Judging by the search-engine hits that lead people to our site, some of our readers are probably wondering why we haven’t commented on the current fuss in the Episcopal Church. Poor things: they only seem to attract public attention when they’re in the process of jettisoning another element of the Christian faith.
This time, as you know, the fracas is over whether they’ll approve as a bishop a (1) openly gay (2) divorced minister, who is (3) in an active non-marital sexual relationship. Once upon a time, those would have been three disqualifications for the Biblical office of bishop, but that is no longer the case.
The story took a soap-opera turn today, when a male accuser from the past popped up to call the Reverend Canon, in an interesting choice of words, a “skirt-chaser”.
What will happen? Will conservatives sway some last-minute votes and keep the status quo in place? Will Robinson slip through anyway? Will Canterbury try to hold things together with a “two province” solution that lets the Episcopal Church split, but keeps both parts in the Anglican Communion? Will Third-World Evangelicals go along?
The outcome doesn’t affect the Catholic Church much at all: the ECUSA has not been a reliable partner in ecumenical relations for some time, and whether they stay together or break up, the resulting bodies don’t seem likely to be much more internally coherent than the current EC. But I could be proved wrong.
