Bishops Edward Salmon, Peter Beckwith, Bruce MacPherson, Maurice Benitez, John Howe, Paul Lambert, Bill Love, Dan Martins and James Stanton charged for supporting the Constitution of The Episcopal Church

Two Breaking stories – read them all:

Anglican Ink: Bishops Salmon, Beckwith, and MacPherson charged with misconduct: Charges filed for endorsing brief filed by the ACNA Diocese of Quincy

Disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against three bishops of the Episcopal Church under the provisions of Title IV for having endorsed a legal pleading filed in the Quincy lawsuit.

On 28 June 2012, the Rt. Rev. Edward L. Salmon, Jr., former Bishop of South Carolina and Dean of Nashotah House seminary, the Rt. Rev. Peter H. Beckwith, former Bishop of Springfield, and th Rt. Rev. D. Bruce MacPherson, Bishop of Western Louisiana received an email from the Rt. Rev. F. Clayton Matthews stating that the charges had been leveled against them.
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The bishops have not been informed what canon they violated. But they appear to be accused of violating the canons for having filed a brief in opposition to the national church’s motion for summary judgment in the case of the Diocese of Quincy v. the Episcopal Church.

The 16 Dec 2011 Judge Thomas Ortbal of the Eighth Judicial Circuit Court in Adams County, Ill., dismissed the claim that as a “matter of law” the Episcopal Church was a hierarchical entity with dioceses being subordinate to the national church. The judge rejected the motion for summary judgment brought by the national church against the breakaway Diocese of Quincy and set the matter for trial. Read more

Anglican Ink: Seven more TEC bishops charged with misconduct: Support for ACNA pleading is grounds for discipline complaint alleges

Seven bishops have been charged with misconduct for having endorsed a friend of the court brief prepared by the Anglican Communion Institute in the Diocese of Fort Worth case.

On 28 June 2012, the Rt Rev Maurice M. Benitez, retired Bishop of Texas, the Rt Rev John W. Howe, retired Bishop of Central Florida, the Rt Rev Paul E. Lambert. Suffragan Bishop of Dallas, the Rt Rev William H. Love, Bishop of Albany, the Rt Rev D. Bruce MacPherson, Bishop of Western Louisiana, the Rt Rev Daniel H. Martins, Bishop of Springfield, and the Rt. Rev. James M. Stanton, Bishop of Dallas were informed they had been charged with misconduct.
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The bishops have not been notified with violation of the canons they have committed, but Bishop Matthews’ notice refers to the pleading they endorsed in the Diocese of Fort Worth case presently before the Texas Supreme Court.

In an amicus brief filed on 23 April 2012 the seven bishops and three scholars from the ACI ”“ the Rev. Christopher R. Seitz, the Very Rev. Philip W. Turner, and the Very Rev. Ephraim Radner — argued a Tarrant County, Texas trial court misconstrued the church’s constitutions and canons by holding that the Episcopal Church was a hierarchical body with ultimate power vested in the General Convention. Read more

So is this a more “Anglican” budget, intended to endear ECUSA to the rest of the Anglican Communion?

Yes and no. For one thing, although the Executive Council had proposed a reduction in the Church’s support for the Anglican Communion Office from the past triennium’s $1,160,000 to $850,000, the PB now proposes to give the ACO just $500,000. At the same time, she proposes to use the savings in what would have been given to the ACO to enlarge the budget of the Church’s own Anglican Communion office by some $500,000 over what the EC had proposed for it (see lines 192-97). This will be touted as “a greater commitment” to the Anglican Communion, but it is all in moneys to be spent by the PB in adding new staff and in entertaining visiting primates and other Communion dignitaries.
Then again, the PB proposes to raise $1.5 million in new funds for the relief of Haiti, by getting “faithful Episcopalians” to donate to match, on a 2 for 1 basis, the $774,000 already budgeted for such relief (lines 18 and 83). This will certainly please the clergy and laity who have been working there to help Haiti recover from its catastrophic earthquake””but should something be budgeted which apparently has not even yet been committed, or pledged?

Other money “found” since the EC met has resulted from a refinancing of the Church’s outstanding debt at a lower interest rate (line 329), but achieved by pledging the Church’s donated stocks and bonds as security. This allows the PB to project a payment on principal of $1.5 million per year for the next three years. Indeed, this successful achievement by her Treasurer and his staff may well have contributed to the impetus for a new draft budget.

However, the PB was not content to book just concrete savings. As noted earlier, she decided to put in phantom pledges in order to redress the budget as “mission-oriented,” and thus in the process to offer bread and circuses to her constituency.

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When asked by Episcopal News Service, the Rev. Canon Gregory Straub, General Convention secretary and the church’s executive officer, said that to his knowledge this was the first time a presiding bishop had proposed a budget after Executive Council had sent its draft budget to the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance.

“I didn’t know that Bishop Katharine was preparing her own budget,” House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson said via email June 21.

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If we are people who value that Anglican sense of ordered freedom, then we need to learn to live in the creative tension between complete order and complete freedom, both of which are ultimately deadly ”“ order because it’s not open to change, and complete freedom because it has a hard time with enduring relationship. Abundant life and creativity come in the dance between what is finished and utter chaos. That lively tension applies to all parts of our lives, including how we make decisions.

Our churchwide governance work is largely based on parliamentary democratic methods. We have evolved a system that gives great attention to the details of process and structure in how decisions are made. We have a representation system that has at least something to do with interest group politics. We have made legislative decisions over the last few decades that have done great good in opening us up to the movement of the spirit. We have also done damage in voting, by creating winners and losers about several hundred issues at every General Convention.

There are other democratic ways of decision-making that are more deliberative, that depend on conversation and consensus more than on up-down, yes-no voting.

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“We need to discover ways to engage in the outside community,” Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said, in urging the 125 delegates attending the Province II Synod of the Episcopal Church to recognize that while many believe the church is an unchanging rock, it too slowly evolves.

“‘We are beginning to discover a way forward into a new chapter in the church’s history,” Jefferts Schori said. “If we are going to save the life of the church, we are going to have to lose it.”

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Virginia is the epicenter of the Episcopal schism. Heathsville is one of seven churches ”” including two of the largest and most historic in the country ”” that broke away from the denomination in 2006. Now that they’ve lost their lawsuit, they all have to find new homes.

Church of the Apostles is one of the seven breakaway churches. At its home in Fairfax, a half-dozen men wrestle with a 360-pound cross, panting as they remove it from its moorings in the sanctuary. Parishioner Wayne Marsh says the cross is going into storage and the church is being shuttered.

“It’s sad and heartbreaking, and it’s a tremendous loss,” he says, “but God has just given me a peace to understand this is his will and we’re going forward with it, not knowing exactly where we’re going.”

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One of my favorite Easter hymns is about greenness. “Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain.”

It goes on to talk about love coming again. It’s a reminder to me of how centered our Easter images are in the Northern hemisphere. We talk about greenness and new life and life springing forth from the earth when we talk about resurrection. I often wonder what Easter images come in the Southern hemisphere, and I think that church in the south has something to teach us about that.

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On same-sex marriage and other gay rights issues, Jefferts Schori said she has been “stunned at how quickly public opinion has changed in the U.S.” though she cautioned that she doesn’t expect controversy over gay clergy in the Episcopal Church to fade. As more states legalize same-sex marriage, she said, conflicts in the church could become more frequent.

“We muddle through [controversial issues] in a very public way,” she said of the church that has just under two million members in the United States.

“I would guess that at [General] Convention, we would adopt a trial rite for blessing same-sex unions,” she said, referring to the annual meeting of the church’s governing body, which meets every three years. It will next meet in July in Indianapolis. Jefferts Schori said that no priest is required to bless any marriage, but that formal same-sex blessings could become optional.

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The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops spent much of its five-day meeting at Camp Allen Conference & Retreat Center in Navasota, Texas, focusing on its ongoing theme of ’Church for the 21st Century and the Gift of Episcope’ and discussing issues related to the upcoming General Convention and same-gender blessings.

During its March 20 business meeting, the House of Bishops adopted a resolution to send greetings to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as he prepares to leave his post and return to academia at the end of the year.

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From here:

“I am grateful for Rowan Williams’ service as Archbishop of Canterbury during an exceedingly challenging season. We can all give thanks for his erudition and persistence in seeking reconciliation across a rapidly changing Anglican Communion. His leadership of that reconciling work through Indaba and Ubuntu is bearing remarkable fruit, and I believe this will be his most important legacy. I give thanks that his spiritual and intellectual gifts will continue to bless the larger world, albeit from a different vantage point. May the coming months bring well-deserved peace to him and his family, and may we join in blessing his ministry. ”˜Well done, good and faithful servant!’”

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

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Dear Deputies and First Alternates:

A confusing situation has arisen and I’d like to set the record straight:

On Thursday, the Presiding Bishop released a video directed to the House of Deputies expressing her opinion about legislative issues that will come before General Convention this summer. Yesterday, the Office of Communications sent an email to bishops that mischaracterized my response to the video’s release and asked the bishops to forward the video message to their diocese’s deputies.
On Thursday afternoon, I received word from the General Convention Office that the Presiding Bishop, via the Office of Communications, had directed that office to forward a video message from the Presiding Bishop to all deputies. I had neither seen the video nor been consulted about it and so I told the General Convention Office to hold it.

In my nearly 25 years as a deputy, I don’t ever recall the Presiding Bishop speaking directly to the House of Deputies outside of a joint session or without giving the House due notice, while at General Convention. I don’t ever recall a Presiding Bishop corresponding directly with deputies outside of the General Convention, without the knowledge of, or in collaboration with the President.

I was surprised because I thought that the Presiding Bishop, her staff, and I had worked through some important issues of internal communications last fall. I had talked with both Bishop Sauls and the Presiding Bishop and asked that we proceed in a more collegial and cooperative manner. I thought we had agreed to do so.

But while the General Convention Office was holding the video, it was released by the Office of Communications to the whole church just hours before the Presiding Bishop and I were scheduled to arrive in Baltimore where we could have resolved the situation in person.

I am glad to tell you that, while we have been in Baltimore, Bishop Katharine and I have shared a meal and talked in person. I told her that I’m disappointed about what’s happened in the last few days and asked that we proceed toward General Convention with collegiality and a cooperative spirit even””especially””when we disagree. I also told her that I am concerned about the use of churchwide resources to lobby General Convention on only one side of a legislative issue.

Despite this productive conversation, upon direction from the Presiding Bishop, the Office of Communications sent the second email, this time to bishops, that mischaracterized my request that the video be held, thus putting me in a difficult position and making it necessary to spell all of this out.

I am confident that we can get back on track and work productively and faithfully to prepare for General Convention. I will continue to urge that those of us who lead the church talk directly with one another to resolve differences. I will also continue to ask that the resources of the Church Center be deployed in ways that present the full range of opinions on legislation that will determine how the church meets the challenges before us.

Thank you for your commitment to our work. I am looking forward to being with all of you in Indianapolis and to the work that we will accomplish together.

Peace,

[Ms.] Bonnie Anderson, President, The House of Deputies

The budget, which will not be final until General Convention acts in July, proposes to set aside money for a “churchwide consultation” on the Episcopal Church’s future shape and work. It also includes money for pilot projects that Chief Operating Officer Stacy Sauls said could show how the church’s purchasing and organizational power could help congregations and dioceses free up more of their resources for mission work.

Sauls characterized such a cooperative arrangement as one way to bring about “long-term significant change” in how the churchwide staff relates to the rest of the church. Council accepted his proposal and his suggestion that the 2013-2015 budget “should open the door to doing long-term reform of how we do business as a church.”

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Three Episcopal Church leaders challenged members of the church’s Executive Council Jan. 27 to engage in “adaptive change” in response to what they said are changing church and societal environments.

That challenge began immediately as the members received two different budget scenarios developed by council’s Executive Committee upon which to begin formulating a draft 2013-2015 budget. One scenario calls for asking dioceses to contribute 19 percent of their income and the other calls for dioceses contributing 15 percent. The larger income would be $103.6 million and the 15 percent-asking budget would be reduced by approximately $13.5 million, according to Treasurer Kurt Barnes.

In an emailed memo to Episcopal Church Center staff after the scenarios were presented to council, Chief Operating Officer Stacy Sauls noted that the 19-percent version plans on a $5.9 million decrease in income from the current triennium. The 15-percent version’s reduced revenue amounts to $19.3 million less than the current triennium.

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[Jefferts] Schori presides over Episcopalians in 16 countries. She made her first visit to North Carolina, in part, to help St. Martin’s celebrate its 125th anniversary, a century of it spent in the small building tucked between Seventh Street and Independence Park.

As Schori noted often in her sermon, St. Martin’s has a long tradition of community involvement. It was home to the city’s first Boys and Girls Scout troops. Today, its 750 members are active participants in a host of community affairs, from AIDS and HIV awareness to homelessness and affordable housing.

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I was interested to see the AP describe the Presiding Bishop’s remarks as “a rare comment on a local issue.”

[The Episcopal Church]…is hemorrhaging members. In the last 40 years, the Episcopal Church in the U.S. lost 34 percent of its members and 3.66 percent in the last five. This year it declined 2.36 percent and counts just over 2 million members….

Jefferts Schori did not give any response about this decline, nor did she comment on the Catholic Church’s outreach to disaffected Episcopalians….

[Instead she said she] sees encouraging signs. “Engagement in God’s mission looks different in different places, but it usually has something essential to do with Jesus’ own primary acts of service – feeding, healing, and teaching people,” said Jefferts Schori, mid way though her nine year term. “I also see church members moving out into the community to listen to the deep spiritual questions of the unchurched and dechurched.” And she’ll find out this Sunday that is also what has revitalized Incarnation.

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Rejected by the Roman Catholic Church, in 2004 he became an …Episcopal] priest, even after informing the then bishop of Nevada, Katharine Jefferts Schori, that he had sexually transgressed just a few years earlier. She was also told by his former monastery about his sordid past and given highly damaging psychological records. Surprise, surprise. In July this year he resigned from his post and is currently facing criminal charges.

But here is where it all becomes somewhat Kafkaesque. Rather than campaigning against Jefferts Schori and demanding to know why she accepted into ordination a man with such a grotesque record ”” reports that suggested he was likely to reoffend ”” the usual anti-Catholic brigade have set up shop locally to attack the Catholic bishop and the Catholic Church.

Ms. Jefferts Schori, of course, is now the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States, or in other words the head of the American version of the Anglican communion. She is also a roaring liberal, a darling of the left, the gay community and those who believe Catholicism to be reactionary, ultra-orthodox and on the wrong side of history.

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Perhaps this link will work: http://www.diocesemo.org/news/2011/11/19/presiding-bishop-katharine-preaches-at-convention-eucharist/

The Bishop of South Carolina, the Rt Revd Mark Lawrence, is cur­rently under investigation by the disciplinary board of the national Church on charges of having “ab­andoned” the Episcopal Church (News, 14 October). He is charged with a variety of omissions and commissions, includ­ing failure to take legal action against a parish in his diocese which had realigned itself…

The Church’s crusade against conservative dis­senters is pointless, wasteful, and self-destructive. And, although Dr Jefferts Schori has defended her actions as necessary to protect the Church’s assets, it is hard to understand what material benefits the Church’s programme could reasonably achieve. If the Episcopal Church retains the properties of departing congregations, it will be stuck with church buildings that the few (if any) remaining loyalists cannot afford to maintain. In the best-case scenario, it may be able to offset the cost of litiga­tion by selling them for use as mosques or saloons.

The Episcopal Church has plunged into a maelstrom of institutional turmoil and litigation, alienating some of its most committed constitu­ents. Representing less than one per cent of the American population, it has not affected the at­titudes of the general public, or benefited gay men and women, who are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. And it has not impressed the secular élite, who are as contemptuous of the Episcopal Church, for all its political correctness, as they are of all Christian groups, whose members they regard as superstitious ignoramuses.

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We are pleased that the Presiding Bishop and Bishop Dan Edwards of Nevada have issued further statements on Bede Parry. In light of these statements, however, two further clarifications are needed.

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Bede James Parry was serving as organist and music director at All Saints Church, Las Vegas, when I became aware of him. His arrival preceded my own in the Diocese of Nevada.

He approached me to inquire about being received as a priest, having served as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. At the time, he told me of being dismissed from the monastery in 1987 for a sexual encounter with an older teenager, and indicated that it was a single incident of very poor judgment. The incident was reported to civil authorities, who did not charge him. He told of being sent to a facility in New Mexico, serving as a priest thereafter both in New Mexico and in Nevada, and recently (2002) being asked to formalize his separation from the monastery.

In consultation with other diocesan leadership and the chancellor, we explored the possibilities and liabilities of receiving him. I wrote to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas and the Diocese of Santa Fe, receiving brief responses from each bishop, who indicated no problematic behavior. I wrote to Conception Abbey, from whom I received only an acknowledgement that he had served there, been sent for treatment to a facility in New Mexico, and had been dismissed for this incident of misconduct. Neither then nor later did I receive a copy of any report of a psychological examination in connection with his service in the Roman Catholic Church. His departure from the Roman Catholic priesthood had to do with his desire to take up secular employment.

Parry was required to fulfill all the expectations of the canons regarding reception of a priest from another communion in historic succession. He did undergo a psychological exam in the Diocese of Nevada, was forthcoming about the incident he had reported to me, and did not receive a negative evaluation. His background check showed no more than what he had already told us. He was forthcoming about the previous incident in his interviews with the Commission on Ministry and with the Standing Committee.

I made the decision to receive him, believing that he demonstrated repentance and amendment of life and that his current state did not represent a bar to his reception. I was clear that his ministry would be limited to an assisting role, under the supervision of another priest, and like any other diocesan leader, he would not be permitted to work alone with children. Since that time, as far as I am aware, he has served faithfully and effectively as a minister of the gospel and priest of this Church.

The records of his reception are retained by the Diocese of Nevada, and further questions should be directed to Bishop Dan Edwards.

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

In response to any claim that ours is a tendentious reading of these TEC policies, it is sufficient merely to note that we are addressing vigorous claims that the knowing reception into the priesthood of a child sex abuser was fully in accord with these policies. We can only conclude that to the extent the inexplicably bad judgment exercised in the case of the reception of Bede Parry was fully in accord with TEC’s canons and policies, this serves not to exonerate that judgment but only to indict those policies. When TEC revised its canons and policies in recent years in light of public scandals, it chose to adopt the model of discretion formerly used by Catholic bishops instead of the strict policy those bishops themselves adopted in response to these scandals. The result is Bede Parry as an Episcopal priest. We have little doubt that most TEC bishops would exercise better judgment than that shown in Nevada, but the biggest scandal in the Parry affair is that after the events of the last decade it can plausibly be claimed that receiving a known child abuser as a priest is fully consistent with TEC’s revised policies.

This analysis reveals serious problems with our canons as they now stand. Clearly they need review and revision. It is also the case, however, that the most adequately drawn laws require for their implementation leaders who exercise judgment in prayer and with accountable concern for Christ’s body. In the case of Bede Perry, the best one can say is that the judgments involved, although layered, were poor. Much is simply unknown with the result that many legitimate questions remain unanswered. Despite the seriousness of the questions, the Presiding Bishop, who had the final decision in this matter, has remained silent. Nevertheless, given the serious nature of the issue involved in this case, the Episcopal Church is right to ask for a more adequate accounting of the reasoning behind the decisions that were made in this case.

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