In July of this year, the 76th General Convention adopted resolution C056, “Liturgies for Blessings.” It allows that “bishops, particularly those in dioceses within civil jurisdictions where same-gender marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships are legal, may provide generous pastoral response to meet the needs of members of this church.”
Your bishops understand this to mean for us here in the Diocese of Massachusetts that the clergy of this diocese may, at their discretion, solemnize marriages for all eligible couples, beginning Advent I. Solemnization, in accordance with Massachusetts law, includes hearing the declaration of consent, pronouncing the marriage and signing the marriage certificate. This provision for generous pastoral response is an allowance and not a requirement; any member of the clergy may decline to solemnize any marriage.
While gender-specific language remains unchanged in the canons and The Book of Common Prayer, our provision of generous pastoral response means that same-gender couples can be married in our diocese. We request that our clergy follow as they ordinarily would the other canonical requirements for marriage and remarriage. And, because The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage in The Book of Common Prayer may not be used for marriages of same-gender couples, we ask that our priests seek out liturgical resources being developed and collected around the church. We also commend to you the October 2008 resource created by our New England dioceses, “Pastoral Resources for Province I Episcopal Clergy Ministering to Same-Gender Couples,” available at www.province1.org.
We have not arrived at this place in our common life easily or quickly. We have not done it alone. This decision comes after a long process of listening, prayer and discernment leading up to and continuing after General Convention’s action this past summer.
A direct violation of I.18.2b (2006) of the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church. Not that [b]that[/b] makes a difference to anybody. I’m just saying.
Bruce Robison
#1. Correct. General Convention is now operating above/beyond its own legal parameters. It gave permission (apparently, depending on whether one views resolutions as binding–people take turns on that) for Bishops to do what +Shaw has declared he is doing: using BCP services for same-sex couples. On the floor of convention +Frey said the resolution would be allowing a violation of BCP and BCP is constitutional. He was politely ignored.
Amazing how much mileage +Shaw & co. (+KJS) get out of their disinformation strategy about the Church’s evolving understanding of marraige.
By what authority does he say that marriage is not the union of one man and one woman, but that the Church should give its blesing to relationships of any two people exhibiting “fidelity, monogamy, mutual affection and respect”? It seems if you turn your back on the authority for one, you’ve undermined your argument for the rest of the package.
Pax Christi,
Chuck Bradshaw, Hulls Cove, Maine
Bp Scruton of W Mass will not allow same-sex blessings, and certainly not with a pronoun-adjusted BCP service. However, when GC does make the changes needed to canonically permit same-sex “marriage,” he will permit such ceremonies. He gives more weight to the canons than he does to Scripture, sad to say.
Moratoria? What moratoria?
My sense of the phrase “generous pastoral response” in the General Convention resolution–which I voted against–was that it was intended by its drafters to allow bishops to authorize, in dioceses in states where same-sex civil marriage is on the books, something like what Bishop Shaw was authorizing up to this point: actions conducted more or less within the conceptual frame of the BCP office for the Blessing of a Civil Marriage. A good deal was made in Anaheim of the point that what the resolution [i]didn’t[/] do was effect a change in the marriage canon. (I’m pretty sure a change of the marriage canon would in fact have had majority support in the HoD, but I think the feeling was that the bishops weren’t ready, um, “yet,” to go that far.)
The expressed understanding was that there would be in this triennium the process of the collection of existing and composition of new liturgical resources for SSB’s and, again, something like the Blessing of Civil Marriages in Massachusetts and other such states, but that, specifically, no canonical changes would be necessary, because clergy of the Episcopal Church would not be “solemnizing same-sex marriages.”
Bruce Robison
Shhh! Don’t tell the Archbishop of Canterbury!
How many times can you sing Blowin’ in the Windsor Process’ ear?
About as many premature Lambeth invitations as the ABC sent.
Has the Bishop renounced his ministry in this church by this canonical illegality?
Driver8, assuming that you’re part of TEC, perhaps you might convince some clergy and laity to bring a presentment against +Shaw for violating the canons. Not that it would do any good, since TEC seems hell-bent on violating them as well.
TEC is at the end of the rope, I’d say. Left hanging, TEC isn’t attracting the living. Intrinsically disordered lifestyle is against the Gospel. To mock Holy Matrimony is against the Gospel. And the evidence is? TEC is not attracting the living.
#10 Sadly where the law makers and the judges are the same people, justice is distributed or denied at their whim. However as the Bishop is incontrovertibly rejecting the discipline of this church then one can surely expect him not to be tried but simply to be “renounced”. Indeed this very communication can be taken as his letter of renunciation.
OK, now what Neff Powell?
You said that giving “generous pastoral responses” wouldn’t lead to this. You gave us this mess because you voted to open the door to your fellow bishops to run AMOK.