Last night a further 40 Anglicans in Sevenoaks were received into the Catholic Church, joining groups who had already converted earlier in the week in Oxford, London and Tunbridge Wells.
James Bradley, formerly the assistant curate at St John’s the Baptist Anglican church in Sevenoaks, said: “I’m very excited. It has been the culmination of a lot of prayer and it is a wonderful opportunity for all of us.”
Interesting how this story, like so many others, hammers away on the womanpriest issue , and puts all other issues under the heading of “other liberal developments” without naming them. How about the Episcopal Church making a man in a gay “marriage” one of its bishops.
In fact, I have heard far more people who are very upset about trends in the Episcopal-Anglican church more upset at that development than anything else. They feel it is both a trashing of traditional Christian morality and the morality taught in Scripture and thus far more serious than ordaining women to various positions.
Perhaps you haven’t seen the chronology as significant, #1. Once women were ordained, they began to support in large numbers the ordination of homosexual persons, practising or non- . Thus they were the breach in the Tradition through which the torrents of innovation could begin to course, and course they will. The trashing of traditional Christian morality was facilitated by the ordaining of women – regardless of whether you personally know women who are ‘ordained’ and are supporters of traditional morality.
Re #1
DeaconJohn,
I second TACit’s comment. W/O was the camel’s nose under the tent flap. Once you let the camel in you were going to be sleeping with all of its fleas. Or to put it in perhaps less analogical terms, once you decide you can reject immemorial and universally accepted church doctrine on one topic, you can hardly complain when people start throwing out whatever other doctrines they don’t like.
W/O was the moment that doctrinal orthodoxy became optional in TEC/ECUSA. Everything that has followed was highly predictable.
In ICXC
John
I don’t know to what extent we “let the camel in” as the thing was shoved into the tent during our “study/listening process” on WO. That tactic proved so successful for those advocating WO that the Gay lobby took note and successfully used the tactic for their purposes. The tactic seems particularly prone to success where there are no strong gatekeepers who will say NO,,,,and let their NO really mean NO.
A similar tactic is used all the time in the secular world and even has its own descriptive terminology, “The Overton Window Effect”.
I agree–WO was the camel’s nose–as above comments point out. But I wanted to make two points. First, that more people seemed upset about the Gay marriage issue than the WO and thus the Gay marriage issue became the straw that broke many a camel’s back.
And second, how the media so frequently doesn’t want to directly name the “liberal” issues that become the final catalyst sending people running to the doors. Methinks they are afraid of waking up a few more sleeping Christians who haven’t been noticing the moral downward spiral many churches have been in.
the “liberal” issues that so
Last line out of context–please ignore.