Resolution D025 was passed on July 14 by the 76th General Convention meeting in Anaheim, California. In addition to underscoring the Episcopal Church’s support of and participation in the Anglican Communion, the resolution affirms “that God has called and may call” gay and lesbian people “to any ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church.”
The presiding officers emphasized that D025 has “not repealed” Resolution B033 that was passed by the 75th General Convention in 2006. B033 urged restraint in consenting to the consecration of bishops whose “manner of life” might present challenges for the rest of the Anglican Communion. That challenge was widely understood to refer to gay bishops in partnered unions. The full text of the letter to Williams is available here.
In a separate letter, Jefferts Schori wrote to the primates of the Anglican Communion — including a copy of the letter to Williams — acknowledging that “with so much misinformation circulating through the press and other sources, it is crucial to me that I provide the Archbishop and all of you with accurate information.” Thirteen primates were present in Anaheim, the largest number ever to attend a General Convention.
This is deeply disingenuous. D025 does not repeal B033. It supersedes it. In both Houses many folks (both conservative and progressive) argued this resolution superseded B033. In an interview published just today Bishop Robinson said he considered that a partnered gay bishop may be elected within a year. Honesty really is essential, simply as a christian virtue, and it is hard to see this letter as anything other than an attempt at misdirection.
This reads sort of like a letter from a cheating spouse, explaining the “context” for the infidelity.
Rich. Duplicitous. Dishonest.
Darin+
#1 – I agree – this is simply dishonest. In her own words:
NPR June 29, 2006
D025 addressed the same subject matter as B033 and omitted any obligation for restraint. There is no longer any “pause.” Mainstream understanding of D025 as a repudiation or superseding of B033 is correct.
🙄
So, if I read this right, Schori and Anderson are saying the moratoria of B033 are still in place, but if a diocese decides to consecrate a partnered homosexual as bishop, that’s consistent with said moratorium?
When did we fall through this looking glass?
No what she is saying is that D025 is not a legislative repeal of B033. This is true. However what she doesn’t say is it seems most who voted consider it to have superseded B033. So that the General Convention is no longer requesting “gracious restraint” upon consent to partnered gay bishops.
Given 5 or 6 bishops signed the Anaheim Statement who voted for D025 we can guess than in around 5 dioceses the bishop will instruct his Standing Committee that the request for restraint remains the position of the General Convention. Of course the Standing Committees are at liberty to disagree.
If Bishop Robinson is right – and I think he is close to the heartbeart of Integrity – we should expect to see Standing Committees and Bishops will have the opportunity to make clear their interpretations of D025 in fairly short order. The PBs letter will then be irrelevant.
The depth of the PB’s duplicity is truly astounding. The language of D025 speaks for itself.
Taken together, D025 and the “Anaheim Statement” do, I think, accurately describe the current position of TEC: the majority of the church considers openly gay, partnered homosexual people eligible to be bishops. Sooner or later, such a person will most likely be elected as a bishop. When that happens, some bishops and standing committees will consider themselves bound by B033 and the Windsor moratoria to deny consent; others, most likely the majority, will not.
Is that in any way not a true picture of where we are right now?
Ross, if language means anything, and I doubt that for TEC, a moratorium means that we will not do something. A statement that you will not do something until you do it is not a moratorium.
I think your statement is correct. And of course B033 was never really a moratorium. It was a statement designed to fool those who wanted to be fooled.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Ambassador presented the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, with a fourteen-part message ending Japanese-American negotiations. He read it and replied: ‘In all my fifty years of public service,’ he told the astonished diplomats, ‘I have never seen such a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehood and distortion.’ That applies to TEC
The PB is also not a Primate. Another lie.
This was utterly predictable … as is the ABC’s response — “the TEC is Windsor compliant. I have their total assurance that B033 is still in place.”
It will be dressed up of course .. but that is what it will say.
Jeffersonian (#4),
[blockquote]
So, if I read this right, Schori and Anderson are saying the moratoria of B033 are still in place, but if a diocese decides to consecrate a partnered homosexual as bishop, that’s consistent with said moratorium?
[/blockquote]
The restraint of B033 (such as our moratorium has been since 2006) is meant to operate mainly during the consent process. So a diocesan election will not break that restraint unless it gains consent.
Because I see the restraint of B033 (urged by both Bishop Griswold and Bishop Jefferts Schori at the end of GC 2006) as something done at the request of Archbishop Williams, I’m inclined to think it likely to hold at least until 2015, the end of the current PB term.
The fact that Matt Kennedy (in a Stand Firm video), prior to the HoB session on C056, reported rumors that C of E folk were being consulted in regard to the revision of C056 by the ad hoc group of bishops reinforces my guess about this.
#8 Br. Michael, I would have to agree that B033 was never really a moratorium. To the extent that it represented the collective mind of TEC in 2006, at best it said that we would think twice before consenting to the election of an openly gay bishop. It would have been more truthful to say that we were divided on the issue; some would vote for consent and some would not, and in 2006 it was less clear where the majority lay. Now it seems clear enough.
But on the other hand, if language means anything, then a moratorium means a delay. I’ve said before that this was the fatal flaw in the Windsor Report: in an effort to come up with something that a critical mass of both reappraisers and reasserters could go along with, it pitched its message to reappraisers as requesting a temporary delay; just hold off a little while until the rest of the Communion catches up. But to reasserters, it was understood that the “until some new consensus emerges” clause meant never, so what was asked was not a delay but a permanent cessation. But of course the reappraisers’ patience with delay was bound to run out eventually, and when it came down to it the reasserters could not be in communion with people saying, “We have a different epistemology and hermeneutics than you do, and as a result we firmly believe that this is right, but for your sake we’re not putting it into practice,” even if the ComLibs had carried the day and the Windsor “moratoria” were being fully observed. So the Windsor Report was bound to fail by its own internal contradictions, and that indeed is what has happened.
I don’t think that B033 was intentionally created to be duplicitous. I think it was an unfortunate attempt to find a compromise statement that two deeply divided factions each hated little enough that they could agree to it without quite choking, when a plain statement of division would have been more honest. When you take the average of a bipolar distribution, then the mean is in that halfway place that virtually nobody actually occupies. That’s where B033 was, and the “duplicity” was in suggesting that it represented some kind of consensus position rather than a hypothetical point in the gulf between two sides.
In the (I believe) unfortunate presumption that we had to have a compromise statement to give to the Communion, GC06 contorted itself enough to produce B033. It was, I don’t doubt, the best compromise statement that we were capable of giving at that time. For political reasons it was both offered and accepted as representing common ground within TEC, and that was neither accurate nor honest.
In this sense, D025 is a better, more accurate, more truthful statement, especially in conjunction with the Anaheim document. It states that we are not of one mind. The Windsor requests will still be adhered to by those who were likely to adhere to them in the first place, and it’s now pretty clear who those people are. Among other things, they are a minority. The majority will do as it feels it must.
And the Instruments of the Communion will now do what they feel they must… whatever that turns out to be.
BS, of course B033 was meant to be duplicitous. Everything that TEC says is a tissue of lies. The only thing worse are the people who believe them, or defend them.