In the space of a week, Mary Glasspool has gone from being an obscure priest in Baltimore to the emblem of a growing international tempest over gay bishops in the Episcopal Church.

The lesbian priest with salt-and-pepper hair — one of two newly elected suffragan, or assistant, bishops in Los Angeles — has become a potent symbol of hope for gays in the national church but a portent of doom for traditionalists worried about their denomination unraveling.

Ask Glasspool, 55, about her central role in the turbulence that has drawn the disapproving eye of the archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, and she offers a lament: The struggle for gay rights in the church has never been her primary mission, she says, even as she speaks proudly of her 22-year relationship with her partner, social worker Becki Sander.

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Find them here and please join me in praying for the election.

Update: here is the proposed schedule

Reconvening for the Election of the 8th Bishop of Upper South Carolina
December 12, 2009
Averyt Hall, Trinity Center for Mission and Ministry
Host ”“ Trinity Cathedral, Columbia
9:00 am Registration
10:00 am

Mission and Ministry ”“ Session I
Check in for registered delegates closes for the 1st ballot
The Holy Eucharist
The First Ballot
Check in for registered delegates reopens after the 1st ballot is closed.
Continuing prayers, meditations, hymn singing
Check in for registered delegates closes for the 2nd ballot
Results of the 1st Ballot announced
The Second Ballot
Check in for registered delegates reopens after the 2nd ballot is closed.
Continuing prayers, meditations, hymn singing

The process continues until there is an election.
12:30 pm Lunch
The Next Ballot
Check in for registered delegates reopens after the next ballot is closed.
Continuing prayers, meditations, hymn sing

The process continues until there is an election.
The Song of Praise
Concluding Prayers
The Blessing
The Dismissal
All delegates proceed to check-in tables to sign the testimonial of election.

From here:

Statement of the Holy See

Mr. Moderator,

Thank you for convening this panel discussion and for providing the opportunity to hear some very serious concerns raised this afternoon. My comments are more in the form of a statement rather than a question.

As stated during the debate of the General Assembly last year, the Holy See continues to oppose all grave violations of human rights against homosexual persons, such as the use of the death penalty, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. The Holy See also opposes all forms of violence and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons, including discriminatory penal legislation which undermines the inherent dignity of the human person.

As raised by some of the panelists today, the murder and abuse of homosexual persons are to be confronted on all levels, especially when such violence is perpetrated by the State. While the Holy See’s position on the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity remains well known, we continue to call on all States and individuals to respect the rights of all persons and to work to promote their inherent dignity and worth.

Thank you, Mr. Moderator.

The president of the U.S. bishops’ conference is calling the Senate’s move to table an amendment that would prevent federal money from funding abortion “a serious blow” to health care reform.

Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago, said this today after the Senate voted 54-45 on Monday to kill the Nelson-Hatch-Casey Amendment proposed by senators Ben Nelson, Orrin Hatch and Robert Casey.

A similar measure was passed in the House of Representatives, paving the way for the passage there of the “Affordable Health Care for America Act.”

“The Senate is ignoring the promise made by President Obama and the will of the American people in failing to incorporate longstanding prohibitions on federal funding for abortion and plans that include abortion,” Cardinal George said.

“While we deplore the Senate’s refusal to adopt the Nelson-Hatch-Casey amendment, we remain hopeful that the protections overwhelmingly passed by the House will be incorporated into needed reform legislation,” he added. “Failure to exclude abortion funding will turn allies into adversaries and require us and others to oppose this bill because it abandons both principle and precedent.”

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About 400 Episcopal clergy and lay delegates will come to Columbia on Saturday to elect a bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina.

The election to find a successor to retiring Bishop Dorsey F. Henderson Jr. comes at a time when the U.S. church and the worldwide Anglican Communion are roiled in controversy over the role of gay and lesbian clergy.

Six candidates are on the ballot, including the dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Columbia, the Very Rev. Philip C. Linder. He had removed his name from consideration, shortly before nine candidates were winnowed to five, but agreed to resubmit it after a petition drive.

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Jenny Sanford made it clear Friday: She isn’t standing by her man.

Stung by a cheating husband, South Carolina’s first lady filed for divorce on grounds of adultery because of Gov. Mark Sanford’s affair with his Argentine mistress.

Friends, political observers and media experts said the move separates Jenny Sanford, a former Wall Street vice president, from a string of other jilted political wives because she opted to dissolve a 20-year marriage.

“She impeached him when the Legislature wouldn’t,” veteran University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said of the Sanford scandal.

“In the future you will have people asking whether the wronged spouses will follow the Hillary Clinton example, or the Jenny Sanford example.”

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So where does the Anglican Communion go from here? The Archbishop of Canterbury’s relatively mild reaction to Mary Glasspool’s election is a recognition that this appointment could still be halted if the bishops and dioceses of The Episcopal Church fail to confirm her election. However, it remains a highly unlikely prospect.

The problem that the Archbishop of Canterbury faces is that the Anglican Communion will continue to fragment. The Covenant which he believes is a centre of unity around which the vast majority of provinces can coalesce is not even yet in its final form. Such is the polarisation of the Church of England, as a result of the Anglican Communion crisis, that there is now no guarantee that it can pass in the General Synod let alone in other more liberal western provinces.

It seems likely that any Anglican future worth having will be radically different from the current shape of things. The so-called instruments and international meetings will become largely a thing of the past, replaced by networks, regional conferences and some tangential relationships to the Canterbury primate. It is a fragmented and difficult future, but one preferable to a constant state of hysteria and schism.

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The word “evangelical,” as the bishop notes, is in danger of being lost to us because of its almost daily use in the media to denote fundamentalists and others on the Christian Right who insist on “born-again” experiences as the hallmark of the true believer. These Christians are typically identified with three issues above all others””abortion, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research””and vote Republican in overwhelming numbers.

The word is also used within the historic Protestant (mainline) denominations to identify parties within the church, usually in a political context with regard to hotly debated issues such as same-sex marriage. Rarely are the deeper theological issues addressed or even acknowledged. Part of the frustration of being evangelical in the Episcopal Church today is the near-impossibility of getting a discussion going about foundational issues””Christology, Scriptural interpretation, the doctrine of revelation, the divine agency. The last is the most important of all, as F. F. Bruce clearly outlines in the quotation above, which is taken from a 1989 interview with W. Ward Gasque, a professor at Regent College.

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