Eideard

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The Episcopal Church consecrated its first openly lesbian bishop Saturday in the face of objections from some conservative Anglicans.

Mary Glasspool is the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church since Gene Robinson took office in New Hampshire in 2004. Episcopalians instituted a temporary ban on gay bishops after Robinson’s ordination but revoked that ban last summer…

Bishop Jon Bruno of Los Angeles called Glasspool, an ordained priest for 28 years, a “highly qualified and experienced” cleric. “She’s not afraid of conflict and is a reconciler,” Bruno said, according to the Episcopal Church website. He added that Glasspool and her partner of 19 years, Becki Sander, are an example of living service and ministry…

Glasspool’s consecration drew opposition from Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who said Glasspool’s ordination would deepen rifts in the Church…

The Church of Ireland also issued a strong condemnation…”We wish to express sorrow that Mary Glasspool, a person who is living in a same-sex relationship, is to be consecrated,” the Church of Ireland said in a statement. “The elevation to senior church leadership of a person whose lifestyle is contrary to the will of God revealed in scripture is both wrong and disappointing.”

I’m not about to repeat more of such Stone Age stupidity. “Revealed” scripture means some dude – or a collection of like-minded dodos – wrote down what he figured he could hustle his True Believers with to get ‘em to fork over their worldly goods in return for promises of a happy life after death.

Science, reason, plain and simple good will refutes this crap.

Is there anybody out there?

The Anglican Church in Canada – once as powerful in the nation’s secular life as it was in its soul – may be only a generation away from extinction, says a just-published assessment of the church’s future.

The report…calls Canada a post-Christian society in which Anglicanism is declining faster than any other denomination. It says the church has been “moved to the far margins of public life…”

The report repeats, without qualification or question, the results of a controversial study presented to Anglican bishops five years ago that said that at the present rate of decline – a loss of 13,000 members per year – only one Anglican would be left in Canada by 2061…

Regular attendance is declining at all Canadian Christian churches, except for the Roman Catholic Church, whose small increase is attributed to immigration…

“The status quo is not an option,” the report says. With a preponderance of Anglicans being 60 or older, the church is “one generation away from extinction,” it says.

Do you think we could borrow some of whatever you’re doing up there – and spread it around the lower 48? It would a positive step forward to see the United States become a “post-Christian” society.

When the Vatican announced last week that it would welcome groups of traditionalist Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church, leaders of one Episcopal parish celebrated as if a ship had arrived to rescue them from a drifting ice floe.

“We’d been praying for this daily for two years,” said Bishop David L. Moyer, who leads the Church of the Good Shepherd, a parish in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia that is battling to keep its historic property. “When I heard the news I was speechless, then the joy came and the tears.”

This parish could be one of the first in the United States to convert en masse after the Vatican completes plans for a new structure to allow Anglicans to become Catholic while retaining many of their spiritual traditions, like the Book of Common Prayer and married priests.

They will share the ideology they have in common: misogyny, homophobia, fear of science and reality, no divorce, oppose birth control, choice…

The arrangement is tailor-made for an “Anglo-Catholic” parish like this one, which has strenuously opposed the Episcopal Church over decisions like allowing women and gay people to become priests and bishops. Mass here is celebrated in the “high church” style reminiscent of traditional Catholic churches, with incense, elaborate vestments and a choir that may sing in Latin…

The Church of the Good Shepherd has long been at loggerheads with the Episcopal Church, the American branch in the global Anglican Communion. This year, the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania sued to take over the church’s building, a magnificent stone replica of a 14th-century English country parish that was built in 1894. The church’s property is estimated by its accounting warden to be worth $7 million…

Bishop Moyer acknowledged that some of his parish’s 400 members would choose to leave rather than become Catholic. Some are former Catholics who may not want to go back. Others feel loyalty to the Episcopal Church, despite the conflict…

Bishop Moyer lives in a rectory on the church’s property. He said he hopes to resolve the church’s “legal quagmire” over the building before they decide to jump to the Catholic Church.

But, then, if you decide to waste a certain portion of your life studying Catholic history, you’ll learn priests used to be married – as were Popes – and the core of the conflicts that split apart the Catholic Church was property. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Groups of Anglicans will be able to join the Roman Catholic Church but maintain a distinct religious identity under changes announced by the Pope.

The Vatican said the new rules follow requests from Anglicans wanting to join but retain their liturgical heritage.

It comes amid splits among Anglicans worldwide over homosexuality and the ordination of women.

But Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams said he did not think it was a “commentary on Anglican problems”…

The measure, known as an Apostolic Constitution, was shown to leaders of the Church of England just two weeks ago.

Under its terms announced by the Vatican, groupings of Anglicans would be able to join “personal ordinariates”.

If there’s anyone who can be counted on to provide aid and comfort to homophobes and misogynist bigots it’s the “Holy Father” and his obedient flock.

There are times when the great events of the day are glimpsed through a prism of small, personal rituals and routines that offer new insights, almost a kind of truth.

And so it seemed for some Christians contemplating the convulsions within the hierarchy of the Anglican Church over the vexed question of allowing the appointment of women bishops.

Finally, 16 years after permitting the ordination of women priests, the General Synod of the Church of England took the first step this past week toward the consecration of female bishops, following the practices prevalent in the United States, Australia and Canada.

But far from being feted as a progressive step forward, the moment seemed drowned out by the minority voices of clerics and lay worshipers opposed to the elevation of women to the bishopric.

There was talk – increasingly common in the worldwide Anglican Communion – of schism, of rebel clerics abandoning their ministry within the Church of England to march toward the Church of Rome, reversing the historic split within Christendom inspired by Henry VIII in the 16th century…

But there is also a contest over the purity of faith and, as in the Roman Catholic Church, the protection of stern moral doctrine against flexible approaches to belief, behavior and worship.

As usual, the defenders of the faith are those who believe nothing changes and nothing should change. Or, even worse, ordinary human beings should have little or nothing to say about how their lives change.

Learning and knowledge play no part in the equation that dances in the heads of True Believers.