(ENS) The Rt. Rev. Herbert A. Donovan, Jr., who currently serves as an assisting bishop in the Diocese of New York, has been named as deputy to the Presiding Bishop for Anglican Communion Relations.

In this newly developed position, Donovan will serve as the liaison for the Episcopal Church to the other 37 provinces in the Anglican Communion, as well as to international groups, organizations and partners, said an October 20 press release from the Episcopal Church’s Office of Public Affairs.

“I am honored to be asked by our Presiding Bishop to assist in the work of the church within the Anglican Communion at this important time in our life together,” said Donovan, who serves as vice chair of the Association of Episcopal Colleges and Universities.

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The assembly of the Anglican Parishes of the Central Interior (APCI) has requested its bishop, Gordon Light, to allow clergy whose conscience permits to bless civilly-married gay couples where at least one party is baptized. The assembly passed the motion when it met Oct. 17 to 19.

A notice of a similar motion was filed at the synod of the diocese of Ontario but was declared out of order by the diocesan bishop, George Bruce, who acted on the advice of the diocesan chancellor (legal advisor). The ruling was appealed at the synod held Oct. 16 to 18 but was upheld by a majority vote of delegates.

At the APCI assembly, Bishop Light gave concurrence to the motion but suspended any action pending consultations with the Canadian house of bishops, which meets Oct. 27 to 31 to discuss, among others, how best to respond to renewed proposals for moratoria on the blessing of same-sex unions, the ordination of persons living in same-sex unions to the episcopate, and cross-border interventions.

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You have to hand it to Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister: he’s good value for money. He doesn’t realise that there are some subjects that ministers should leave well alone. There’s a reason why he’s not on Question Time tonight. Immediately after being appointed, he opened up the Pandora’s box that is the Government’s immigration policy.

In the same interview with The Times he declared that the Church of England would end up being disestablished: “Disestablishment – I think it will happen… once you open debate about the House of Lords you open up debate about the make-up… It will probably take 50 years but a modern society is multifaith.” Hang on, Mr W. The assumption that a multifaith society can’t accommodate a privileged position for one religion, Anglicanism, can’t be taken as given.

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The lower house of parliament approved legislation Wednesday allowing scientists to create animal-human embryos for medical research, in the biggest shake-up of embryology laws in two decades.

Despite opposition from religious and pro-life groups, MPs in the House of Commons backed the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill by 355 votes to 129. It will now go to a vote in the House of Lords, and could be law by November.

The wide-ranging bill, which has been debated for months, would also allow “saviour siblings” — children created as a close genetic match for a sick brother or sister so their genetic material can help treat them.

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The troubled U.S. economy is forcing tens of thousands of people to visit food pantries for the first time. But as the demand rises, donations to those pantries are drying up and some places have run out of food entirely, even in the nation’s breadbasket.

Although Kansas’ Johnson County is one of the richer counties in the United States, a food pantry there run by the local Catholic Diocese had to close last week.

Ellen Jones, director of Catholic Community Services, says she was stunned.

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Main Street USA in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom seems far, far away from the meltdown on Wall Street.

Children hug Winnie the Pooh. At Town Hall, the mayor sings, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Yet Wall Street’s financial mess has touched even this idyllic world.

A very good piece from the front page of today’s USA Today on the collateral damage of this economic crisis–read it all.

(ENS) Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and deposed Diocese of Pittsburgh Bishop Bob Duncan met privately in London last week.

The Lambeth Palace press office confirmed that the meeting took place on October 15, but would not disclose details of the conversation between Williams and Duncan, saying it was “one of many private meetings” the archbishop hosts at his London residence.

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ACNS spoke to the Chairman of the Design Group, Archbishop Drexel Gomez about the Covenant Process.The full transcript is available below:

The Lambeth Commentary to the Saint Andrew’s Draft – what is it exactly?

At the Lambeth Conference, the bishops spent a great deal of time and attention looking at the Saint Andrew’s Draft for the Anglican Covenant – discussing the principle and the text, its merits and demerits. It is very important that their views are made available to the Communion as the Provinces assess the Saint Andrew’s Draft, and so they have now been published in a Lambeth Commentary which has been drawn together by the Covenant Design Group from the materials produced at the Conference.

And what was the reaction of the bishops at Lambeth?

Happily, it has been positive – and I say that as one who is a firm supporter of the current draft. A number of concerns were expressed about how the idea of a covenant might impact on the life of the Communion, but when the bishops looked at the detail, then there was a surprisingly high degree of satisfaction with many parts of the text.

Read it all and follow the links.

The Holy Father expressed his hope that “in the difficult international economic context of today, particular attention is given to the people and families who are most underprivileged and the weakest of society.”

He also spoke out on behalf of those for whom life is more difficult due to the crisis: “The present situation aggravates the already worrying and sometimes tragic conditions of life for numerous people, whose human dignity is in this way gravely compromised.”

The Pontiff concluded asking God to “support all those people who are victims of extreme poverty” and bless “the efforts of those who, with their generous commitment, contribute to the building up of a more just and fraternal world, which rejects the misfortune of extreme poverty.”

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Whatever the long term effect of this bailout, it should at the very least make us, as a society and as Christians in society, take a far more critical view of the culture in which we are inevitably embedded.

Most of us have very little influence on the great affairs of state; we do not run major financial institutions or multinational corporations. But we are entitled to opinions about how far the pursuit of wealth by the few should be allowed to trump their responsibilities to the many. We are entitled to take a stand on the glorification of greed in popular culture.

And we are obliged, by our discipleship, to live differently ourselves. To walk around one of our great city centres is to be exposed to a full-scale onslaught on the senses from advertisers who want us to buy things not because they are useful, but because they are desirable in themselves; a quality they acquire simply because we are persuaded that other people desire them too.

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A reader sent us a copy of the resolutions passed by the Diocese of Dallas during its convention October 17-18.
You can read them all here: Diocese of Dallas 2008 resolutions

The three resolutions forwarded to us:

1) Express gratitude express to Bishop Stanton and Bishop Lambert for voting No to the deposition of the Rt. Rev’d Robert Duncan

2) Request that the office of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church provide each diocese of The Episcopal Church with the following information:
a. the dollar amount spent by TEC on litigation against dioceses, parishes, groups of churches and individuals since General Convention 2006;
b. a list of the church accounts and/or budget items from which these funds were taken;
c. the proposed amount of money for litigation to be presented to the 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church.

3) Requests that the Episcopal Church adopt a policy of negotiation and/or mediation with regard to disputes over property, and according to the request of the Dar Es Salaam Primate’s Communiqué, cease and desist from engaging in lawsuits with fellow Christians.

According to our informant all three passed. We’d welcome more details as to vote margins, etc. Thanks!

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For the first time in at least a decade, the nation’s consumers are trying to get by on fewer prescription drugs.

As people around the country respond to financial and economic hard times by juggling the cost of necessities like groceries and housing, drugs are sometimes having to wait.

“People are having to choose between gas, meals and medication,” said Dr. James King, the chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, a national professional group. He also runs his own family practice in rural Selmer, Tenn.

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Kendall,

I have found myself increasingly stunned by the tone of…[some] of the respondents on Titus, and that particular thread which included your own thoughts on Sarah Palin was particularly unedifying….

On a more general note, these days I usually pause several times before posting on Titus because it would appear that on…[some] of the threads there is rightist determination to pounce on anything that is considered not to be towing their particular party line — and usually it is not the idea that is made subject to debate, but it all comes down to issues of personality and prejudice. Most of the time I do not engage because of such an expected response.

I am sorry that such Rush Limbaugh shout-you-down tactics have taken more moderate voices like my own out of the discussion, because clearly a lot of us have shrugged our shoulders and said to ourselves that we have better things to do than jumping in on a conversation where we are going to be kicked around the place like something nasty that the cat brought in!

I am sorry that this polarization has taken place because it minimizes our ability to honestly and faithfully exchange ideas and create some kind of fresh, Christ-centered synthesis.

My deepest sympathy for the way you were raked over the coals recently at T19 (“Many Evangelicals Struggle with the Choice of Sarah Palin”). It was a masterpiece of understatement when you finally said:

This thread is not proving productive nor is it a good witness.

It’s just awful to see such terrible departures from civility amongst Christians, much less than a complete flight from the deeper Christian virtues of gentleness, tenderness, charity, humility, and forgiveness. It must have been miserable for you. And certainly as you say it isn’t a good witness to the outside world.

Anyway, my deepest sympathy to you.

But we’re deluding ourselves if we assume that we can recover from the crisis of 2008 so quickly and easily simply by watching the Dow creep upward. The wounds go deeper than that. To heal them, we must repair the broken moral balance that let this chaos loose.

Debt ”” who owes what to whom, or to what, and how that debt gets paid ”” is a subject much larger than money. It has to do with our basic sense of fairness, a sense that is embedded in all of our exchanges with our fellow human beings.

But at some point we stopped seeing debt as a simple personal relationship. The human factor became diminished. Maybe it had something to do with the sheer volume of transactions that computers have enabled. But what we seem to have forgotten is that the debtor is only one twin in a joined-at-the-hip pair, the other twin being the creditor. The whole edifice rests on a few fundamental principles that are inherent in us.

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In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision knocked down laws against abortion in all 50 states, fabricating a constitutional “right” to abortion that continues to haunt and divide our society. Within two days of that decision, the Catholic bishops rejected it as “bad morality, bad medicine and bad public policy.” We called for a comprehensive response: exploring “every legal possibility” for challenging the Court’s tragic error and restoring legal safeguards for the right to life of the unborn child; helping to pass laws to “restrict the practice of abortion as much as possible” in the meantime; and educating society to the need to safeguard the child and support “more humane and morally acceptable solutions” for women facing problems during pregnancy.

Recently, some have called on the Church to abandon most of this effort. They say we should accept Roe as a permanent fixture of constitutional law, stop trying to restore recognition for the unborn child’s human rights, and confine our public advocacy to efforts to “reduce abortions” through improved economic and social support for women and families.

[We have been very involved in manifold ways in seeking to provide such ministry and support]….

These efforts, however, are not an adequate or complete response to the injustice of Roe v. Wade for several important reasons. First, the Court’s decision in Roe denied an entire class of innocent human beings the most fundamental human right, the right to life. In fact, the act of killing these fellow human beings was transformed from a crime into a “right,” turning the structure of human rights on its head. Roe v. Wade is a clear case of an “intrinsically unjust law” we are morally obliged to oppose (see Evangelium vitae, nos. 71-73). Reversing it is not a mere political tactic, but a moral imperative for Catholics and others who respect human life.

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This is well worth the time.

Roman Catholics in North America and Britain are calling for a series of YouTube videos showing a Canadian teenager destroying Communion hosts to be removed from the Internet.

The Quebec teenager named Dominique, who tags himself “fsmdude,” has posted more than 40 videos featuring him desecrating the host, the small circular wafer that Catholics ingest during Eucharist service.

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“Marriage is between a man and a woman,” said Dr. Frederick K.C. Price, who leads the 22,000-member Crenshaw Christian Center. He urged his audience to “stand with God in saying the definition of marriage must not change.”

A few miles away at Lucy Florence Cultural Center in Leimert Park, a much smaller group of ministers — three, as it turned out — spoke against the measure. Among their arguments: that African Americans, given their history of discrimination, should not be taking away rights.

“Same-gender marriage is a civil rights issue,” the Rev. Eric Lee, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Council of Los Angeles, said at a recent event.

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(ENS) If a proposed Anglican covenant is released in mid-May for adoption by the Anglican Communion’s provinces, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori will “strongly discourage” any effort to bring that request to the 76th General Convention in July….

Anglican Communion provinces have until the end of March 2009 to respond to the current version of the proposed covenant, known as the St. Andrew’s Draft. The Covenant Design Group meets in London in April 2009 and may issue another draft of a covenant. That draft is expected to be reviewed by the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) during its May 1-12, 2009 meeting. The ACC could decide to release that version to the provinces for their adoption.

If the ACC decides to do that, “my sense is that the time is far too short before our General Convention for us to have a thorough discussion of it as a church and I’m therefore going to strongly discourage any move to bring it to General Convention,” Jefferts Schori told the Executive Council. “I just think it’s inappropriate to make a decision that weighty” that quickly, she added.

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This week, a judge in Fairfax County, Va., will hear the last round of arguments in a church property case that has drawn national attention. As a member of Truro Church, one of the parishes being sued by The Episcopal Church and Diocese of Virginia, I’d like to reflect on how we got to this point and what we could be doing with the money that has been spent on legal fees.

This journey started two years ago, when ten congregations, formerly part of the Diocese, voted to sever our ties with The Episcopal Church and affiliate with the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a new denomination affiliated with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, thereby remaining with the worldwide Anglican Communion. These congregations are now part of the Anglican District of Virginia, which has grown to include 23 Virginia congregations in its short history.

We made that decision soberly and prayerfully, based on actions of The Episcopal Church to walk away from what we see as the basic tenets of the Christian faith. Our decision was not about issues of lifestyle or minor differences of opinion. We simply could not continue to be led by a church body that would not affirm the authority of Scripture.

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IT’S a very long way from the cloisters of Cambridge to the Iraqi city of Mosul, where at least a dozen Christians have been killed this month, and hundreds of Christian families have fled, in that country’s latest sectarian mayhem.

But Rowan Williams, head of the 80m-strong Anglican Communion, and Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, were doing their gallant best to minimise the distance as they presided, this week, over a new effort by the world’s leading Muslim and Christian scholars to understand each other. The threat facing Iraqi Christians had “undermined a centuries-old tradition of local Muslims protecting and nourishing the Christian community”, the two clerics carefully opined, as they pledged to create links between Western academia and Muslim universities, like Egypt’s 400,000-strong al-Azhar campus, a place which had already been awarding degrees for two centuries when Cambridge was founded in 1209.

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* WHEREAS Church of the Atonement, Carnegie, PA being founded in 1884, and a part of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh and The Episcopal Church (USA) for the purpose of maintaining and teaching the historic faith and order of the Christian Church within the Anglican tradition; and
* WHEREAS The Episcopal Church (USA) has failed to discipline it’s bishops and other clergy who have taught in a manner grievously contradicting the historic faith and order of the Christian Church ; and
* WHEREAS The Episcopal Church (USA) has brought innovations in to the teaching of the Church, ignoring the goodly council of the Primates of the Anglican Communion; and
* WHEREAS The Episcopal Church (USA) has deposed the duly elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh in violation of the clear reading of the Constitution and Canons of the The Episcopal Church (USA); and
* WHEREAS as The Episcopal Church (USA) has failed to resolve disputes in a Christian manner with dioceses and congregations who hold to the historic faith and order of the Christian Church; and
* WHEREAS as The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh has changed its Constitution and Canons in accordance with the Constitutions and Canons of the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Canons and Constitution of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh in a manner to accede to a province of the Anglican Communion other than The Episcopal Church (USA),

* BE IT RESOLVED that we, the vestry and wardens of the Parish of the Church of the Atonement deplore the situation which has resulted in the secession of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh from The Episcopal Church (USA). We continue to hope and pray that the divisions within the Diocese and within the Episcopal Church (USA) may be resolved without further litigation, wasting the resources committed in good faith to Christ and his church. We reluctantly but unanimously support the resolution adopted at the Diocesan Convention on October 4, 2008 and will continue to operate as a faithful parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh within the Anglican Communion.
* BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we encourage the leadership of The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh to move forward with full resolve in the formation of a North American Anglican Province committed to the faith and order of historic Christianity, keeping in mind the desire and hope that The Episcopal Church (USA) return to the historic faith and order of the Church.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

–Albert Camus

The banks aren’t lending. And despite what you have heard, they probably won’t start just yet….

Sure, there are some positive signs that the credit market is opening up a bit: Libor rates, the price at which banks lend to each other, have crept down in recent days, greasing the wheels of capitalism, or at least what’s left of it. Some banks, like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, actually made loans to banks in Europe on Friday. These are all important steps on the way to a recovery.

But make no mistake, the banks are doing the opposite of what Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, sought when he virtually demanded that they accept the taxpayers’ money: They are hoarding it. It’s a bit like the government’s sending out tax rebate checks and the consumers’ not immediately running out and spending them.

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Buoyed by easy credit and inflated property prices, the British public spent itself into debt, a total of $2.49 trillion of it. The average British household now owes $102,000, including mortgages. One-third of consumer debt in all of Europe is held by people in Britain, said Chris Tapp, director of Credit Action, which counsels people about how to handle debt.

Audrey Hurren, 65, a retired secretary who was waiting for the subway in central London the other day, said that it had all been too much.

“I think it wouldn’t do any harm at all for some of the younger generation to be less greedy,” she said. “It’s not a very nice thing to say, but maybe they could behave a little more sensibly.”

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Two small parishes in the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia have quit the denomination because of objections to gay ordination and have joined a like-minded group of dissident churches based in Northern Virginia.

The break away Anglican District of Virginia announced Friday that Christ Church in Emporia and Grace Church in Purdy had become members. The district now includes 23 parishes that have cut ties with the Episcopal Church.

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The Archdiocese of New Orleans has formally closed seven historic Catholic parishes as a painful downsizing of the regional church in the wake of Hurricane Katrina nears completion.

Archbishop Alfred Hughes signed the relevant decrees; formal notifications were to be distributed in letters hand-delivered to affected rectories on Friday (Oct. 17) afternoon, archdiocesan spokeswoman Sarah Comiskey said.

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