THE Rt Revd Bob Duncan, the former Bishop of Pittsburgh in the Episcopal Church in the United States, deposed from holy orders by the Presiding Bishop last month for “abandoning communion” after his diocese realigned itself with the Province of the Southern Cone, has warned that English traditionalists could find themselves similarly threatened……
At a press conference in London last Friday, Bishop Duncan said that the Episcopal Church in the US had treated him “unjustly and uncanÂonÂically”. He had been deposed, two weeks after his diocese’s vote to leave the Episcopal Church, under a canon designed to remove those who had become RCs or PresÂbyterians or who had lost their faith. But he expected to be re-elected by the diocese at a Convention on 7 November. “I will have been both the 7th Bishop of Pittsburgh and the 8th Bishop of Pittsburgh, and I didn’t die in between.”
There is one very basic mistake in this article. Bishop Duncan was of course “deposed” by The Episcopal Church [b]before[/b] the diocese realigned.
How can they not have the chronology of his deposition for abandonment of communion and the [i]subsequent[/i] vote by the Pittsburgh diocesan convention to amend their diocesan constitution correct?
Their error makes Bishop Duncan’s claim that his deposition was unjust and uncanonical sound like so much empty pleading, when the correct chronology makes patently obvious the truth of his claim.
Was this intentional or was it simply a matter of indolence on the part of the writer?
Somehow, I don’t think that Bishop Duncan cares about what Schori and her lapdog think, say, or do. Neither do the rest of us. His “deposition” isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
Cennydd: You are partially right, but the Court of Common Pleas and the court of public opinion may care.
… not what KJS thinks, but the chronology.
I nominate Bp. Duncan to be an honorary “Texan”. He’s definitely got the right stuff!!!
I didn’t see anyplace on the Church Times website for comments or ‘contact us’ to let them know of their error in the timeline. If anyone is a subscriber, perhaps they can send off a ‘letter to the editor’ asking for a correction?
In His Peace
Jim E. <><
That this story gets its facts so blatantly wrong in the lead says the rest of the story is similarly flawed. Good journalists write their story in the first two-three paragraphs in case an editor decides to overwork his or her blue pencil down to the nub.
I would say that such an obvious mangling of facts does not reflect well on the Church Times’ attempts to report on the situation in CoE or the wider Anglican Communion with regards to the growing theological and ecclesiastical fault lines inside Anglicanism.
Hi LibraryJim. I wrote the Church Times this morning. You have to do some hunting but there is a CONTACT US link at the very bottom of the page. I sent my letter to Helen Saxbee, the news editor.
Here’s what I wrote:
I’d like to refocus our attention on a different aspect of this article, which the author has highlighted, i.e., that what happened in the US could also happen in the UK. Now granted, the conservative wing of the C of E is immensely larger and more powerful than the conservative wing of TEC, but the way the General Synod voted in July over the matter of removing all real protection for opponents of ordination of women to the episcopate does make Bishop Duncan’s warning seem pertinent to me.
There are many of us who have served as lay or ordained leaders in liberal dioceses who can testify to the sad irony that +Bob Duncan the Lion-Hearted is decrying, i.e., that liberals, once they have consolidated power in their own hands, often turn very illiberal and intolerant indeed.
David Handy+