DOLLHOUSE

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

To Walter Russell Mead, Episco-Barbie might just be the perfect metaphor for TEO:

"But then I see something like this. There is still hope; we Episcopalians still have a message to the contemporary world. We are ‘fun’. We dress up. We are PC. We have incense. As a church which has borne Christian witness in this land for more than 400 years falls to pieces on our watch and around our ears we have hundreds of hours to spend making vestments for dolls.

"More to the point I suspect that Bishop Barbie at her worst wreaks far less havoc on the church than some of her colleagues. There’s a diocese not five hundred miles from the stately Mead manor that would have been better served for many years by Bishop Barbie and Canon Ken than by those who actually filled the positions. Compared to some bishops in the church, Bishop Barbie is a new Phillips Brooks – and I have known canons who make Canon Ken look like St. Paul.

"We Episcopalians seem to be living proof that the old story about the frogs in boiling water must be true. For years we’ve sat passively as things gradually got worse; we’ve become skilled at accepting the unacceptable. Otherwise, surely we would be screaming and leaping about as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States continues to melt down and fall apart.

"On the other hand, we did successfully vet the lyrics of the 700-plus hymns in our hymnbook for ’sexist’ lyrics. We have repeatedly made certain that the world understands that we think that poverty, injustice and war are wrong. There is no fashionable virtue that we don’t praise, no unrealistic aspiration of the foundation left that we don’t sprinkle with holy water. Our procedures and our canons are among the most complex and recondite in Christendom. We tithe mint and dill and cumin while the house is burning down.

"General Seminary is on the brink of collapse. According to the article, this flagship seminary has suffered from stagnant or declining enrollment for thirty years. It has roughly $100 million in deferred maintenance on its buildings. It has an annual operating deficit of roughly $3 million out of a total budget of $8 million. It pays its bills by drawing down its endowment. Not living on the interest, but eating the principal. Now it appears that the endowment-eating process is approaching its natural and inevitable end, and the seminary is hoping to get into the hotel business to stay alive by converting part of its operating plant into the “Desmond Tutu Center” which will be used for conferences and, when no conferences are scheduled, will rent rooms out to tourists. But the Center didn’t open on time (surprise! surprise! administrative incompetence in the Episcopal church!) and the seminary is $2 million to $4 million short of what it needs to operate next year.

"The ever active rumor mill, for what it’s worth, says things are even worse than the seminary admits. I have no idea; but after decades of incompetent, spendthrift denial the seminary leadership can hardly be surprised that nobody trusts that it either knows or tells the truth today.

"This crisis did not come out of the blue. It has been growing steadily for thirty years, during a period in which the virtually the entire leadership of the Episcopal church busied itself by industriously looking the other way — and issuing public statements telling public officials and various other people that they didn’t understand moral values and were doing their jobs wrong. $100 million in deferred maintenance and the endowment is being chewed up year by year: did they think Jesus was coming again before the buildings would finally collapse? Were they waiting for the Rapture? For a new Miracle of Cana that would turn the red ink black?

"No, they were doing the ecclesiastical equivalent of dressing Barbie dolls. They were dressing up and performing as bishops, deans and trustees — playing church. As long as money can be scraped up somewhere, the show can go on. The trustees and leaders of GTS are no worse than the rest of the church. Cathedrals and parish churches are falling into disrepair all over the Episcopal church: business as usual. Endowments are being eaten out. Eyes are averted from inevitable, onrushing doom."

Needless to say, read the whole thing.