Are Private Same-Sex Blessings Okay?

Report/Analysis By Auburn Faber Traycik
The Christian Challenge
www.challengeonline.org

December 31, 2007

ARE ANGLICAN PRIMATES prepared to overlook private blessings of same-sex couples, just not public ones?

“No way,” says a leading conservative archbishop.

But – as one version of the story goes - a high-ranking Anglican official gave the nod to private blessings in speaking with an Episcopal bishop before American prelates responded to the primates (provincial leaders) in September. Moreover, the official was said to have based his okay on a claim that the Church of England also has a policy permissive of non-public homosexual blessings.


The official in question - Canon Kenneth Kearon, Secretary General of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) – told TCC the report is “not quite accurate,” maintaining that he stressed the language of the 2004 Windsor Report and primates’ requests in speaking with the bishop in question - Washington Bishop John Chane. He also said it was “extremely unlikely” that he would have mentioned practice in the Church of England.

Bishop Chane commented little on his conversation with Kearon, but confirmed to TCC that there are differing interpretations on the matter of same-sex blessings within the Episcopal House of Bishops (HOB) - a fact that again calls into question claims by some Anglican Communion officials that The Episcopal Church (TEC) has “given the necessary assurances” on the matter.

Chane also said Kearon made no mention of the C of E’s practice during their exchange. But his communications official, Jim Naughton, stated that “We are under the impression that church leaders in the British Isles would be happier if we blessed same-sex relationships privately rather than publicly.”

QUESTIONS ABOUT whether Kearon - overseer of the London-based Anglican Communion Office, significantly funded by TEC – may have misrepresented the primates’ intent first arose after Bishop Chane met with the rector and vestry of the traditionalist St. Luke’s Parish in Bladensburg, Maryland, this past autumn. After the candid but cordial encounter, the rector, the Rev. Mark Lewis, reported Chane as telling of a telephone conversation with Kearon before or during the September meeting in New Orleans at which the HOB made its formal response to the Anglican primates’ February 2007 communique from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Asking Kearon what the primates were looking for, Chane was said to have reported the Secretary General as saying that U.S. bishops would pass muster with the leaders by agreeing to abide by a situation akin to that in the C of E, wherein he claimed that public same-sex blessings are banned but may go on privately.

At their September gathering, the HOB indeed pledged not to authorize “public” same-sex blessing rites or approve further actively gay bishops – at least until General Convention 2009. Kearon was on hand during the meeting in support of members of the Joint Standing Committee (JSC) of the ACC and the Primates who were present, most of whom joined in a report concluding that the HOB had made an adequate response to primary questions that should move the Communion toward “closure” for now on the issues of gay bishops and blessings. The report was discounted by some conservative primates as a product of improper coaching and conflict of interest, and Anglican primates as a whole have reached “no consensus” about the adequacy of the New Orleans statement.

Contacted by TCC, Canon Kearon confirmed the phone conversation with Chane before the New Orleans meeting in which the Washington prelate “wished to be quite precise as to what exactly [what] was being requested by the primates in Dar es Salaam.” Over the course of two communications, Kearon did not speak directly to the question of whether he told or inferred to Bishop Chane that gay blessings could continue privately. But he stressed that “What I did in my conversation with Bishop Chane (and with anyone else with whom I spoke) was to reiterate the requests of the Windsor Report, and the questions from the primates at Dar Es Salaam. With respect to same-sex blessings the Windsor Report called for `a moratorium on all such public rites’ (para 144).” The primates, he noted, had requested that Episcopal bishops “`make an unequivocal common covenant’” not to authorize “`any rite of blessing for same-sex unions in their dioceses or through General Convention (cf TWR paras 143, 144).’”

He added that it was “extremely unlikely that I would have referred to practice within the Church of England, as I don’t know what that practice is (though I work from London I am Irish and only moved to London to take up this post – I am a member of the Church of Ireland).”

Aside from voicing unhappiness over TCC’s probe of comments made during “a confidential meeting between bishop and vestry/rector,” Bishop Chane averred that “There is a matter of different interpretation on the blessings of committed, same-gender individuals within the [HOB] and within the larger Communion. I understand from public knowledge that the Church of England views the issue of blessings in a different way than it is viewed within The Episcopal Church. The Secretary General and I have discussed briefly such blessings as they are viewed within [TEC], but he did not share with me any information about the nature of blessings in the [C of E]. Such differences regarding interpretation and practice within [TEC] and within the larger Communion are common and under the circumstances understandable.” Chane was reported in his diocesan newspaper last fall as saying that Washington does not have an authorized rite for blessing same-sex relationships, but that the statement passed by Episcopal bishops will allow for such blessings to continue in the diocese. Los Angeles and El Camino Real (CA) have been reported as among other dioceses in which private same-sex blessings are offered.

-A Clouded Understanding -

TO BE FAIR, though, if Canon Kearon, Chane or other TEC bishops maintain that non-public gay blessings are kosher, they are merely doing as liberals do, exploiting a gray area of understanding that even conservative primates have had an unwitting hand in developing; indeed, this issue may be among those that the Archbishop of Canterbury had in mind in calling recently for a panel to work on “unanswered questions” arising from the primates’ “inconclusive evaluation” of the HOB statement.

It was not just the Windsor Report’s call to halt only “public” same-sex blessing rites that clouded the matter, but the apparent assumption in some quarters that “rites” refers only to public ceremonies, and the wording of a 2003 primates’ communiqué that liberals saw as a wink and nod for private same-sex blessings. The HOB in September (as well as the JSC in its report) made good use of these areas of confusion. In their reply to the primates, Episcopal bishops not only ignored the primates’ attempt to bar “any” same-sex blessing rites, but clung to the claimed need for “a breadth of private response to situations of individual pastoral care” – the wording from the primates’ 2003 statement.

ANY IDEA that this language was intended to allow for the non-public blessing of homosexual unions was denounced, however, by Southern Cone Archbishop Gregory Venables, who chaired the team that drafted the 2003 communique. “In no way was that countenanced,” he told TCC. When, later, one of the primates pointed out that there could be a double sense to the language, “there was a sense of shock,” said the Archbishop.

Asked also if the majority of primates in Dar es Salaam, in requesting that Episcopal bishops not authorize “any” rite of blessing for gay unions in their dioceses, meant to allow for such a blessing to be privately conferred, Venables said, “No way, whatsoever.”

TCC then asked: “Is there any difference, in your opinion, between the public and private blessing of a same-sex couple? Is the cleric offering such a blessing acting for and on behalf of the Church in both instances?”

“There is no difference at all,” Archbishop Venables replied. “We do it in the name of God and God doesn’t have private and public attitudes. He either blesses or doesn’t and doesn’t contradict Himself.”

With the backing of his provincial leadership, Venables has recently expanded efforts to offer a safe haven for faithful North American Anglicans disaffected with their liberalized provinces but desiring to remain part of the Anglican Communion.

-Church Of England Policy v. Practice-

What of Kearon’s alleged claim that the C of E is permissive toward private same-sex blessings?

Under a controversial C of E bishops’ policy, clergy are allowed to register same-sex civil partnerships, now legal under British law, if they pledge not to have sex, but are barred from having their gay partnerships blessed in church.

Nonetheless, a member of the C of E’s General Synod and an international Anglican panel who asked not to be named conceded that the situation is not entirely as advertised, though he denied that there is general acceptance of it.

“The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement claims that it helps to arrange for some 500 gay blessings a year in England, with the connivance of a network of sympathetic clergy,” he told TCC. “Some bishops know it goes on and turn a blind eye to it. Some would like to do something about it but are unable to do so because we do not have a workable disciplinary system. The general public is blissfully unaware that it goes on, including many clergy. Many General Synod members are unaware that it goes on, and would be outraged if they knew.”

He added that it is “widely understood and accepted that there is no approved rite for such a blessing, and that there is no possibility of such a rite being approved by General Synod, or by any diocesan bishop. There are a couple of bishops who are thought privately to wink at the use of unauthorized rites, but there would be an outcry if it became public knowledge that they had consented in any way…”

BACK IN TEC, meanwhile, the HOB statement is being openly ignored in a few dioceses. The Diocese of California's convention recently asked Bishop Marc Andrus to authorize three trial rites for blessing same-sex unions. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, has also denied that the HOB declared a moratorium on even public same-sex blessings and indicated that any contrary claim would not be heeded in his diocese.

END