By Thomas Lipscomb on 11.14.05 @ 12:06AM
Last week in Pittsburgh, the wayward Protestant Episcopal Church suffers further humiliation.
In a meeting last week in Pittsburgh, an international panel of
prominent Anglicans has called for an open break between members of
the Anglican Communion and what they view as the wayward Protestant
Episcopal Church of the United States. The meeting was hosted by
the Bishop Duncan of Pittsburgh and presided over by seven
archbishops from the West Indies, South East Asia, and Africa.
The collapse of the authority and membership of mainstream
churches in the United States has paralleled the collapse of the
influence of other institutions from the media to academia as a
yawning gap has continued to open up in the past half century
between their actions and their announced goals.
The sad huddle of affluent bedwetters, thumbsuckers,
treehuggers, social climbers, homophiles, quavery ladies, and
chronic petition signers that makes up the current Episcopal Church
is no exception. Historic hubs like lovely Grace Cathedral in San
Francisco or St. Paul's in Richmond, Virginia, have been turned
into bizarre nests of homosexual and "peace" activism, complete
with rainbow and peace flags hanging in the nave and lesbian and
homosexual priests ramming their agenda down the throats of the
congregations along with the communion wafer.
Many think those activists continually demanding a more
"inclusive" church might have paid a little attention to the
majority of its communicants. The majority had proven itself
perfectly willing to include minorities with equal rights. But the
radical minority didn't want inclusiveness... it wanted to
dominate. And if success is dominating empty churches by driving
out their congregations, they have succeeded.
The reality of the "inclusiveness" of the radicals was brought
home a year ago by an idiotic abuse of power by the Bishop of
Washington, D.C. against a tiny tidewater Maryland parish and its
brave priest. Now the radicals are the majority many places. And
they control the lovely churches, seminaries, and the all-important
church pension plan.
Those who have left the Episcopal Church, or are being included
out, are, in a sense, "Neo-Puritans," just as they are accused of
being by those trying to keep PECUSA together.
So were those part of the Reformation movement spread by Martin
Luther and his successors and the original Puritans themselves. But
they were protesting innovations and abuses by the hierarchies in
the reigning churches of their day, including the Catholic
practices of simony, benefices, the selling of indulgences, and, in
the Puritans' case, the conversion of the Anglican church from a
institution of God to an institutional extension of the Stuart
Monarchy's recently asserted "divine right."
Their problem was a "trahison des clercs." Congregations weren't
trying to reform the basic tenets of the church. If anything they
were trying to return to them. Few of the Episcopal laity had any
problem with the 39 Articles of Religion at the back of the Book of
Common Prayer, but dozens of their bishops and priests did.
In fact they so objected to the Book itself that they destroyed
it with a "revision" in the 1970s. The basic language of the BCP
somehow had served almost 500 years of Episcopalians from Tudor
times to Jimmy Carter's presidency, and suddenly it failed the
clergy's "inclusive" test.
Besides, prominent bishops like Spong and Robinson disagreed
with some of the most basic elements of the Nicene Creed, the heart
of Anglican belief. Some they considered minor matters of
definition, like the divinity of Christ. It made one wonder why, if
the radical clerics shared such contempt toward these unfashionable
tenets of faith, they hadn't left their unenlightened laity to more
orthodox priests and moved on?
The American Episcopal Church itself is a byproduct of the
Reformation. It proudly called itself the Protestant Episcopal
Church of the United States to make that point after the American
Revolution. It intentionally dispersed its authority originally
through a series of local parishes that owned their own property
and selected their own priests under bishops of dioceses of limited
power. That way the parishes could reflect whatever the local
people wanted, from "Low Church" "plain altar" evangelicals of the
Puritan tradition to lush "High Church" parishes with their "smells
and bells."
Over the past 50 years radical priests and allied bishops have
systematically gutted parishional authority and taken over their
property as one diocese after another has swung into line with the
new authoritarian radical clergy. In short, the protest meeting led
by the courageous Bishop of Pittsburgh was a reaction to a half
century of peculation -- embezzlement led by the church
establishment. But on whose behalf?
Fortunately a healthy religion is able to renew itself from time
to time as required. When it isn't, a black hole like the Islam of
today results that becomes the enemy of reform and enlightenment
itself.
What a wonderful irony that Third World members of the Anglican
Communion are more vital in this renewal than the Mother Church of
England itself, much less the incredible, shrinking weirdo
Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States.
topics:
Religion, Islam, Africa
