Monday, the diocese informed the Groton church it had appointed a new “priest-in-charge” of Bishop Seabury, which recently ended its 132-year history with the Episcopal Church over differences in biblical interpretation.
“Our basic concern here is to continue to provide the services of a priest for the parish,” said Bishop Suffragan James E. Curry, who sent an open letter to the parishioners of Bishop Seabury announcing the appointment of the Rev. David Cannon, a retired priest from Preston.
Cannon, who served as vicar of St. James Church in Preston from 1964 to 2000, is likely to find it difficult to minister to his new flock ”” at least for the foreseeable future.
Gauss ”” who retired as rector of Bishop Seabury on Dec. 1, according to Curry ”” is still very much in charge there and said Monday that the church will continue on as it has been, regardless of Cannon’s appointment.
“We’re just going to go on,” Gauss said. “When the bishop earlier in the year fired the vestry, we then met and re-elected the vestry. And I have a civil contract with the parish.”
I know this parish pretty well and the climate in that Diocese well before 2003. The good rector and his parish were generally treated as oddballs but tolerated, sometimes with humor, sometimes without. But there were no problems.
The present state is a reflection on what has happened since 2003 and the true cost of pushing the outer limit of another’s conscience. We see that 2003 really was the tipping point.
All of these CT parishes had been able to survive in quasi Episcopal exile until then without being seen as something much to worry about. But then came a new and largely political bishop with one hell of an agenda to appease and control. Very little theology, I assure you. Or rather, like many Episcopalian Bishops, his politics was his theology with a good bit of corporate management theory thrown in. Not that he is particularly good at it, as we saw in the fallout.
The real and final shame was how the charges against him were handled at 815 and show 815’s complicity which should have been writing on the wall to the onlookers then as to what is happening now.
In any case, now we see the true nature of this Diocese’s leadership and the hate-filled aggression that comes from this single issue from the liberal end. It always comes back to the bad energy that under-girds this one issue.
At the very least, it raises the question of what it is about this sex matter that unleashes such liberal fury. I know this “irrational anger” card is usually played against conservatives, but time and time again we see it really is a liberal issue of control, intolerance, and yes, hatred.
One thing I know for sure is that the infusion of a gay subculture in the Episcopal Church over many years has created a drift from liberal politics in general to a kind of gorilla warfare. I wonder what it is about this one issue out of a host of others.