diocese of Pittsburgh or its bishop to have abandoned "the communion of this Church", unless "this Church" is out of communion with the Southern Cone. The only way it can do so is if TEC acknowledges that it is no longer in communion with the Province of the Southern Cone and all the provinces in communion with her.
Granted, there might be some disciplinary implications when a bishop leads his diocese out of the home province. But even mentioning the word "discipline" is laughable after the past three decades of raucous contempt for any ordered continuity of the Church's historic discipline. Discipline today has no meaning apart from selectively attacking the legal status of clergy or parishes that have fallen out of favor with the hierarchy. Ever since the trial of Bishop Pike, when the Episcopal Church declared heresy to be, in effect, heretical, the church has proven over and over that it does not have the nerve, or the conviction, to apply discipline. So whatever will transpire this week in the House of Bishops, it will not be Christian discipline.
It is a weighty thing when the Presiding Bishop declares an orthodox province of the Anglican Communion to be something antithetical to the doctrine and discipline of the Episcopal Church. If I were Sigmund Freud, I would say that Katharine Jefferts Schori had tricked herself into acknowledging the abandonment of the Communion by her own province.
That's one of the problems with being in too much of a hurry. You make foolish mistakes. Sometimes you make the fatal mistake of telling people who you really are and where you really stand.
Bob Duncan faces his denouement this week. By all accounts it is tragic moment. Real hearts will be broken and real tears will be shed.
In spite of the grievous losses and the perverse obstinacy of the players, this is a moment of momentous comic significance. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" rues the brooding Schori, revealing the staggering depths of her wounded pride. She will strike the unresisting Duncan and topple him from his incumbency only to elevate him to new heights.
In the same stroke she separates her own church from the Anglican Communion. Either that or "communion" has no meaning. Either way she ends up shadow bishop of a "church" that can no longer be meaningfully defined.
---The Rev. Canon J. Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida, and a regular columnist for VirtueOnline
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47-1: May 2008
(11 articles)
February 2008 - May 2008: Volume 47 Number 1
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45-1: Feb 2006
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January - February 2006: Volume 45 Number 1
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44-5: Dec 2005
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November - December 2005: Volume 44 Number 5
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44-4: Oct 2005
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September - October 2005: Volume 44 Number 3
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43-5: Jan 2005
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The Christian Challenge - Dec 2004/Jan 2005 (Vol 43, No. 5)
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43-4: Nov 2004
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The Christian Challenge - October/November 2004 (Vol 43, No. 4)
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