Homosexuality cures do not work: CEN 8.21.09 p 5. August 31, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Human Sexuality --- The gay issue, Popular Culture.comments closed
There is no scientific evidence that “gay to straight” or reparative therapies work, a task force of the American Psychological Association (APA) reported last week to the association’s national convention. However, in a major policy shift, the APA stated that it was ethical for therapists to help those seeking to overcome same-sex attractions and acknowledged for the first time that therapists should respect the religious beliefs of their clients when dealing with homosexuality.
The 130 page report prepared by the APA’s Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Homosexuality examined 83 studies and concluded the “the results of scientifically valid research indicate that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through SOCE [sexual orientation change efforts]” or reparative therapy.
Same-sex attractions were “normal and positive variants” of human sexuality, the APA said, affirming its 1973 position that homosexuality was not a mental illness.
The report criticized traditional religious teachings on the morality of homosexual behavior stating “there is a growing body of evidence that sexual stigma, manifested as prejudice or discrimination directed at non-heterosexual orientations and identities, is a major source of stress for sexual minorities.”
This stress had arisen from the “moral and religious values in North America and Europe” which gave the “the initial rationale for criminalization, discrimination and prejudice against same-sex behaviors,” the APA report said.
However, the APA held that patients should be permitted to seek help overcoming unwanted same-sex attractions. “The appropriate application of affirmative therapeutic interventions for those who seek SOCE involves therapist acceptance, support, and understanding of clients,” the report concluded, adding the proviso that therapists should not impose “a specific sexual orientation identity outcome.”
The report adopted an agnostic view on the efficacy of reparative therapies as “there are no methodologically sound studies of recent SOCE that would enable the task force to make a definitive statement about whether or not recent SOCE is safe or harmful and for whom.”
The task force recommended that psychologists help clients “explore possible life paths that address the reality of their sexual orientation, reduce the stigma associated with homosexuality, respect the client’s religious beliefs, and consider possibilities for a religiously and spiritually meaningful and rewarding life.”
Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, an ex-gay ministry, called the report a “positive step.”
“Simply respecting someone’s faith is a huge leap in the right direction,” said Mr. Chambers, a self identified ex-gay man who has overcome same-sex attractions and is now married with children.
But I’d go further. Don’t deny the possibility that someone’s feelings might change,” he told the Associated Press.
The Rev. Mario Bergner, a onetime gay activist who became an Episcopal priest and now leads the Boston-based Redeemed Lives ministry helping those with “unwanted same-sex attractions, was concerned the report ignored the work scientists who had found that sexual orientation can be changed.
He stated the “APA statements on Evangelical Christians is a display of both ignorance and hubris. Evangelical Christian pastoral care givers, such as myself, do not provide reparative therapy of any sort, because we are not therapists. We provide pastoral care and discipleship that employs the insights from Christian and non-Christian therapists who for decades helped men and women find freedom from unwanted same-sex attractions.”
The APA’s “hubris” was two-fold, Fr. Bergner said. “By suggesting people with same-sex attractions seek churches that will affirm these attractions, [the APA] has made itself the judge above global conservative Christianity, Judaism and Islam,” he said, adding that the APA’s statements “may result in denying men and women with unwanted same-sex attractions the personal freedom to seek treatment.”
The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), which supports reparative therapy, lauded the APA’s acknowledgment of the “importance of faith and religious diversity.”
However, the “report reflects a very strong confirmation bias; that is, the task force reflected virtually no ideological diversity. No APA member who offers reorientation therapy was allowed to join the task force.”
It further claimed the APA “selected and interpreted studies that fit within their innate and immutable view” and ignored studies that contradicted its preconceived conclusions.
Canadian priest takes over Unity, Faith and Order brief: CEN 8.21.09 p 6. August 31, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Canada, Anglican Consultative Council, Church of England Newspaper.comments closed
The Secretary General of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) has appointed a Canadian priest to be the ACC’s director for Unity, Faith and Order (UFO).
On Aug 14 Canon Kenneth Kearon announced that the Rev. Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan would take up the newly created UFO post next month in succession to the ACC’s former deputy secretary general and director of ecumenical affairs Gregory Cameron, who earlier this year had been elected Bishop of St Asaph.
Since 1995 Canon Barnett-Cowan has served as the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada’s director of Faith, Worship and Ministry and has been assisted with the work of several pan-Anglican bodies, including the Lambeth Commission on Communion, the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations, and most recently was appointed to the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission for Unity, Faith and Order. She has also served as a consultant to the Anglican-Lutheran International Commission and as a member of the Plenary Commission for Faith and Order at the World Council of Churches.
Speaking from her sabbatical in New Zealand, Canon Barnett-Cowan told ACNS she was honored to have been chosen for the post and looked “forward to continuing to serve the wonderful and complicated family that is the Anglican Communion, and the ecumenical movement of which it is a part.”
Canon Kearon stated Canon Barnett-Cowan brought “a profound knowledge and experience of both ecumenical and doctrinal issues to this role,” while Canadian Archbishop Fred Hiltz also applauded the choice.
“We, in the Anglican Church of Canada, are enormously grateful for the outstanding service Alyson has given to our Church as Director of Faith Worship and Ministry. While we shall miss her we rejoice in her new appointment. I am confident the Communion will be well served through her leadership, one which is marked by integrity, passion and a deep love for the Church,” he said.
As director of the ACC’s Unity, Faith and Order, Canon Barnett-Cowan is expected to continue the work of Bishop Cameron in strengthening the communion’s relations with other churches, as well as assist the newly formed pan-Anglican standing committee on Unity, Faith and Order.
The ACC’s London office at St Andrew’s House, also known by the informal nickname, “Anglican Communion Office” or “ACO,” will serve as Canon Barnett-Cowan’s base of operations.
South Carolina splits from TEC leadership: CEN 8.21.09 p 5. August 31, 2009
Posted by geoconger in 76th General Convention, Church of England Newspaper, South Carolina.comments closed
The Bishop of South Carolina has asked his diocese to begin a process of disengagement with the governing organs of the Episcopal Church, but will not pull the diocese out of the church.
At a special meeting of the diocesan clergy held Aug 13, Bishop Mark Lawrence said that in the wake of the Episcopal Church’s decision taken at its General Convention in Anaheim to walk apart from the wider Anglican Communion some “would counsel us that it is past time to cut our moorings from the Episcopal Church and take refuge in a harbor without the pluralism and false teachings” within “our Church.”
Others counseled “patience, to ‘let the Instruments of Unity do their work’,” while some appeared “paralyzed,” adopting a “posture of insular denial of what is inexorably coming upon us all.”
South Carolina would take the middle course, conforming to the teachings of the wider Anglican Communion, while maintaining its place as the Episcopal Church in the lower half of the state of South Carolina.
Bishop Lawrence asked the diocese to consider linking with fellow traditionalists to form “Dioceses in Missional Relationships” with “conservative parishes and missions in dioceses where there is isolation or worse.”
He proposed a statement of clarification made at all new ordinations in the diocese whereby the oath of conformity to the “doctrine, discipline and worship of The Episcopal Church” would be clarified as an oath in support of what the Church had historically meant by such an oath, “as this Church has received them.”
The diocese would also “establish appropriate boundaries and differentiation” from the national church, Bishop Lawrence said, adding that a resolution will be brought to the next diocesan convention “withdrawing from all bodies of governance” of the Episcopal Church “that have assented to actions contrary to Holy Scripture,” traditional church doctrine, the resolutions of the Lambeth Conferences, the Prayer Book and the church’s constitution and canons “until such bodies show a willingness to repent of such actions.”
This is “not a flight into isolation; nor is it an abandonment of duty, but the protest of conscience,” he said as the actions of the July General Convention in Anaheim were a “blatant disregard and violation of Holy Scripture, the bonds of affection, and our own Constitution & Canons that one is led by reasoned conviction to undertake an intrepid resistance to the tyranny of the majority over judicious authority; therein erring both in Faith and Order.”
By taking an activist stance now, South Carolina had the “opportunity to help shape the emergence of a truly global Anglicanism,” Bishop Lawrence said. He urged the diocese to begin consideration of the Ridley Draft of the Anglican Covenant, and “weave and braid missional relationships which strengthen far flung dioceses and provinces in the work of the Gospel.”
The problems within the Episcopal Church were the result of “false teachings” promulgated by the liberal hierarchy and a generation of poor clergy formation. This had created a “Gospel of Indiscriminate Inclusivity” that had led to a deconstruction of classical Christian doctrine.
The doctrine of the Trinity was under assault, he said, noting the passion for inclusive language that removed masculine names for the Father and the Son, had resulted in a corrupted view of the nature of God.
This was coupled by “irresponsible” comments that appeared to deny the “Uniqueness and Universality of Christ” by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. As a bishop of the church, it was her “responsibility” to “proclaim the saving work of Jesus Christ and to teach what it is the Scriptures and the Church teach. Anything less from us who are bishops is an abdication of our teaching office.”
The power and place of Holy Scripture was also under assault, Bishop Lawrence said, as “in my experience all too many of our bishops and priests seem to mine the scriptures for minerals to use in vain idolatries. There is too little confidence expressed in its trustworthiness; the authority and uniqueness of revelation.”
He stated that “ridiculous arguments such as shellfish and mixed fabrics are dragged out” which has long ago been reconciled by the Church Fathers “to confuse the ill-taught or the untutored in theology” to support the progressive agenda.
The revisions to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer’s Baptismal liturgy had further created a new theology whose mantra had become “all the sacraments for all the Baptized,” substituting God’s grace for a belief in civil rights, while the Episcopal Church’s wholesale revision of traditional teachings on human sexuality had now posited the “moral equivalency of GLBT sexual unions with the Christian understanding of marriage between a man and a woman.”
The path of “indiscriminate inclusivity” began with the “denigration of the Holy Scriptures, then, step by step has brought the very core teachings of the Christian faith under its distorting and destructive sway.” The Episcopal Church had now reached the point whereby that which contradicted the new doctrines, such as traditional church moral teachings, where considered to be the problem—not the new teachings.
Cape Town defers decision on same-sex marriages: CEN 8.28.09 p 7. August 28, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Southern Africa, Church of England Newspaper, Human Sexuality --- The gay issue.comments closed
| First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
The Diocese of Cape Town’s triennial synod deferred action last week on a motion that sought to place same-sex relationships on the morally equivalent footing as marriage, pushing the matter onto the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa for review. On Aug 22, delegates from St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, whose dean the Rev Rowan Smith is the only “out” gay clergyman in the South African church, asked synod to request that it commend to Archbishop Thabo Makgoba that the church give “serious and prayerful consideration to the acceptance of gays and lesbians in their committed partnerships as valued members of our parishes”. |
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The basis for accepting committed same-sex partnerships within the life of the church arose from the “long-standing tradition within the Anglican Communion of respect for individual conscience, in seeking to be faithful disciples of Jesus,” the resolution said.
The resolution also asked the House of Bishops to “provide pastoral guidelines for those of our members who are in such covenanted partnerships as faithful members of our parish families”.
After deliberation the synod released a statement saying it had taken no action, but had “agreed to a resolution asking the church’s bishops to provide pastoral guidelines for gay and lesbian members of the church living in ‘covenanted partnerships,’ taking into account the mind of the world-wide Anglican Communion.”
Last week’s synod vote follows four years of legal and political debate within South African society over gay marriage. On Nov 14, 2006, the South African Parliament voted 230-41 to allow same-sex couples to “solemnize and register a voluntary union by way of either a marriage or a civil partnership.” The governing African National Congress (ANC) backed the Bill and required its MPs to support the legislation.
The bill arose in response to a 2005 ruling by South Africa’s Constitutional Court mandating legal status under law for same-sex couples by Dec 1, 2006. While ANC leaders backed the bill, rank and file party members were largely opposed, with then former Deputy President Jacob Zuma — now the country’s president — calling the gay marriage bill a “disgrace to the nation and to God”.
After the 2006 vote, Archbishop Makgoba — then the Bishop of Grahamstown — urged all sides to continue talking. “We agree that we have to dialogue, and listen to the experiences of all people around this issue, so that when the conclusion is arrived at, all of us understand and appreciate the challenges that all people feel,” he said.
The then Archbishop of Cape Town Njogonkulu Ndungane welcomed the expansion of civil rights for gay couples, but stated the “Anglican Church’s position is clear. We have repeatedly affirmed that we do not regard partnership between two persons of the same sex as a marriage in the eyes of God.”
However, Dean Smith said after the vote in Parliament that he hoped the new law would prompt the Anglican Church to allow congregations a local option whether or not to bless same-sex couples. The Province presently allows gay clergy to serve in the ministry but requires that they be celibate, and requires all clergy to abstain from sexual relations outside of marriage.
After the vote, Archbishop Makgoba said the resolution was “an important first step to saying: ‘Lord, how do we do ministry in this context?’” of changing sexual mores.
“The reason for this resolution was because we have these [partnered gay] parishioners, and the law provides for them to be in that state, so how do we pastorally respond to that?” Archbishop Makgoba said.
Court to rule on status of Georgia church: CEN 8.21.09 August 28, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Georgia, Property Litigation.comments closed
| First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
The fate of the ‘mother church’ of the Diocese of Georgia in the USA is in the hands of a Savannah court after arguments were presented last week in litigation over the secession of Christ Church, Savannah from the Episcopal Church. Founded in 1733, the landmark church in downtown Savannah is the oldest church in the state of Georgia and numbered among its early rectors John Wesley and George Whitefield. The primates in Dar es Salaam had given the Episcopal Church the “final call” to “return to the central tenets of Christianity,” the vestry said. The failure to conform to the church’s historic teachings had left the parish no choice but to secede, as “our first allegiance is to the Lord Jesus Christ and God’s word revealed to us in the Holy Bible,” the parish’s senior warden said after the split. |
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On Sept 30, 2007, the vestry of Christ Church voted to quit the diocese and move under the oversight of Uganda’s US Bishop John Guernsey, after the US House of Bishops ignored the primates’ request for the Episcopal Church to conform to the Communion’s teachings on human sexuality.
Georgia Bishop Henry Louttit responded that while people may leave the Episcopal Church, congregations may not, and moved to depose the church’s clergy and replaced the parish vestry. Litigation ensued and on Aug 14 the Chatham County Superior Court heard a motion from the diocese and the national church seeking summary judgment against the congregation seeking immediate possession of the building and assets of the parish.
During the two-hour hearing before Judge Michael Karpf, lawyers for the national church and diocese argued that in property disputes within “hierarchical churches” the court must defer to the church’s canon law. The court must therefore follow the Episcopal Church’s 1979 “Dennis Canon,” which created a trust on all parish property in favour of the diocese and national church, and grant them possession.
Lawyers for the parish responded that Christ Church had been founded as congregation of the Church of England in the colony of Georgia. In the wake of the American Revolution, in 1789 the Georgia legislature transferred ownership of the congregation from the Crown to the wardens of the congregation. While the congregation had joined in union with the Diocese of Georgia, this accession to the diocesan constitution and canons was not open ended, and could be revoked, they argued.
Questions were also raised over the legal validity of the Dennis Canon, with the parish’s attorneys arguing that as a New York corporation, the national Episcopal Church must comply with statutory mandates that require associations that claim an interest in one of its member’s property to give advanced notice of that claim. When it passed the Dennis Canon, no proper notice was given under New York or Georgia law, rendering the national church’s claims legally unenforceable, the lawyers said.
A decision is not expected for some weeks, and will likely be appealed by the disappointed party.
Police issue warrant for Bishop: CEN 8.26.09 August 26, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Pakistan, Persecution.comments closed
| First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
Punjabi police have issued warrants for the arrest of the Bishop of Faisalabad and 128 other Christians, charging them with conspiracy in the July 31 assault by Islamic militants on Gojra. The First Information Reports or FIRs were filed this week by the Punjabi police against the Rt. Rev. John Samuel (pictured with Archbishop Chew of Singapore), the Church of Pakistan’s Bishop of Faisalabad and 28 other Christians, in retaliation for complaints of police incompetence in the wake of the attacks on Christians in the town of Gojra that left ten dead and destroyed three churches and over 100 homes. FIRs have also been registered against 100 unnamed Pakistani Christians charging them as co-conspirators in the attacks. |
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Local human rights activists have denounced the police action telling AsiaNews, “It is a revenge move by agents and district administration against the Christian victims of the accidents in Gojra.”
The three day anti-Christian pogrom began on July 30 in the village of Koriyan following a church wedding. Following local customs, confetti was tossed over the bride and groom as they left the church—however, local Islamists took offence saying the shredded paper had come from pages of the Koran. Rocks were thrown and a fight ensued leading to the burning of several Christian homes.
The following day members of the banned extremist Muslim organization, Sipah-e-Sahaba, gathered near the railway station in Gojra and marched towards the Christian quarter of the town, and began throwing petrol bombs and shooting at the fleeing Christians. Ten Christians were killed either by the gunfire or were burned to death by the mob in their homes.
In the days preceding the violence, the Punjabi police were warned of an impending action by the Sipah-e-Sahaba—who through a radical splinter group, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, are linked to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. During the attacks the police are alleged to have stood aside as the banned terrorist group destroyed the Christian quarter of the town.
“All the world knows about this incident very well, what the Islamic terrorists have done with the Christian community in my diocese and even in my city,” Bishop Samuel told The Church of England Newspaper in an email on Aug 26.
“Instead of arresting those responsible for this incident, the police have registered the F.I.R. against 29 nominated and 100 un-nominated people. My name and the name of my both sons are also included in those 29 names,” he said.
“We have again become the victims,” the bishops said, stating he had sent his family away from Gojra but would remain in the town and was ready to be “prosecuted for the glory and for the work of Jesus Christ.”
“I daily receive threats through phone calls from unknown numbers,” he said, and reported this to the police. However, the police are “not paying attention to us and they are just favouring the persons who are responsible” for the attacks.
Bishop Samuel has urged Christians around the world to “please pray for us and also do something for my family because we are in great trouble.”
Anaheim Statement Continues to Gain Supporters: TLC 8.24.09 August 24, 2009
Posted by geoconger in 76th General Convention, Living Church.comments closed
The Anaheim Statement endorsed by 34 bishops at the close of the 76th General Convention in Anaheim, Calif., has added two more bishops to its list of supporters.
The Rt. Rev. Charles E. Jenkins, III, Bishop of Louisiana, and the Rt. Rev. Harry W. Shipps, retired Bishop of Georgia, have endorsed the letter affirming their loyalty to the Anglican Communion in the wake of the adoption of resolutions C056 and D025 ending the moratoria forbidding the consecration of partnered gay clergy as bishops and the authorization of rites for the blessing of same-sex unions.
However, Bishop Jenkins also was one of the bishops who voted against D025 but in favor of C056. He later said he voted for C056 because his colleagues had responded well to his plea for graciousness. “I felt I was honor-bound to vote for it because these bishops had done what I had asked them to do,” he said. ” I felt that the process was a ray of hope for The Episcopal Church.”
In a series of letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury and primates of the Anglican Communion written at the close of General Convention, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and the President of the House of Deputies Bonnie Anderson have disputed the characterization of the adoption of the two resolutions as having ended the moratoria or a “walking apart” by the Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion.
Speaking to the media on July 18 Bishop Jefferts Schori stated the votes were a “truthful attempt to deepen relationships” with the wider Anglican Communion. She added that “in 2009” there are “more and deeper relationships with parts of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion than five or 10 years ago.”
Overseas Anglicans, however, have so far not been persuaded by the Presiding Bishop’s explanation. On July 27, Archbishop of Canterbury released his reflections on the General Convention, voicing a sharply critical view of the votes. Archbishop Williams also took note of the Anaheim Statement, noting that a “significant minority of bishops” had “clearly expressed its intention to remain with the consensus of the Communion” on the issues of human sexuality and the moratoria.
Aides to the archbishop have also been noting the progress of the Communion Partners group of rectors in “loyal opposition” to the “current trajectory” of the Episcopal Church. The Rev. Russell Levenson, Jr., rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, stated the fellowship as of Aug. 11 now includes 66 parish rectors whose congregations number nearly 60,000, ranging in size from his Houston parish of 8,500 members to the Church of the Incarnation in Lafayette, Louisiana with 20 members.
On Aug 17, the Rev. R. Leigh Spruill, rector of St George’s, Nashville, Tenn., and the group’s administrator, explained that the Communion Partners were not a protest group but rather a “missional fellowship committed to reviving classical Christianity” within the Episcopal Church. The group seeks to provide a place for those “committed to remaining within the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church,” while also offering “theological and spiritual support” in the anxious days following General Convention, Fr. Spruill said.
“We are not just another group poised to split off,” he noted. “Because of our ecclesiology” as clergy committed to the Anglican way, the group believes that working towards the Archbishop of Canterbury’s goal of building an Anglican Covenant is a “reasonable” and “solid theological place to stand.”
The Anglican Communion is not an idol for us, but a gift from God,” Fr. Spruill said. The Communion Partners “offers us a way forward for us” to be faithful as priests to their faith and to the church, he said.
Sodor & Man facing dramatic overhaul of diocesan structures: CEN 8.21.09 p 4. August 24, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper.comments closed
| First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
The Bishop of Sodor and Man will ask a special meeting of synod to reform the administration of the diocese, abolishing rural deaneries and replacing them with four regional Mission Partnerships to better serve the church on the Isle of Man. The Rt Rev Robert Paterson’s report, Recommendations for Mission and Ministry 2009, will be tabled before the Sept 28 special synod. Its 78 recommendations seek to bolster attendance, improve communications, and respond to a forecasted shortage of clergy in coming years. The major reform proposed by the bishop is the creation of four Mission Partnerships based upon the principle of subsidiarity, with most decisions taken on the local or least centralized level of authority in church life. The Rural Deaneries of Castletown, Peel, Douglas and Ramsey will be replaced by a North, South, East and West regional partnership for the diocese’s 28 parishes. By giving local parish communities a greater hand in their management, the diocese hopes to foster growth in each community. |
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Bishop Paterson has also proposed opening a non-residential lay and clergy training course for the island, to respond to a shortage of qualified pastors. “It is my intention that every church and local community will, in time, be provided with a known, trained and licensed pastor,” the bishop said. From 1879 to 1943 the diocese had operated Bishop Wilson College located at the episcopal residence, Bishopscourt in Kirkmichae to train local clergy.
Coupled with a move towards decentralisation is a commitment toward a revamped youth ministry, along with an aggressive move onto the internet and multi-media. “We recognise that it will not do to expect young people to bridge the enormous cultural gap between the religious behaviour of the 50-plus generation and theirs,” Bishop Paterson noted.
“As far as possible, churches, particularly those of historic and/or community significance, should not be closed,” Bishop Paterson said. However “for many, probably all in rural areas, this will mean that additional, complementary uses should and must be found.”
The present practise of having some churches open only for “an hour or two a week” was an inefficient use of resources and failed to fulfill the “purpose for which they exist: God and people,” the bishops said.
The bishop’s recommendations are based upon the work of two independent commissions. The September meeting of the Sodor and Man synod will be asked to appoint an implementation committee to take the 78 recommendations forward.
Battle over homosexuality is over says Bishop Spong: CEN 8.21.09 p 6. August 24, 2009
Posted by geoconger in 76th General Convention, Church of England Newspaper, Human Sexuality --- The gay issue.comments closed
| First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
The Archbishop of Canterbury is on the wrong side of history and ignorant of the scientific and social realities of homosexuality, retired Bishop Jack Spong has declared. Writing in the Aug 8 on-line issue of Newsweek’s “On Faith” section the controversial former Bishop of Newark has also rejected US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s contention that nothing had changed as a result of the 76th General Convention’s votes on gay bishops and blessings. “The battle over homosexuality in the Episcopal Church is over,” Bishop Spong wrote. |
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“The vote at the last General Convention was overwhelming. The sacred unions of gay and lesbian people are to be blessed and enfolded into liturgical patterns in the same way that the sacred unions of heterosexual people have been honoured for centuries. The ministry of this church is to be open to gay and lesbian people who are qualified and chosen in the process by which this church makes such decisions,” he said.
Bishop Spong rejected Dr Williams’ contention that acting upon same-sex attractions was a free-will decision, saying “homosexuality is not a choice” but a component of “human individual identity” akin to race or gender. The condemnation of homosexual behaviour was “discrimination” built upon “prejudice based on ignorance,” he said.
General Convention’s vote last month to permit gay bishops and blessings brought “honesty to this church,” as Episcopal clergy have been blessing same-sex unions “for decades, but only secretly.”
The church also had “countless gay clergy and gay bishops, but pretended that this was not so,” citing an unnamed “gay bishop” elected to serve as vice president of the church’s House of Bishops.
Some of the church’s hostility towards homosexuality came from self-hating gay clergy, Bishop Spong said. “Some of our bishops who were most hostile to homosexuality have themselves been gay and when they were discovered in “improper” relationships or with an HIV infection, it was hushed up.”
Those unable to accept this “reality, including the present Archbishop of Canterbury, will just have to become more and more irrelevant,” Bishop Spong said. Unless Dr Williams changed his views, he would find himself “on the backside of the tide of history and will be constantly compromised and embarrassed.”
The Episcopal Church’s decision to end the moratoria on gay bishops and blessings was prophetic, he said. Dr Williams’ argument that “this step is improper because the whole communion is not ready to move as a whole, is a tragic misreading of history,” he said, citing the support of some church leaders for slavery, apartheid or segregation.
Bishop Spong called upon Anglicans not to “postpone justice for homosexual persons until all of the homophobic and prejudiced-based ignorance is finally gone.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury has clashed with Bishop Spong over his controversial theological views before. Following the publication in 1998 of Bishop Spong’s 12 theses denying traditional theism, Dr Williams responded that they “represent a level of confusion and misinterpretation that I find astonishing.
“The implication of the theses is that the sort of questions that might be asked by a bright 20th century sixth-former would have been unintelligible or devastating for Augustine, Rahner or Teresa of Avila,” Dr Williams noted. “The fact is that significant numbers of those who turn to Christian faith as educated adults find the doctrinal and spiritual tradition which Bishop Spong treats so dismissively a remarkably large room to live in.”
Archbishop of Singapore re-elected Primate: CEN 8.21.09 p 6. August 21, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of the Province of South East Asia.comments closed
| Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.
The Archbishop of Singapore, Dr John Chew has been re-elected as Primate of the Anglican Church of the Province of South East Asia. The Provincial Extra-Ordinary Synod meeting July 29-30 at Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia re-elected Dr Chew to serve a second four-year term as primate. Dr Chew also serves as President of the Singapore Anglican Community Services, President of The Bible Society of Singapore, and President of the National Council of Churches of Singapore. Primates of the province are elected to a set term of office, but may stand for reelection up to the age of retirement. On Feb 2, 1996 Archbishop Moses Tay was installed as first archbishop of the new province by the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey , while the second Primate, Archbishop Yong Ping Chung of Sabah, served from 2000 to 2006. In other business, the synod approved the election of the first indigenous bishop in North Borneo. The Ven Melter Jiki Tais was consecrated as suffragan bishop of Sabah at All Saints Cathedral, Kota Kinabalu on Aug 14, and will assist Bishop Albert Vun in the supervision of the fast growing diocese. Archdeacon Tais is the first Kadazan-Dusun to be consecrated as bishop. Sabah’s Anglican bishops have historically drawn from the ranks of British missionaries and in the past 30 years, from Chinese-Malaysians. At age 44, he will be the youngest bishop in the province, and at less than five feet tall, its smallest bishop. Archdeacon Moses Chin described the new bishop as a “small man with a big heart.” The bishop’s duties will be to train youth and lay leaders and develop mission churches to parish status “so that they are self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating,” Archdeacon Chin told the Daily Express. |
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Shock at ‘deadliest attack on Christians’: CEN 8.14.09 p 1. August 20, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Pakistan, Persecution.comments closed
Funerals for the victims of the anti-Christian pogrom in Pakistan began last week, with over 500 people packing Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in Gojra for services for the seven Catholic victims of the violence.
Three members of the Church of Pakistan and seven Catholics were killed on Aug1 by a Muslim mob in Gojra in Faisalabad province in the Eastern Punjab. Reports from Pakistan emailed to The Church of England Newspaper along with press accounts indicate the violence began on July 30 at a Christian wedding in the village of Koriyan, near Gojra.
As the newly married couple left the church, guests tossed flowers, rice, slips of paper with words of prayer or encouragement and confetti onto the new couple according to local custom. Muslim on-lookers accused those tossing the confetti of having shredded a Koran, violating law 295 which criminalizes blasphemy for those who offend Islam, the Koran or Mohammed.
Since 1986, accusations of blasphemy for offending Islam have been lodged against 982 Pakistani Christians—with 25 killed by Muslim vigilantes defending the honor of their faith, according to data collected by Minorities Concern of Pakistan. The accusations of shredding a Koran led to stones being thrown. A fight ensued, and houses set ablaze.
On Aug 1, violence erupted when eight buses packed with masked and armed Islamic militants from outside the area, entered the neighboring Christian town of Gojra. The militants began chanting anti-Christian slogans, accusing the Pakistani Christians of being in league with America and enemies of Islam.
The sounds of the chanting mob alerted most of the residents of the town to the danger, and when the mob began to spray houses with gasoline, setting them alight, most of the residents had already fled. Seven of the dead died in the fires while three were shot to death, 68 homes were destroyed along with a Church of Pakistan church and an independent church.
Speaking to the congregation at the catholic funeral for seven members of the Hamid family, the Church of Pakistan’s Bishop John Samuel of Faisalabad said “while we believe those killed for their faith go to heaven, there are those who kill others for the promise of heaven.”
“Only the Word of God can bring comfort to our heavy hearts,” he said according to an account of the service given by the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN).
The pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church Fr. Shafique Hadayat told the congregation at the close of the service the dead had not died in vain. The Aug 1 attack on Gojra was the “deadliest attack on Christians in the history of this country,” he said.
But “their blood will not be wasted,” he said and would mobilize public opinion to bring an end to Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law.
Full military honours for funeral of Harry Patch, Britain’s oldest soldier: CEN 8.14.09 p 5. August 20, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper.comments closed
The Bishop of Taunton and the Dean of Wells escorting the coffin of Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier to have served in the First World War, after his funeral at Wells Cathedral on Aug 6.
Mr Patch, who was 111 when he died on July 25, was conscripted into the Army in 1917, and served in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. He saw combat at Passchendaele at the Third Battle of Ypres, where from July and to mid-November 1917 the Allies advanced eight kilometres at the cost of over half a million casualties, while German losses were 350,000.
Private Patch, a machine gunner, was wounded when a shell exploded overhead, killing three of his five-man gun team. His wounds sent him back to England where he was in hospital when the armistice was signed on Nov 11, 1918. Across the lines, Adolf Hitler served as a lance corporal in a Bavarian infantry regiment during the battle.
Thousands of well wishers attended the funeral of Britain’s “last Tommy” including Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall, Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Gloucester, Harriet Harman QC MP representing the government, Veterans Minister Kevan Jones, and the Chief of the General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt.
Six solders of the Rifles, the successor to the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, served as pallbearers along with two Belgian, two French, and two German infantrymen.
General Dannatt said it was “a great honour and privilege to represent the British Army at the funeral of Harry Patch.”
“In his passing we have lost our last living link to the fighting in the trenches of the Western Front and a member of a generation that stood firm in the face of extraordinary adversity and unimaginable suffering.
“But today above all else we give thanks for the life of a brave and inspirational man whose message of reconciliation and peace has reached and touched so many.”
Presbyterians join battle over Los Angeles church property: CEN 8.14.09 p 7. August 20, 2009
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| Conservative Presbyterians in the United States have filed an amicus curiae brief with the United States Supreme Court in support of the breakaway congregation of St James Newport Beach in its battle with the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.
On July 27, the Presbyterian Lay Committee, a leading traditional pressure group within the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (PCUSA) filed a brief in support of the Petition for Writ of Certiorari filed last month by St James in response to the February decision by the California Supreme Court in favour of the diocese. The Presbyterian legal team is led by Kenneth W Starr, a former federal judge and US solicitor general who was appointed Independent Counsel to the Whitewater land transactions of President Bill Clinton. The Starr Report submitted to Congress was the basis for impeachment proceedings later brought against the president. Dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law, Mr Starr successfully defended California’s Proposition 8 before the state’s Supreme Court after supporters of gay marriage sought to overturn the referendum that banned it. St James’ legal team also includes a leading Washington lawyer as well, with President Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese, III serving as co-counsel. |
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Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.
Pakistan attack is an affront to God and Islam: CEN 8.14.09 p 6. August 20, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, Church of Pakistan, Persecution.comments closed
| The recent attack on the Christian village of Gojra in Pakistan must be denounced by all Christians and Muslims as an affront to God, the C-1 World Dialogue group of religious leaders has declared.
On Aug 9, the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres and the Grand Mufti of Egypt Dr Ali Gomaa released a statement on behalf of the interfaith group saying “murder, arson and theft committed in the name of God is both a crime and sacrilege.” The “perpetrators of this attack” had committed crimes “not only against Christians but against Pakistan and beyond even that, against the honour and dignity of Islam,” they said. Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper. |
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Christians slaughtered as ‘Nigerian Taliban’ seeks Islamic state: CEN 8.21.09 p 5. August 20, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Nigeria, Persecution.comments closed
| The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has accused the government of Northern Nigeria’s Borno State of complicity in the murders of 12 Christians by members of the ‘Nigerian Taliban’ the Boko Haram last week.
Twenty churches, including Immanuel Anglican Church, Gamboru-Ngala in the Diocese of Maiduguri were destroyed in the uprising by members of the militant Muslim sect. The security services put down the uprising after five days of fighting on August 6 after the sect’s leader Ustaz Muhammed Yusuf was killed while attempting to escape from the police. Approximately 700 people died. Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper’s Religious Intelligence section. |
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Presiding Bishop outraged over Israeli evictions: CEN 8.07.09 p 5. August 19, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Israel, The Episcopal Church.comments closed
| US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has joined the international chorus of voices expressing outrage over the Aug 2 eviction by Israeli police of two Arab families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Jerusalem.
In an open letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton published on Aug 5, Bishop Jefferts Schori said “this action undermines the quest for peace led by you and President Obama and represents a step backward in the peace process and a likely precursor to further violence.” On Aug 3 Mrs Clinton called the eviction “deeply regrettable” and “provocative,” and told reporters the “the eviction of families and demolition of homes in east Jerusalem is not in keeping with Israeli obligations.” The European Union expressed its “serious concerns” as well. Sweden, which holds the six-month rotating EU presidency, summoned the Israeli ambassador to its Foreign Ministry last week, handing over a note stating, “house demolitions, evictions and settlement activities in East Jerusalem are illegal under international law.” However, the Aug 2 evictions were not directed by the Israeli government, but followed a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court in favour of Jewish families who claimed ownership of the land. The Jewish litigants argued their ancestors had purchased the land at the end of the 19th century from the Ottoman government, however during the British mandate in the 1930s the Jewish owners moved out following attacks by Arabs. According to The New York Times, the evacuated houses were built in the 1950s by the UN for Arab refugees who had fled west Jerusalem during the 1948 war. When Israel captured east Jerusalem following the 1967 Six Day War, the Arab families were permitted to stay on as tenants. The Arab tenants, however, stopped paying rent, arguing the Ottoman-era deeds showing Jewish ownership were forgeries — prompting the lawsuit which the Israeli Supreme Court settled in favour of the Jewish litigants. In her letter to the US government, Bishop Jefferts Schori called for the “immediate return of the Palestinian families to their homes.” The US “must not allow Israel to act with impunity,” she said, and “no matter how many times the Israeli government may declare East Jerusalem to be part of Israel, under international law it remains occupied territory.” The Presiding Bishop said the Episcopal Church endorsed a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis with “Jerusalem as the shared capital of both states.” She told Mrs Clinton she prayed “through your efforts Israel may come to realize that continuing to build and develop settlements presents a severe barrier to a just peace, and that an immediate freeze is required, beginning with vacating these Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.” First published in The Church of England Newspaper. |
From new priest to bishop in just 17 days: CEN 8.14.09 p 7. August 16, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Zimbabwe.comments closed
Seventeen days after being ordained to the priesthood by the Bishop of Kensington, the curate of the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Hampton of the Diocese of London has been elected Bishop of Manicaland.
On July 24 the electoral synod of the Zimbabwe diocese elected as bishop the Rev. Dr. Julius Makoni to succeed his deposed processor the Rt. Rev. Elson Jakazi. Dr. Makoni’s election must now go the House of Bishops of the Church of the Province of Central Africa (CPCA) for confirmation.
An ally of former Harare Bishop, on Sept 23, 2007 Bishop Jakazi joined Dr. Nolbert Kunonga in writing to Archbishop Bernard Malango saying their dioceses had withdrawn from Central Africa in protest to what they alleged was a pro-gay bias in the Province.
The dean of Central Africa, Bishop Albert Chama of Northern Zambia responded that it “was impossible for them to withdraw the dioceses” and on Oct 19, 2007 the Central African bishops declared the two “were no longer bishops” of the CPCA.
In April 2008 the former Bishop of Harare, the Rt. Rev. Peter Hatendi was appointed interim bishop of Manicaland. However, Bishop Jakazi last year retracted his declaration of independence from the CPCA and had sought to block the election of a new bishop for the diocese, claiming he remained the rightful bishop. Litigation is currently underway between the CPCA and Bishop Jakazi over the trusteeship of the Manicaland church properties.
Dr. Makoni was one of Zimbabwe’s leading bankers until he fled to England in 2004, after the Mugabe regime threatened to arrest him over charges of currency manipulation. Émigré newspapers at the time dismissed the charges as being motivated by political and tribal jealousies, and the government eventually dropped all charges.
Educated at St Ignatius College in Harare, Dr. Makoni earned a BA and PhD in finance from Cambridge University and an MBA from London University. He worked in the City of London for Morgan Grenfell followed by eight years at the World Bank and three years at Bankers Trust before he formed his own bank, NMB Bank which was listed on the London and Zimbabwe stock exchanges.
After fleeing Zimbabwe in 2004, Dr. Makoni studied for holy orders at Westcott House and was ordained a deacon in 2008 by the Bishop of Southwark on behalf of the Bishop Harare, and was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Paul Williams on July 9.
Dr. Makoni is the son-in-law of Bishop Hatendi, and his father, the Rev. Alban Makoni, was a priest of the Dioceses of Manicaland and Mashonaland.
In 2002, death threats were made by supporters of Dr. Kunonga against Dr. Makoni’s wife, Pauline. A member of the chapter of the Cathedral of St Mary and All Saints in Harare, Mrs. Makoni had opposed Dr. Kunonga’s usurpation of authority within the diocese.
New Zealand urged to go further to stop global warming: CEN 8.14.09 p 6. August 15, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand & Polynesia, Church of England Newspaper, Environment.comments closed
| Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.
THE ANGLICAN Archbishops of New Zealand have welcomed their government’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but have cautioned that the proposed level of cuts may not be enough to head off global warming. On August 11 Archbishops David Moxon and Brown Turei wrote to Prime Minister John Key applauding their government’s decision to cut emissions “to between 10 and 20 per cent below what they were in 1990” by 2020. New Zealand had an “enviable” and “valuable” reputation of being “being clean and green, and your actions will help safeguard this good image,” the archbishops said. |
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The proposed cuts, however, did not go far enough, as the “10 to 20 per cent band is well short of the 40 per cent reduction” needed to limit global warming to 2 degrees. The 2 degrees mark, they said, was “a threshold, which marks the difference between controllable climate change, and runaway change that would spiral out of control.”
They urged the government to set the “highest possible target for greenhouse gas emission reductions: in all sorts of ways, doing too little now will cost a great deal more in the long run.”
The “implications of runaway climate change for our brothers and sisters in the Pacific Islands alone are obvious,” they said, warning of rising sea levels and massive dislocation of island and coastal populations that would occur if global warming were not stopped.
Speaking to reporters in Wellington, the minister for climate change, Nick Smith, said current NZ greenhouse gas emissions were 24 per cent above the 1990 level. “This target means we’re going to have to both catch up that 24 per cent increase as well as reduce emissions by 10 or potentially 20 per cent,” he said.
Last week the Pacific Islands Forum called for a 50 per cent global cut in greenhouse gases by 2050. “We call upon world leaders to urgently increase their level of ambition and to give their negotiators fresh mandates to secure a truly effective global agreement,” the South Pacific leaders said in an August 6 statement.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said that for some Pacific nations cutting greenhouse gases was “not just a matter of importance, it is not just a matter of urgency, for many of them it is a matter of national survival,” Rudd told reporters. Australia pledged to cut its emissions by up to 15 per cent of its 2000 levels by 2020.
Seven members of the 16-member forum had asked for a 45 per cent cut by 2020. The forum comprises Australia, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
Compensate Aboriginals or leave says Australian Dean: CEN 8.14.09 p 6. August 13, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Multiculturalism, Politics.comments closed
Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.
Australians should offer compensation to its Aboriginal residents for the crimes and odious sins committed by the descendants of the country’s European settlers, the Dean of an Anglican theological college in Melbourne has declared, or be prepared to leave the country.
Christian teaching requires recompense either through restitution or satisfaction for crimes, Dr. Peter Adam of Ridley College said on Aug 10 during the 2nd Annual John Saunders Lecture entitled “Australia — whose land?” given at Morling College to the New South Wales Baptist Union. The Christian response to the sins of the settlement of Australia, he argued was to return what was taken or to give something in return of equivalent value to the victim where restitution is not possible.
However, “the politics of Aboriginal romanticism that Rev Adam endorses have little basis in reality,” Australian historian Keith Windschuttle tells The Church of England Newspaper. The premise that Australia’s colonization and the English relationship with the Aboriginal peoples was based upon the extermination of the native inhabitants cannot be supported by history, Dr. Windschuttle said.
Government moves towards offering compensation were a beginning, Dr Adam said in his lecture, but something “more drastic” need be done as “no recompense could ever be satisfactory because what was done was so vile, so immense, so universal, so pervasive, so destructive, so devastating and so irreparable.”
The European settlement of Australia was a crime against the native peoples and a sin against God, Dr. Adam said. The church was complicit in the genocide as “the prosperity of our churches has come from the proceeds of crime. Our houses, our churches, our colleges, our shops, our sport grounds, our parks, our courts, our parliaments, our prisons, our hospitals, our roads, our reservoirs are stolen property.”
All non-Aboriginal Australians should be prepared to leave the country, if the indigenous people so desired, or else provide an appropriate recompense, he said. ”It would in fact be possible, even if very difficult and complicated, for Europeans and others to leave Australia. I am not sure where we would go, but that would be our problem,” he said.
In a statement given to the CEN, Dr. Windschuttle, author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land, 1803-1847, and editor of Quadrant, the country’s leading intellectual journal, stated Dr. Adam had “uncritically accepted the interpretation of Aboriginal history offered by a particular school of university-based authors comprised of an alliance of neo-Marxists, postmodernists and former members of the Communist Party.”
This school claimed that “after British colonization in 1788 the Aborigines engaged in frontier warfare against the white invaders and, in retaliation, suffered massacres and genocide.” Such an account has been shown to be untrue, Dr. Windschuttle said. The postmodernist school of Australian historians had “failed their public responsibility to tell the truth about this issue and instead have perpetrated a long series of willful misrepresentations” about the country’s past.
“My own empirical research concludes that in all of Europe’s encounters from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century with the New Worlds of the Americas and the Pacific, the colonization of Australia was far and away the least violent. Rather than being common, massacres of Aborigines were rare and isolated events. Some well-known apparent atrocities had been exaggerated out of all proportion and some were entirely fictitious. The overall death tolls cited by the most reputable historians were no more than guess work and fabrications,” he said.
There was no evidence that the prescription offered by Dr. Adam was wanted as the “great majority of modern Aborigines today show little interest in that kind of politics” of race. Studies show that “65 per cent of Aboriginal adults who are married or cohabiting, are doing so with a non-indigenous spouse” while in urban areas where 73 percent of Aborigines live, the figure rises to 90 percent.
“Instead of an Aboriginal state or treaty, instead of customary laws and traditional culture, most Aborigines have shown by their actions they simply want to live like the rest of us,” Dr. Windschuttle said.
Presiding Bishop steps in to prevent church sales: CEN 8.07.09 p 7. August 13, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Property Litigation.comments closed
Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.
American dioceses may not sell parish properties to breakaway groups, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori wrote in a letter to the US House of Bishops last week.
Bishop Jefferts Schori stated the church expected a “reasonable and fair” deal on any property settlement and “that we do not make settlements that encourage religious bodies who seek to replace The Episcopal Church.”
This means, the Presiding Bishop said, that “property settlements need to include a clause that forbids, for a period of at least five years, the presence of bishops on the property who are not members of [the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops], unless they are invited by the diocesan bishop for purposes which do not subvert mission and ministry in the name of [the Episcopal Church.]”
The Presiding Bishop added she understood that some American bishops might wish to permit Anglican bishops from overseas to “preach, preside, confirm, or even ordain, but that diocesan permission cannot encourage anything that purports to set up or participate in another jurisdiction.”
These principles arose as the “consensus” view of her Council of Advice, Bishop Jefferts Schori said, in a meeting before General Convention.
She added that these rules would be relaxed if the breakaway groups “gain clarity about their own identity” such that “if and when they engage a positive missional stance that doesn’t seek to replace The Episcopal Church, I do believe we can enter into ecumenical agreements that will make some of the foregoing moot.”
It is unclear by what authority the Presiding Bishop can dictate property policies to the Episcopal Church as she is not a metropolitan or archbishop, and the canons are silent as to these injunctions.
Bishop Jefferts Schori’s views come in direct opposition to those of her predecessors, who historically held that parish property disputes are internal diocesan matters, not subject to the review or oversight of the presiding bishop.
Speaking to the Diocese of Western Louisiana on May 11, 2006, former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold said the interpretation of the national church’s property canons was a diocesan matter, and that the national church only became involved in parish property disputes if invited by the local bishop and diocesan standing committees.
The Presiding Bishop’s legal advice may not be enforceable in many US states, as contracts may not incorporate illegal provisions within their terms. The US Constitution and many state constitutions prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion — making a ban on a bishop a dodgy legal stratagem, American contract lawyers tell Religious Intelligence.
Philippino bishops denounce presidential power-grab: CEN 8.12.09 August 12, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Episcopal Church of the Philippines, Politics.comments closed
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Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper. The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church of the Philippines has denounced a government-backed bill to amend the nation’s constitution, saying the proposed charter change, “cha-cha”, is a ploy to keep President Gloria Arroyo in power. |
On July 30 the bishops added their voice to the chorus of religious and civil society leaders, including the late President Corazon Aquino, in denouncing HR No 1109. The bill, which has passed the Philippine House of Representatives and is presently before the Senate, seeks to amend the Constitution through the convening of a constituent assembly “con-ass”.
Supporters — including business and government elites and the army — claim cha-cha would strengthen the rule of law and provide accountability within the state by moving from a presidential system to a parliamentary system form of government. It would provide an economic boost to the lagging economy by restoring investor confidence in the regime.
However, opponents of the cha-cha say there is no connection between constitutional reform and economic growth, charging that cha-cha is an attempt to keep the present ruling elites in power after President Gloria Arroyo’s term ends in 2010.
The bill calls for the House and Senate to meet as one body in the con-ass to draft a new constitution. However, critics charge that as Arroyo’s supporters control the more numerous lower house, their votes would nullify the restraining hand of the senate, if they met as a single body.
“The congressmen’s unreasonable insistence to pursue Charter change despite strong public opposition validates our fears that the President will use them in the Constituent Assembly to perpetuate herself in power,” the bishops said. Religious groups have been among the key opponents of cha-cha. In 2006 the Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines issued a statement questioning the benefits of cha-cha, saying constitutional reform could be hijacked by special interest groups. The Association of Major Religious Superiors of the Philippines added that cha-cha was a smoke screen to cover up the “sins” of President Arroyo.
While the Catholic bishops have so far remained silent on HR 1109, the Association of Major Religious Superiors along with the country’s Protestant leaders have denounced the bill. On June 10, former President Aquino sent a message to an anti-cha-cha rally in Makati stating “Here we are again in the midst of the shameful abuses of the powerful that seek to destroy our sacred laws.
“Over the years, I have learned to endure pain and sadness,” President Aquino wrote. “But perhaps, there is nothing that causes me greater pain than to see our people betrayed again and again by those they have elected to lead and serve them. To those of us who fought long and hard to restore our democracy, the pain deepens at the thought that all our gains have so quickly been eroded.”
President Aquino’s death on July 31 prompted President Arroyo to ask her allies in Congress, led by her son, Rep Mikey Arroyo to pull the bill. However, no final decision has yet been made on a Senate vote.
Gays in line for US bishop elections: CEN 8.07.09 p 7 August 10, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Human Sexuality --- The gay issue, Los Angeles.comments closed
The Episcopal Church’s split with the Anglican Communion widened this week as two dioceses announced slates of candidates for the episcopate that include three gay and lesbian clergy. The news comes less than a week after the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams held that gay clergy were out of bounds for Anglican Churches.
It was improper for any member of the clergy to be “living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond,” Dr. Williams said, adding that the homosexual or unchaste heterosexual “chosen lifestyle is not one that the Church’s teaching sanctions, and thus it is hard to see how they can act in the necessarily representative role that the ordained ministry, especially the episcopate, requires.”
On Aug 1 the Diocese of Minnesota released its list of approved candidates standing for election on Oct 30: the Rev. Bonnie Perry, rector of All Saints’ Church, Chicago; the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, rector of St John’s Church, Minneapolis, and the Rev. Brian Prior, rector of the Church of the Resurrection, Spokane Valley, Washington.
In her autobiographical statement Ms. Perry stated she lived with her partner of 22 years, the Rev. Susan Harlow, a minister of the United Church of Christ. She conceded that in the “current worldwide Anglican climate it may be very difficult for me, an out, partnered lesbian, to be elected” but thanked the diocese for the invitation to test her vocation to the episcopate.
Minnesota’s other two candidates stated that while they were not gay, they supported the full inclusion of gays and lesbians into the church. Ms. Budde stated her parish offers “sacramental blessings of relationships, support[s] gay and lesbian candidates for ordination, and GLBT members exercise ministry throughout the congregation.”
Mr. Prior, vice-president of the House of Deputies of the General Convention, stated he also supported the inclusion of gays in the church, and it was not until he “began serving in the larger church that I became painfully aware of the level of homophobia, sexism, racism, ageism and bigotry in both our church and the larger culture.”
On Aug 2, the Diocese of Los Angeles announced that six priests had been selected to stand for election for the diocese’s two suffragan bishop spots.
The nominees included two priests of Guatemalan background, The Rev. Silvestre Romero, rector, St Philip’s Church in San Jose, Calif., and the Rev. Martir Vasquez, vicar, St. George’s Church in Hawthorne, Calif; two women priests from within the Diocese of Los Angeles, the Rev. Canon Diane Jardine Bruce, rector, St. Clement’s by-the-Sea Church in San Clemente, and the Rev. Zelda Kennedy, associate for pastoral care at All Saints Church in Pasadena; and California; and two clergy from outside the diocese, the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool, canon to the ordinary of the Diocese of Maryland and the Rev. John Kirkley, rector of St John the Evangelist in San Francisco—both of whom identify themselves as being “gay”.
In a statement released with the list of nominees Los Angeles Bishop J. Jon Bruno stated he had interviewed each of the nominees. “I affirm each and every one of these candidates and am pleased at the wide diversity they offer this Diocese.” The election is scheduled for Dec 4.
The president of Integrity—the gay-pressure group within the Episcopal Church—applauded the nominations. “The Diocese of Minnesota is leading the way for the rest of The Episcopal Church,” said the Rev. Susan Russell on Aug 1, “as they move us forward into a future where the resolutions we passed at our recent General Convention become a reality.”
Citing last month’s decision by General Convention in Resolution D025 to end the moratorium on gay bishops, Ms. Russell stated she was pleased the Episcopal Church had now “put a sad chapter of discrimination against the LGBT baptized behind us.”
On Aug 2, Ms Russell said the Los Angeles decision was “another sign that the ‘season of fasting’ at the expense of the vocations of gays and lesbians in the Episcopal Church is at an end.”
Speaking at a July 18 press conference at the close of General Convention, US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori denied the Episcopal Church had abandoned the moratoria on gay bishops and blessings. She stated her “understanding” was that “we reaffirmed the tenets of this church, that the discernment process is open to all people.”
During the debate on resolution D025 permitting gay bishops, the Bishop of Kentucky, the Rt. Rev. Edwin Gulick stated the “passing of the resolution will not end the moratorium.”
Distinguishing between intentions and actions, Bishop Gulick said the moratorium would be broken when the Episcopal Church consecrated a new gay bishop. He then turned to the Presiding Bishop and asked if this was not so. Bishop Jefferts Schori said that was “my understanding of it. We have been asked to exercise restraint, and we have done so.”
On July 18, Bishop Jefferts Schori stated the moratoria on gay bishops and blessings that had been agreed by the instruments of unity: the Anglican Consultative Council, the Primates, the Lambeth Conference and the Archbishop of Canterbury had not been rescinded by General Convention. “Effectively a moratorium remains until it is ended,” she said.
Pressed to account for the negative responses from the Bishop of Durham and other overseas church leaders, Bishop Bruno said “we can’t do anything about their perceptions.”
Church leaders condemn deadly Pakistan rampage: CEN 8.07.09 p 6. August 10, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Pakistan, Persecution.comments closed
The Archbishop of Canterbury has joined the Pope and other Christian leaders in denouncing Friday’s attack on a Christian village in Pakistan by a Muslim mob that left 9 dead and destroyed over 40 homes.
On Aug 4, Dr. Rowan Williams stated the “recent atrocities against Christians in Pakistan will sear the imaginations of countless people of all faiths throughout the world. As the minister of law in the Punjab has already said, such actions are not the work of true Muslims: they are an abuse of real faith and an injury to its reputation as well as an outrage against common humanity, and deserve forthright condemnation.”
Dr. Williams stated Pakistan’s 2.8 million Christians were a “small and vulnerable minority, generally with little political or economic power.” He urged the government of President Asif Ali Zardari to “spare no efforts, not only in seeing that justice is done in the wake of these terrible events, but also in continuing to build a society in which all faiths are honoured and in which the most vulnerable can be assured of the protection of the law and the respect of their fellow-citizens.”
On Monday Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone stated Pope Benedict XVI had called “on everyone to renounce the violence that has caused so much suffering and start working towards peace.”
The pope offered his condolences to the families of the dead and urged Pakistan to build a country were all faith communities displayed a “mutual respect” for one another.
In an email from Karachi, Bishop Ijaz Inayat reported that over 100 houses had been looted and 40 burned in the communal violence in the town of Gojra in the Punjab. Nine Christians had died—seven in the fires and two from gunshot wounds.
“This all started about 12’ o clock [Friday] when thousands of Muslims gathered near the railway station and marched towards the Christian town area where over two thousand Christian families have been housed for over fifty years,” he wrote.
“On reaching the neighborhood some two hundred persons hiding their faces with clothes opened fire on the Christian houses instantly killing on person named Inayat Masih and injuring others. Most of the people fled to save their lives, yet some unlucky got trapped inside their homes and were burnt,” Bishop Inayat said.
The police are alleged to have taken no action to stop the attacks, while the fire services were prevented from reaching the town by the mob, the bishop said.
Press reports from Pakistan indicate the government has blamed outside agitators linked to Al Qaida for the attacks and will compensate the victims of the attack and launch an investigation in to the local government’s handling of the affair.
Government must go, say churches: CEN 8.07.09 p 6. August 10, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Kenya, Church of England Newspaper.comments closed
Kenya’s coalition government has lost the confidence of its people and must go, the National Council of Churches of Kenya said on July 31 after the government reneged on its pledge to bring to justice those responsible for the 2007 post-election violence that led to the deaths of 1500 and displacement of 300,000 people.
In a statement published on its website and distributed to the media by the group’s chairman, the Rev. Canon Peter Karanja, the NCCK said the government’s decision to drop a special tribunal to “try the suspected perpetrators of the post election violence is the greatest betrayal of the people of Kenya.”
President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga had “failed to protect justice” and “in the face of such betrayal, Kenyans must resoundingly put across a strong message that the moral authority of the grand coalition government to govern has been grossly undermined.”
Ignoring the will of the people in a bid to hold on to political power “will only result in destruction, bloodshed and death,” the NCCK said, adding that the government’s “greed and selfishness and failed leadership, has primed this nation for an outbreak of vicious violence that even you will not be able to control.”
The “premise and promise” of the coalition government brokered by former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan in 2008 was that it would “speedily facilitate the necessary reforms to reverse the degeneration of the nation and put us on a path of development and prosperity. One and a half years later, Kenyans are waking up to the realization that the grand coalition government is indeed a fraud on Kenyans by the ruling political class.”
The NCCK believed Kenya’s political leaders had now become its principle liability, for “at the heart of the problems bedeviling our country is a culture of impunity founded on the unbridled selfishness and greed of the political leadership. We have allowed a culture of impunity where thousands of people can commit crime without fear that anyone will hold them to account. We believe that the lethargy in our courts, the incompetence shown by the law enforcement agencies and other flaws are the result of systematic subversion of the rule of law.”
President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga must go, the NCCK said, calling upon to “honorably resign and allow Kenyans to choose a new leadership that will steer this country away from impunity and the high potential of national collapse.”
Political analysts expect the government to maintain its grip on power, though the 2012 general elections may see political change for the East African nation.
Cana says its appeal widens: CEN 8.07.09 p 7. August 8, 2009
Posted by geoconger in CANA, Church of England Newspaper.comments closed
The Convocation of Anglican Churches in North America (CANA) has surfaced as a winner in the wake of the 76th General Convention in the US, Bishop Martyn Minns said last week, with a rise in inquires from Americans Anglicans seeking to pull out of the Episcopal Church since the July 8-17 gathering in Anaheim, Calif.
Speaking to the press before the start of CANA’s annual convention on July 30, Bishop Minns stated the breakaway group had grown to 85 congregations with an estimated average Sunday attendance of 10,000 served by 179 clergy—including military and healthcare chaplains.
CANA’s growth has come in three segments—among Nigerian emigrants to the US, in the Washington metropolitan area, and among suburban families with young children, Bishop Minns said. Its appeal to young people, he believed, was due to the “younger generation looking for authenticity in a church where there is a genuine engagement and interest in truth.”
The breakaway group was “part of God’s redemptive plan” for Anglicanism in North America, he said, noting CANA was an “answer” to Dr. Rowan Williams’ prayers for a healthy church.
However, the old ways of organizing the church around geographically constructed dioceses was counterproductive in the current environment. “Geography and national boundaries no longer define” the church, he said, as the “old natural boundaries” were constructs that served a church built before the age of mass mobility and information technology.
In his address to the convocation, Bishop Minns called upon CANA’s leaders to adopt a three pronged approach to mission based around the concepts of ‘radical inclusion’, ‘profound transformation’, and ‘inspired service’.
The church should focus its energies on its non-members, seeking to include all people, he said. However, those brought to a knowledge of Christ, should be radically transformed—made new in Christ. These new Christians should then be turned back into the world to bring others to Christ and by their labors seek to transform the world, he said.
“Maintaining these core values is essential,” Bishop Minns said, if “we are to preserve our apostolic witness and mission” to America.
Call for Wales to have its own women’s prison: CEN 8.07.09 p 4. August 8, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church in Wales, Church of England Newspaper, Crime.comments closed
It is a crime that there are no jails in Wales for women, says the Archbishop of Wales Dr. Barry Morgan.
In a statement released Aug 3 following a pastoral visitation to HMP Eastwood Park in Gloucestershire, the archbishop said jailing Welsh women in England imposed a hardship on many families. His concerns, however, were not motivated merely by Welsh nationalism. Dr. Morgan urged the government to introduce reforms for women offenders that would support their successful reintegration into society after their term of imprisonment had ended.
“It seems very strange that I have to go across the border, and out of the Province of Wales, in order to visit women prisoners from Wales,” Dr. Morgan noted, adding that many of the prisoners asked “can we have a jail for women in Wales?”
“Their distress at being in prison is heightened far more than it is for men because in England they feel like strangers,” Dr. Morgan said, and their “biggest worry” was that friends and family would not visit “because they are too far away.”
An added burden for some of the prisoners was a sense of isolation and neglect, as some “feel cut off from Wales because English prisons do not show Welsh television channels or have Welsh newspapers so they have no way of keeping up with things happening in Wales.”
Approximately 80 percent of women prisoners come to jail with substance abuse problems Dr. Morgan said, a “high proportion will have had contact with mental health services” and “many” will “have got caught up in crime after years of being abused themselves.”
A penal system that does not plan on the successful reintegration of convicts into society, ultimately fails society, Dr. Morgan warned. “It is vital that these women are given every chance possible to keep their lives together while they are in prison so that they have support and stability when they are released and a chance to break out of the cycle of crime,” he said.
He lauded the work done at Eastwood Park, but called for the building of jails in Wales for women. “Locking them up far from home where, even with the best of care, they feel abandoned, worthless and forgotten will only condemn some of the most deprived people in society to a life spent constantly in and out of trouble,” Dr. Morgan said.
Few agree that US Moratorium holds: CEN 8.07.09 p 7. August 8, 2009
Posted by geoconger in 76th General Convention, Church of England Newspaper.comments closed
| Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.
The Episcopal Church’s protestation that it has not ended the ban on gay bishops or blessings has not found support outside its borders. After strong international reaction against the decisions of the recent General Convention, US Church leaders moved quickly to claim that the Church had not changed its position. |
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But critics said that this was the inevitable outcome when the Episcopal Church opened the discernment process for new bishops to gay clergy and permitted dioceses to compile and develop rites for the blessings of same-sex unions None of the American church’s allies among the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion have publicly spoken up in support of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s claims that nothing has changed, while several sharp statements have been released by overseas provinces and dioceses charging that the Episcopal Church had walked away from the Anglican Communion.
On July 18 Bishop Jefferts Schori stated that “in 2009” there are “more and deeper relationships with parts of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion than five or 10 years ago.”
The votes taken at General Convention were a “truthful attempt to deepen relationships,” she said.
However, on July 30 the Standing Committee of the Anglican Church in Southeast Asia stated the adoption of resolutions D025 and CO56 by the US General Convention, “when on a plain and ordinary reading, constitutes an abrogation by [the Episcopal Church] of the agreed-to moratorium on the consecration of practising homosexual clergy as bishops and rites of blessing for same-sex unions.”
This “effectively moves” the US church “away from the orthodox position” of the wider communion and is a “repudiation of the listening and consultation processes put in place in an attempt to resolve these issues.”
The Rt Rev Bethlehem Nopece, Bishop of the South African diocese of Port Elizabeth, called the adoption of the two resolutions by the US church a “deliberate defiance of the wider Body of the Anglican Communion.”
“The blessings of the same-sex unions and the ordination of practicing gay clergy is inconsistent with the Word of God written; it is theologically uninformed, incoherent with the wider church, endorsing schism in the Anglican Communion and threatens ecumenical fellowship and relations,” he charged on July 31.
The Episcopal Church had chosen to “journey alone,” he said. The South African church will “still uplift the Biblical standard of guidance in moral behaviour. We do not seek any political correctness, but call upon all people to repentance and change of life and patterns of behaviour for a new character in line with the demands of the Word of God,” Bishop Nopece said.
Court to rule on Indian religious row: CEN 8.07.09 August 7, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of North India, Church of South India, Property Litigation.comments closed
| A trial date has been set in the High Court of Delhi to determine the rightful successor to the Church of England in India.
On July 27 Justice Ravinder Bhat consolidated three petitions lodged by the Church of North India (CNI), the Anglican Church of India (ACI), and the Church of India seeking control over churches, schools and hospitals established by the Church of England during the Raj. Trusteeship of church lands in India and Pakistan has been the subject of on-going litigation since independence in 1948, with over 200 trusts, foundations, dioceses and bishops asserting ownership. The Indian news service DNAIndia estimates that over 5,000 lawsuits have been filed over the ownership of church lands. Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper. |
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Malawi ends missionary era with first indigenous bishops: CEN 8.05.09 August 5, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of the Province of Central Africa.comments closed
Indigenous clergy have been elected to the episcopate in Lake Malawi and Northern Malawi this week, ending the era of missionary bishops from Britain and the United States leading the church in Central Africa.
The Aug 1 elections of the Rev. Leslie Mtekateka as bishop-elect of Northern Malawi, and the Ven. Francis Kaulanda as bishop-elect of Lake Malawi permits the province to elect a new archbishop and ends a 150 year tradition of foreign bishops—begun by the Universities Mission to Central Africa of selecting British and American priests to serve as bishops for one of the poorest regions in Africa.
Rector of St Timothy’s, Chitipa, Fr. Mtekateka was the sole candidate on the ballot in Northern Malawi to succeed the Rt. Rev. Christopher Boyle, who has returned to England to serve as Assistant Bishop of Leicester. Fr. Metekateka is the son of the Rt. Rev. Josiah Mtekateka, the first African bishop of Malawi, consecrated in 1965 as Suffragan Bishop of Nyasaland, and in 1971 as the first Bishop of Lake Malawi.
Last month, the Rev. J. Scott Wilson, SSC of the Diocese of Fort Worth withdraw as sole candidate in Northern Malawi, prompting the diocese to conduct an abbreviated internal search for a new candidate. Leaders of the House of Bishops had urged the dioceses to look within Malawi for its new bishops, however this call to Africanize the episcopate had been met with some resistance.
Four years after its last bishop died, on Saturday the Diocese of Lake Malawi elected the Archdeacon of Lilongwe, the Ven. Francis Kaulanda as bishop. In 2007 the election of London vicar the Rev. Nicholas Henderson as bishop of the diocese was rejected by the provincial House of Bishops, which found Fr. Henderson’s theological views unsound.
As chairman of MicroLoan Foundation Malawi, Archdeacon Kaulanda has been active in bringing microfinance to Central Africa. Pioneered by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, microfinance offers small loans to the poor to help them engage in entrepreneurial enterprises to build the economy of rural and deprived urban areas through self-help and self-improvement.
Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper’s Religious Intelligence section.
Archbishop Denies Schism: CEN 7.31.09 p 1. August 5, 2009
Posted by geoconger in 76th General Convention, Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England Newspaper.comments closed
The Archbishop of Canterbury has delivered a sounding rebuke to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, stating its decision to ignore the wishes of the wider Anglican Communion and proceed with the development of rites for the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of gay clergy was theologically uninformed, ecclesiologically incoherent and risked dividing the Anglican Communion.
In his strongest and least ambiguous statement on homosexuality since his address to the 2005 Global South Anglican meeting in Egypt, Dr. Rowan Williams dismissed arguments that appeals to justice or civil liberties should influence the question of gay bishops and blessings, while also reaffirming traditionalist stance on human sexuality. The adoption of resolutions D025 and C056 by the Anaheim meeting of General Convention had not created a de facto schism, he said, but made it increasingly likely that the future of Anglicanism was a two-tier communion of covenanting and non-covenanting provinces.
A spokesman for Lambeth Palace told The Church of England Newspaper Dr. Williams’ July 27 statement entitled “Communion, Covenant and our Anglican Future” was a “reflection” on the actions of the 76th General Convention.
Dr. Williams opened his reflection with a word of thanks for the Episcopal Church’s hospitality and affirmed there was no place in the church of any kind of bigotry towards homosexuals. He also acknowledged that he had heard Presiding Bishop Katharine Jeffert Schori’s assurances the votes did not have the “automatic effect of overturning the requested moratoria” on gay bishops and blessings, “if the wording is studied carefully.”
It was unlikely, however, the wider communion would find Bishop Jeffert Schori’s protestations convincing and would be “unlikely to allay anxieties” the Episcopal Church had chosen to walk apart.
Assuming a didactic tone, Dr. Williams said there were “two points which I believe need to be reiterated and thought through further” by the Episcopal Church.
The Episcopal Church had not done its homework by providing a convincing theological rationale for the adoption of same-sex blessings. Nor had it engaged in the “painstaking biblical exegesis” necessary to justify such an change and had failed to seek a “wide acceptance of the results within the Communion” of its work so far, he said.
Changing liturgies changes doctrine, he argued, and such fundamental changes in Christian anthropology “naturally needs a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding,” Dr. Williams said—and that had not occurred.
Gay blessings were outside the bounds, he said, as a “blessing for a same-sex union cannot have the authority of the Church Catholic, or even of the Communion as a whole.”
Dr. Williams upped the stakes by noting that it was improper for any member of the clergy—bishop or priest—to be “living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond,” Archbishop Williams said. The homosexual or unchaste heterosexual “chosen lifestyle is not one that the Church’s teaching sanctions, and thus it is hard to see how they can act in the necessarily representative role that the ordained ministry, especially the episcopate, requires,” he said.
By permitting gay clergy and same-sex blessings without first “including in its discernment the judgment of the wider Church” the Episcopal Church risked “becoming unrecognizable to other local churches,” and the decision to repeal the moratoria led to an Anglican Communion based upon a “loose federation of local bodies with a cultural history in common, rather than a theologically coherent ‘community of Christian communities’,” he said.
An Anglican Covenant that provided structures of “mutual recognizability, mutual consultation and some shared processes of decision-making,” was a way forward, Dr. Williams said, but acknowledged that some within the Episcopal Church would “not choose this way of intensifying relationships.”
He welcomed dioceses to sign on to the Anglican Covenant in the event their national provinces declined, but said it was too soon to say that a schism had occurred. “It would be a mistake to act or speak now as if those decisions had already been made,” he noted.
The Anglican way historically had been able to juggle “diverse convictions more or less within a unified structure,” he said. While he was not yet willing to say that this period in the life of the church had ended, it may “turn out to need serious rethinking” of what it means to be a catholic church, Dr. Williams said.
Former Bishop of Harare given ultimatum: CEN 7.31.09 p 6. August 3, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Zimbabwe.comments closed
The Church of the Province of Central Africa (CPCA) will give Dr. Nolbert Kunonga his day in court, but he must first return control over the assets of the Diocese of Harare to the province, the deputy chancellor of the CPCA said last week.
The offer of a church trial from Chancellor Robert Stumbles is the latest development in the o-going saga of the controversial former Bishop of Harare, who last week mounted a failed legal challenge to block the consecration of his successor.
On July 26, the Rt. Rev. Chad Gandiya was consecrated Bishop of Harare before a congregation of 10,000 gathered at the city’s Sports Centre. Dr. Gandiya was then enthroned at the Cathedral Church of St Mary & All Saints in a ceremony led by the Dean of the Church of the Province of Central Africa (CPCA), Bishop Albert Chama of Northern Zambia and 12 other bishops.
However High Court Judge Ben Hlatshwayo blocked the installation, granting an injunction filed by Dr. Kunonga on behalf of the “Diocesan Trustees for the Diocese of Harare”, which claimed the CPCA was acting in bad faith by proceeding with the consecration.
“I am still the Bishop of Harare,” Dr. Kunonga claimed in the pleading.
Justice Hlatshwayo held the CPCA had not lawfully deposed Dr. Kunonga, writing that the controversial bishop had to “be charged first, tried and removed from office if there is anything against him before another bishop is ordained. Even divorcing a wife has certain procedures that are taken,” the judge ruled.
The Zimbabwe Supreme Court last week overturned the ruling after an emergency appeal was lodged by the CPCA. The Supreme Court ordered that the status quo be restored, with the two factions sharing the use of church properties until litigation over their ownership is concluded.
In a paper outlining the history of the Kunonga schism released on July 23, the Deputy Chancellor of the CPCA, Robert Stumbles reported the split began at the Aug 4, 2007 meeting of the Harare synod.
One of the Notices of Motion presented stated, “the Diocese of Harare does not recognise homosexuality as an acceptable Christian norm and hence does not recognise marriages from such relationships.” Mr. Stumbles noted that such a statement was unremarkable as it had been the formal “stance of the CPCA” on the issue since 1969.
However, on the floor of synod, the motion was amended by supporters of Dr Kunonga into “something unrecognizable and forced this through a somewhat stunned Synod,” Mr. Stumbles said, which the bishop’s supporters believed gave him the authority to “sever Diocesan links with the CPCA.”
On Sept 21, 2007 Dr. Kunonga informed the diocese “we are withdrawing from the Church of the Province of Central Africa,” and at an Extraordinary Synod held on Oct 20 made a “unilateral declaration of independence,” from the CPCA.
Dr. Kunonga formed the “Anglican Church of Zimbabwe” on March 15, 2008, claiming the CPCA was insufficiently firm on the question of homosexuality—a charge consistently denied by the province, which held Dr. Kunonga was engaged in a power grab with the tacit approval of allies within the Mugabe regime.
The province responded by appointing the retired Bishop of Manicaland, Dr. Sebastian Bakare interim bishop of the diocese, and excommunicated Dr. Kunonga after he created the Anglican Church of Zimbabwe.
Litigation over the control of parish properties ensued and the Harare High Court ordered that until it was resolved the two factions share usage of the properties. However, Dr. Kunonga ignored the court’s order, and with the backing of the police mounted a campaign of violent intimidation against supporters of Dr. Bakare.
The creation of a coalition government this year, however, saw an end to active government support for Dr. Kunonga. On March 4, 2009 the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa wrote to President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai saying they “disapproved of the actions of Dr Kunonga,” did not “recognise the status” of the breakaway bishop and asked the state to oversee the “full restoration of Anglican property” in Harare to the CPCA.
If he admits that he “erred in trying to withdraw the Diocese from the CPCA,” restores and accounts for the church’s assets, and withdraws “all court actions”, the House of Bishops of the CPCA “will convene to determine what steps should be taken by it concerning Dr. Kunonga,” Mr. Stumbles said.
Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper’s Religious Intelligence section.
Episcopal Church wants Royal apology: CEN 7.31.09 p 5. August 3, 2009
Posted by geoconger in 76th General Convention, Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, Politics.comments closed
| The Queen must apologize for the wrongs committed by Henry VII and repudiate the “Christian Doctrine of Discovery,” the 76th General Convention of the Episcopal Church has declared.
On July 17, the triennial meeting of the Episcopal Church’s synod endorsed resolution D035: Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery. The doctrine, “which originated with Henry VII in 1496, held that Christian sovereigns and their representative explorers could assert dominion and title over non-Christian lands with the full blessing and sanction of the Church,” the resolution explained. The principle of the “Doctrine of Discovery” arose in 1493 when Pope Alexander VI gave Spain and Portugal the right to claim non-Christian lands in the new world and Africa, while Henry VII authorized John Cabot to take possession of all lands discovered for the Crown. Beginning in 1823 the US Supreme Court held that Henry’s charter provided the legal basis for the American government’s ownership of Indian lands as Indian tribes were not independent nations, but “domestic dependent nations”. This doctrine, the resolution argued, had led to the “dispossession of the lands of indigenous peoples and the disruption of their way of life,” and as such, was a bad thing. The General Convention directed its presiding officers to “write to Queen Elizabeth II, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, requesting that her Majesty disavow, and repudiate publicly, the claimed validity of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery,” as made by the Tudors. Rising to speak in support of the resolution, the Bishop of Maine endorsed the proposal, saying it would be a symbolic righting of wrongs. There was no debate, and the resolution was adopted on a unanimous voice vote. Hundreds of special interest non-Church related resolutions are brought to General Convention at each session. Those that make it out of committee to the floor are usually adopted with little or no debate on voice votes. Resolutions of General Convention have no legal force under US canon law. Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper’s Religious Intelligence section. |
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