Fr. Haller responds

This is from the comments section of an earlier post. My reply is below. ed.

Tobias Stanislas Haller said...

Fr. Seel (sorry, the omission was unintentional, as I don't know you personally), I am quite aware of John Jay's history. In fact, I brought the motion to the Diocese of New York convention to begin to honor his memory liturgically -- and to move towards a national recognition.

Postulating on his specific views on subjects that concern us today is probably a fruitless cause. I did not mean to suggest he was as extreme as Jefferson in his rationalism -- but I do think he was, generally speaking, what we would today call "liberal" -- as a single example, he was generations ahead of the curve on the abolition of slavery, which was still being defended by mainstream Episcopalians (including the PB) a good forty years after his death.

But, as I say, such speculations are rather pointless, and that wasn't my initial reason for mentioning Jay in my letter -- which was merely to point out the irony of the absence of reference to the Episcopal Church on the ABS website.

All the best for a Holy Lent and a glorious Easter.

Reply: First, I appreciate the irenic tone of Fr. Haller's response. Next, let's deal with the content. Haller states that we should consider John Jay a liberal because he was in support of the abolition of slavery. John Adams was also against slavery, so this would make him also a liberal. Given this logic, William Wilberforce, roughly a generation later (1759-1833) would be another liberal. The problem with this view is that no unbiased historian would call any of these three liberals, particularly as the term may be applied to pecusa liberals today.

No, we can make judgements from history based on the documentary evidence, just as we do with the Bible. The trouble with liberals is they prefer fanciful ideas to documentary evidence. The idea that John Jay would be classified as a liberal because of his views on slavery is equal to saying that I am a liberal because I defend the human rights of babies in the womb. My view is also out of the mainstream of pecusa, yet I was at one time a pecusa priest.

It's not that an exercise in historical judgement is pointless; it is that such investigations do not serve the liberal agenda of many pecusa bishops and priests.