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After the Vatican invited Anglicans to return to the Catholic fold, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, went to Rome. He met the Pope and his cardinals, and the holy father will reciprocate next year in Canterbury.

The invitation allows Anglicans to retain their distinctive customs, but the unavoidable conclusion is that millions of Anglicans would, for the first time in 470 years, kneel and accept the Pope as boss. I expect the meetings in Rome have begun an inexorable reabsorption of the Anglican Church into the world’s oldest institution. The church created by the charismatic King Henry VIII has found its current archbishop, an undertaker, appearing to see his mission as an orderly burial.

Our children will barely distinguish an Anglican from a Catholic church and their children will be baptised in merged congregations. In the absence of a unifying vision, and dynamic global leadership, we must assume the Anglican idea is fast reaching its use-by date.

It has, however, been a great innings, and the Pope’s move is less hostile takeover than reverse takeover. Over the past half millennium, Anglicanism has transformed Catholicism and the world. The Anglican Church was never a truly Protestant church, but a halfway house between Luther and Rome. It leaned Protestant more by accident than design – to keep the peace, it became the original broad church.

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The cardinal, however, said in a statement sent to ZENIT on Thursday that his words were taken out of context. The cardinal said he was referencing the Bible, specifically St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 1:26-27, which says (in part), “Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity.”

“This is what the Word of God says, it isn’t what I said,” Cardinal Lozano Barragán affirmed. “Now, I have never said that a particular homosexual cannot be saved, because he can be saved.”

“Many times one is not a homosexual through one’s own fault; it all depends on one’s education and environment,” the prelate clarified.

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”¢ Scriptural Authority. This is such a comprehensive dimension of our present crisis in the church that one hardly knows where to begin. But one can hardly do better than St. Ambrose’s statement that “the whole of Holy Scripture be a feast for the soul.” How seldom one hears upon us who are bishops in Tec such glowing statements about the Bible. 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. Indeed, as J.V. Langmead-Casserly once put it, “We have developed a method of studying the Word of God from which a Word of God never comes.” Too often supposed conundrums or difficulties are brought up, seemingly in order to detract from traditional understandings, never considering the damage to the faithful’s trust in God and his Word. Ridiculous arguments such as shellfish and mixed fabrics are dragged out (long reconciled by the Fathers of the Church, as well as the Anglican Reformers) in order to confuse the ill-taught or the untutored in theology. And those who are intellectually sophisticated, schooled in many academic disciplines, but dreadfully untaught in the Bible and theology, are, through little fault of their own, except for naively trusting generations of slothful priests and bishops, are led astray. We must be willing to speak out against this.

—South Carolina Bishop Mark Lawrence in his special clergy day address earlier this year

The Rev. Marcus Kaiser will be ordained a priest on Saturday, December 5 at a service beginning at 11 a.m. at Holy Comforter, Sumter, the wonderful parish where I served my curacy.

No, this isn’t a joke; it’s a new scene for American Christianity: Young guys in their 20s and 30s forming Christian communities in pubs, concert halls, cafes and art galleries.

In West Town, that guy is Mark Bergin, 29, who leads prayer meetings wearing a cap embroidered with the Guinness logo. The self-described “hot-dog-eating, baseball-loving, tool-owning missionary” is part of the church planting movement in the United States — an effort to start thousands of churches a year that reach people in more culturally relevant ways.

When he moved from Seattle a few months ago to start a church on Chicago’s West Side, he met more than 50 potential churchgoers by visiting neighborhood coffee houses and bars, including the Chipp Inn across from his house.

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In the Episcopal Church, the late Bill Gordon is probably best known as the church’s youngest bishop.

In Alaska, he’s best known as a pilot.

The second plane of Gordon’s, aka “The Flying Bishop,” is being hung for display next week in the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in downtown Fairbanks.

The yellow Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser with brown trim has a 35 1/2-foot wingspan and room for a pilot and two passengers.

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John Lipscomb, the married, 59-year-old former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southwest Florida, was ordained a Catholic priest Wednesday.

The morning after, he expressed joy and a sense of relief. He’s at peace, spiritually. He’s just a priest now. He’s not the boss.

“The part of the job that never fit was sitting in judgment of other people’s lives,” he said. “I’m at a point in my life where I want to do the things God called me to do, and not have to make the kinds of decisions that are impossible to make anyway.”

“We’re happy that John has found his place,” said Jim DeLa, the Episcopal Diocese’s director of communications. “If this is it for him, God bless him.”

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The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles elected the first woman bishop in its 114-year history today but had yet to decide whether to select an openly gay priest for a second bishop opening.

Clergy and lay leaders, meeting in Riverside for their annual convention, chose the Rev. Canon Diane M. Jardine Bruce, a local favorite from Orange County known for her financial expertise and ability to build up congregations.

Bruce, rector of St. Clement’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in San Clemente, edged out five other candidates, including two openly gay priests, for the first “suffragan” bishop post. Suffragan bishops assist a diocese’s primary bishop.

“All my life I have known that I have been called to serve God in Christ in God’s church,” Bruce wrote in her biography on the diocese’s website.

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Check it out–fascinating to ponder.

The link is here.

U.S. job losses in November posted the smallest drop since the start of the recession and the unemployment rate unexpectedly declined, a sign the labor market is finally healing as the economy recovers.

Nonfarm payrolls fell by just 11,000 last month, slowing down from a downwardly revised 111,000 drop seen in October, as the recovery encouraged some companies to retain workers, the Labor Department said Friday.

It was the best showing since December 2007, when the recession began and payrolls had risen by 120,000. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected a payroll decrease of 125,000.

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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said any tax on financial transactions would have to be designed to ensure taxpayers don’t ultimately bear the burden, criteria he said no current plan meets.

“I have not seen the version of that that I think works,” Geithner said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “Otherwise people would have done this a long time ago.”

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