The Fort Worth diocese amended its constitution to shift allegiance from the Episcopal Church to the Anglican Communion, its parent body. The measure passed by a vote of 72 to 19 among the clergy and 102 to 25 among the laity, at the diocese’s 26th annual convention at St. Vincent’s Cathedral in Bedford, Tex.
The diocese was welcomed Saturday into the Province of the Southern Cone, based in Argentina, but the realignment is expected to be temporary while the diocese works to establish a conservative province of the Anglican Communion in the United States, diocese leaders said.
Bishop Jack L. Iker laid blame for the split on what he described as “a church that is increasingly unfaithful and disobedient to the word of God, a church that has caused division and dissension both at home and abroad, a church that has torn the fabric of the communion at its deepest level, a church that acts more and more like a rebellious protestant sect and less and less like an integral part of the one holy catholic and apostolic church. It is time to say enough is enough.”
I’m very surprised at how fair the article is. The first five paragraphs are really quite sympathetic to the orthodox. Huh!
This is a fair article. Not perfect (the lede refers to “a dispute that involves the ordination of an openly gay bishop”), but fair.
Looks to me as though, over the past several months, reporters have become warier of ECUSA spin. Newspaper coverage of Pittsburgh’s split from ECUSA was generally balanced and acknowledged that the dispute runs deeper than gay bishops. Spin wears thin.
This bit at the end struck me:
Two questions come to mind.
(1) Do the leaders of the loyalist groups in the departing dioceses get “talking points” memos from 815? This is KJS almost verbatim — in fact it may be a perfect quote down to each word and punctuation mark. Or is it that the leaders know who will be buttering their bread in the future and so quote her as a proof of loyalty?
(2) Does anyone who says this — even KJS — really believe the inner logic of this claim? How can anyone assert with a straight face that the many generations of Episcopalian donors before 1950 would, if only they could be consulted now, be delighted by Schiori’s commitment to gay marriage and her attacks on the creeds, and deeply distressed by Iker’s commitment to traditional apostolic teaching? Does anyone with a modicrum of sense doubt that the past generations would line up behind Iker with a margin of 95-5 or better?
Alas, it is the modicum of sense that is missing. Itching ears draw teachers of one’s desires as St Paul clearly observed in Corinth. Our problems are not new nor anymore culturally-responsive than those of the Corinthians who attempted to circumvent the mores of the Church of God. “To corinthianize” was a well known Greek expression; we’ve merely updated the verb “to ecusaize” or “to TECize”. The events involved are the same. I am willing to bet the farm that neither the faithful of the past in America nor St Paul would tolerate it. In fact, I suspect their clarity in rejection of such false teaching would bear all the nuance of the “slip of the circumcision knife” of St Paul at its most kind.