ANTI-POPES

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

Considering the zone she’s been in lately, I didn’t think it was possible for Katharine Jefferts Schori to step her game up but by golly she sure has. According to the Presiding Bishop, do you know who’s dumber than a bag of hammers where the Anglican Communion is concerned? I’ll give you a hint. He’s Welsh, he’s an archbishop and he currently lives in a town called Canterbury:

"At a June 8 press conference at General Synod 2010 in Halifax, U.S. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori described the decision by Lambeth Palace to remove Episcopalians representing Anglicans in international ecumenical dialogues as “unfortunate….it misrepresents who the Anglican Communion is.”

Okay, I’ll play. Pope Benedict XVI doesn’t understand what Roman Catholicism really means. The Ecumenical Patriarch is having a tough time with this Eastern Orthodoxy stuff. “Canada? Damned if I know,” said a confused Captain Heinrichs. “Nebraska? What are you looking at me for?” asked a befuddled Don Janousek.

A word of warning: this next part is so stupid and so dishonest that it may cause you to scream and throw your keyboard against the wall or out the window.

“I don’t think it helps dialogue to remove some people from the conversation,” she said shortly after addressing General Synod. “…We have a variety of opinions on these issues of human sexuality across the Communion…For the Archbishop of Canterbury to say to the Methodists or the Lutheran Federation that we only have one position is inaccurate. We have a variety of understandings and no, we don’t have consensus on hot button issues at the moment.”

Um…Kate? When you give pointy hats to TWO practicing homosexuals and when your General Convention passes all sorts of resolutions on this subject, then you only have ONE position and only ONE understanding and you do too have only ONE consensus on the issue of human sexuality regardless of whether or not you cash the pledge checks of those few remaining Episcopalians who disagree with you. GOT IT?!!

Bishop Jefferts Schori said Archbishop Williams’ letter “really jumped” the process around the proposed Anglican Covenant, because it “imposed a number of the sanctions that were envisaged in the fourth section…” The Covenant is being viewed as way of addressing schism in the Communion over the issue of human sexuality.

So guess what’s not going to get any easier, Presiding Bishop. I’d put the phone numbers of the Unitarians and the United Church of the Zeitgeist into your cell phone sometime soon. You may be hooking up with them a lot quicker than you think.

Asked whether Archbishop Williams has adequately addressed the issue of cross-border interventions, Bishop Jefferts Schori said, “I don’t think he understands how difficult and how painful and destructive it’s been both in the church in Canada and for us in the U.S…when bishops come from overseas and say, ‘Well, we’ll take care of you, you don’t have to pay attention to your bishop.’ ” Such actions “destroys pastoral relationships,” noted Bishop Jefferts Schori. “It’s like an affair in a marriage,” she said. “It destroys trust.”

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me see if I have this straight. If your Episcopal bishop schtups the Zeitgeist right up the squeak hole, he’s being “pastoral.” But if you get some bishopping from a bishop who still believes the Christian religion, you’re just a skank.

“Painful and destructive?” I guess those are good words for watching the leadership of the only church you’ve ever known basically come out and admit that they think the Christian religion is a sham. Those seem to be excellent terms for getting sued out of your meeting house and watching your “Christian” bishop sell the parish you had turned around to non-Christians for a third of what you were willing to pay for it.

Moving on. One of you dropped the ball. A Roman Catholic or Orthodox reader forgot to lock up church history when he/she was finished using it so Mrs. Schori got into it and made a mess that I’VE got to clean up. Again!!

She added that it’s “a very ancient teaching of the church that bishops are supposed to stay home and tend to the flock to which he was originally assigned.”

The Freudian slip, ladies and gentlemen. The Presiding Bishop is unconsciously referring to that other “very ancient teaching of the church” which states that bishops aren’t supposed to be the same gender as she is.

Reading Anglican posts here and there over the last several days leaves me with the impression that Rowan Williams’ Pentecost letter just may have been an inadvertent stroke of genius. With the mildest possible measures, His Grace has gotten the Anglican left, from Mrs. Schori on down, implicitly or explicitly contemplating something they would never have dreamed of contemplating before.

Splitting from Canterbury.

Would the left actually take that step? It’s entirely possible. Lord knows, the Episcopalians would have a lot of non-American support; Canadian Primate Fred Hiltz suggested as much the other day.

I think they’d hesitate, though. As I explained down below, the Canterbury connection might be more important to the liberals than to the conservatives. Stay in and they’re “apostolic.” Form an “Episcopal Communion” based in New York and all they’ve done is start a brand new Protestant church no matter how many western Anglicans sign on.

There’s an easy way around that, though. Since the “apostolic” nature of Anglican Christianity is a considerable historical and theological stretch anyway, all the Anglican left would have to do is meet in convention somewhere(they could call it a “church council” if they wanted) and decide that Rowan Williams didn’t get the Anglican Communion anymore and needed to be replaced.

That done, the meeting could immediately change Katharine Jefferts Schori’s job title to “Archbishop of Canterbury” and declare her the head of a reconstituted “Anglican Communion.” If Mrs. Schori was amenable, someone in Britain could find her offices and lodgings that were actually in Canterbury but it wouldn’t be essential. After all, the Bishops of Rome had spent a lot of time living in Avignon, France back in the day.

What if someone mentions that the Archbishop of Canterbury has to be appointed by the British monarch? You forget that Anglicans can cherry-pick history better than just about anyone alive. Yeah, someone will scornfully tell you. That’s been going on for 500 whole years. For the 1,000 years or so before that? Not so much. Augustine and Anselm will be worked into the conversation relentlessly.

The point of all this is that if liberal Anglicans want to find “historical” or even “apostolic” justifications for a split, they can. So let them. If it facilitates a split, let the left tell itself anything it wants.