Allegations fly in e-mail row: CEN 5.27.09 May 29, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Free Speech, Religion Reporting, The Episcopal Church.trackback
| A “dirty tricks” campaign has blown up in the faces of liberal activists in the Episcopal Church, as the publication of purloined e-mails has led to allegations of “conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy” being lodged against the leader of the gay-pressure group Integrity and a member of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council.
Bishops associated with the Anglican Communion Institute (ACI) have asked the bishops of Los Angeles and Delaware to look in to the conduct of the Rev Susan Russell and the Rev Canon Mark Harris for having surreptitiously obtained and then posting on their blogs the text of private correspondence exchanged among the ACI and its attorney. A request has also been made to Bishop John Chane of Washington to review the actions of one of his staffers in the anti-ACI campaign. The dispute centres around e-mails published by Canon Harris and Ms Russell though written and exchanged by the ACI leadership on the crafting of a position paper entitled the “Bishops’ Statement on the Polity of the Episcopal Church”, released last month by the ACI and subsequently endorsed by 14 bishops. Priests “publishing the private e-mails of bishops is a matter of grave pastoral disorder,” ACI member the Very Rev Philip Turner, former Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School, at Yale charged. However, writing on the Integrity blog website, Ms Russell applauded the “outing” of the ACI, saying the Bishops’ Statement was an “unprecedented power grab by anti-gay bishops” that should be made known to the wider church. The ACI case will likely test the free speech limits of clergy blogs and amateur church news gathering. The explosive growth of the internet, which has seen many clergy turn to blogging in recent years, has not been matched with a code of conduct that draws the line between libel, copyright theft, defamation and aggressive reporting with a priest’s obligation to engage in moral and civil conduct. Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper. |
 |
