The Episcopal Church

At hostile blogs, commenters occasionally criticize me for belonging to the left-wing, homosexual-friendly Episcopal Church. These commenters have evidently missed my repeated statements in 2003 and afterward that the Episcopal Church USA as a result of ordaining a practicing homosexual as a bishop has definitively ceased to be a Christian body. Those statements should have been enough to make clear my personal relation to the ECUSA. The situation has only gotten worse since 2003, with the current presiding bishop of the ECUSA issuing explicitly non-Christian descriptions of the Christian religion, and, more recently, with the ordination of a lesbian as a bishop. There are dissenting parishes and dioceses around the country, belonging to an organization called the American Anglican Council, which are in the process of seceding from the ECUSA and aligning themselves with foreign dioceses. No such parishes are in New York City, where I live.

The loss to me of the Church and more importantly of the Anglo-Catholic parish where I first became a Christian believer, where I was baptized some years later, and where over and over I was formed and transformed by Christian truth as conveyed through the traditional Liturgy of the Word and Liturgy of the Eucharist, was an inexpressibly painful experience for me, which I have not wanted to discuss publicly. I only mention it now to clarify that while I remain at heart an Anglo-Catholic, the tradition that made me and formed me as a Christian, I do not consider myself a member of the Episcopal Church.

(Note: “Anglo-Catholic” refers to the traditionalist, high-church wing of the Anglican and Episcopal churches.)

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Ferg writes:

We are co-religionists. I too was confirmed Anglican High Church, or Anglican Confession of the Catholic Faith as it was called in my church. The church I joined was the most traditional and “Catholic” in Minneapolis at the time. Now it has a female rector. I long ago gave up on it, but have been unable so far to make the move to the Roman church. I guess they made me a better Anglican than I thought at the time. Still, I cannot think of any Protestant denomination I would be interested in joining, so I guess Roman or nothing, since my own church died long ago. Maybe someday.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 27, 2010 10:02 PM | Send